Removing street names connected to the slave trade labelled ‘criminal’
Scotland’s pre-eminent historian said any move to remove the Glasgow street names that mark the city’s links to the transatlantic slave trade was an act of censorship.
Sir Tom Devine, emeritus professor of history at Edinburgh University, made the remarks as an online petition calling for the signs to be removed gained momentum.
Meanwhile, anti-racism campaigners have added new street signs alongside those that honour the Glasgow merchants who made vast riches by exporting the slave-produced goods of tobacco and sugar. Black activists, such as Rosa Parks, Fred Hampton and Joseph Knight, are honoured instead.
Sir Tom said he was “entirely opposed” to such proposals set out in the online petition. He said that, to a historian, such moves “verged on the criminal”.
Sir Tom said: “These signs grew out of the fabric of our past and they need to be retained as a reminder of that past, warts and all. To do otherwise is to commit the nefarious intellectual sin of censorship. The implication is that as values and attitudes change and opinions alter about the past, so historical artefacts considered as obnoxious have to be altered or destroyed. Where does that mindset lead ultimately?”
Glassford Street is named after John Glassford, who made a large part of his wealth from his tobacco plantations in Virginia and North Carolina. Buchanan Street honours former Lord Provost Andrew Buchanan, who built a tobacco empire in Virginia and traded sugar and rum from Jamaica.
Sir Tom said modern research had only very recently “exposed the wickedness of the regime of chattel slavery on which their business successes entirely depended”.
The historian said Scotland and slavery should be embedded firmly in the school curriculum and that Glasgow’s Merchant City should host new information boards which explain the “darker as well as some of the more positive aspects of the area’s history”.
Glasgow City Council has commissioned Dr Stephen Mullen of Glasgow University to study the city’s links with slavery with the public to drive how the story should be told.