ND’SRACISTROLE
d collapsed dridge’s ed a torrent e of propriety a Negro – was ona, played that Aldridge n’s theatre umber of uding of orced to go me and y deserved. he strelsy in Scots theatres and music halls was a great upsurge in support in the nation for the emancipation of the slaves held in America.
The spark that re-ignited national support of the emancipationists was the bitter schism within the established Church of Scotland, primarily over patronage, which led to a breakaway group forming the Free Church of Scotland.
The latter took money from Presbyterians in America for funds, including from slave-holders.
A nationwide Send Back the Money campaign, was launched to denounce the Free Church’s communion with slave owners.
This provided the ideal stage for the American emancipationists to drum up support from a highly receptive Scots audience.
Fugitive black slave Frederick Douglass delivered the message to packed Scots audiences, that “slavery linked Scotland to America”.
His statesmanlike gravitas blatantly contradicted the stage caricature of all Afro-Americans as “dumb Jim Crows”.
On Douglass’s arrival in Edinburgh in April 1846, he was immediately struck by his warm reception. He said: “I am treated as a man and as an equal brother.”
But within months of the start of Douglass’s campaign, the Adelphi in Edinburgh had put on a “new n ***** extravaganza”, the all-female Buffalo Gals – led by the black character Lucy Neal.
They were white men dressed up and the Buffalo girls was a derogatory term equating the afro curls to the bison topknot.
Douglass was appalled by the damage done to public perception of the Afro-American by such minstrel shows and their spin-offs.
On his return to America, he referred to them as, “filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature”.
With the American Civil war and the rise of the emancipation movement, upmarket theatres gradually disassociated themselves from the crude racial humour of the early black minstrelsy.
But the minstrelsy still appeared in the drinking saloons of mid-Victorian Scotland, and continued to ridicule the Negro in the eyes of the lower classes.
Although the popularity of Black and White Minstrel Shows in local British music halls peaked in the 1890s, they continued with local amateur productions across Scotland, even in the the more remote areas such as Stornoway in Lewis and Lerwick in the Shetlands and Maybole in Ayrshire.
It is important that we remember this time in our history. We should entrust our youth with the raw material so that they can come to a realisation for themselves of the damage done to the national psyche in the name of humour or “light entertainment”.
We must tackle racism from its root cause. ● For details on Scotland’s Black History Month, go to www.crer.scot. To see Dr Graham’s essay in full, go to www.slhf.org