THE future of Glasgow’s statues and street names with links to individuals involved in the slave trade should be up to the people to decide.
And just how the city reacts to a crucial report into Glasgow’s connections and subsequent wealth from the slave trade is something its citizens could have a say on.
That is the view of both a leading charity on racial and equality rights and the chairman of a city council cross-party working group on slavery.
Their comments come after the publication of the Glasgow Slavery Audit, which shows how the city’s wealth and growth stemmed from its involvement in the slave trade.
Read more: Eight Glasgow statues singled out for links to slave trade, report revealed
The Glasgow City Council-commissioned report by Dr Stephen Mullen, an academic historian with the University of Glasgow, singled out eight Glasgow statues of individuals with connections to the slave trade.
It added that gifts from those linked to the trade amounted to more than £300 million in today’s money, with a bequest that would amount to £110m for the Mitchell Library in 1874.
The monuments to Colin Campbell, William Gladstone, John Moore, David Livingstone, James Oswald, Robert Peel Jnr, James Watt and King William III are all highlighted in the report.
Read more: 62 Glasgow street names and areas with links to slave trade
The report also highlights 62 Glasgow streets and locations with connections to Atlantic slavery. These include Buchanan Street, named after Andrew Buchanan Jr, and Glassford Street, after tobacco lord John Glassford.
Between 1636 and 1834, 40 out of 79 lord provosts nominated to Glasgow Town Council had some connection to Atlantic slavery, and some sat in office whilst owning enslaved people.
Councillor Graham Campbell, chairman of the council’s cross-party working group on slavery, said the report is a sobering reminder of just how deeply involved the city was in slavery, but he added it offers a platform on what comes next.
He said: “What I hope the report will do is give people the facts and that is really where Dr Mullen comes at with this.
“You deal with the historical facts and what the archives show was the involvement of our merchants in tobacco, sugar, cotton, etc.
“It is there and celebrated in the forms of street names so the visible evidence surrounds us.
“Then it is a question of what do the citizens do with that knowledge.
“The council slavery agreement working party has now spent more than a year meetings with historians, cultural archivists and the city heritage trust. We are consulting with communities impacted by racism and also the wider city.
“When this committee later reconvenes for the new term, we hope the new councillors who are elected will take on board the work we have started.
“What has perhaps been polarising in other places is not having preceded it with a grassroots, organised conversation from below backed up with scientific evidence.
Once the report is more widely circulated, hopefully we will have a result which impacts upon the country’s and the city’s history of itself that we can correct and some of the misconceptions that are out there about the history of it.
“It starts with awareness raising, atonement, acknowledgement and maybe then we might start to think about apologies.
“We don’t want to have a tokenistic approach and that is the end of it. It would be pointless without an ongoing, engaging process of looking at that history and responding to it in some way such an anti-racism policy for the city, acknowledgement in our museums and our streets and also in the projects that we chose to run, cities we chose to link with.
“Maybe linking with Kingston, that is one thing I would love to see us do.”
Nelson Cummins, communities and campaigns officer for the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, praised Dr Mullen for the report which he says shows how transatlantic and chattel slavery have been at the core of Glasgow as a city and its development as a city as well.
He said: “We are still a city which struggles with racism in our key institutions and I think a report like this that gives us this historical context, it can almost create a thread where we can link it to present day issues that we have as well.
“The actions to be taken on the back of this report are up to the people of Glasgow to decide."
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