On my mind

HIS Vietnam War standard issue US M14 rifle was locked away in a case, but his Smith and Wesson was under the bed ready to be used against, in his own but censored words, “any black man who walked across my lawn”.

This was a 1980s Texas city and I was there studying substance misuse strategies in local high schools. The guns and white supremacist views were from the male in the family I was staying with. Posters on windows forbade students to take guns into the schools and the antediluvian American ‘war on drugs’ was soon discarded. But the attitudes and values of a tarnished American dream are now coming home after decades of systemic racism.

Yet, like many countries, Britain’s colonialist economic ambitions included the exploitation of the slave trade. It cast a shadow on Wales too, as Chris Evans in his book ‘Slave Wales’ demonstrates. Items made from Swansea copper were used to buy slaves on the African coast; nearer home Coleshill, a Llanelli street (terrace) and school is named after the village where stood the mansion of slave owning ancestors of Sir John Cowell Stepney.

Welsh industrialists placed slaves in the cruel El Cobre copper mines of Cuba and Mary Glascott and Sons of Llanelli’s Cambrian Copper Works tolerated this slave-holding in their Cuban company. Edward Hamlin Adams was a Jamaican slave merchant who settled in Wales at Middleton Hall and became MP for Carmarthenshire in 1833.

Perhaps awareness of the past and the US scenes of protest inflamed by a morally bankrupt leadership will help us be more sensitive to the future in building a new postCovid society.

Now is the opportunity to build it not on GDP, profit and exploitation but on the value of human relationships, respect and equality.

Follow Graham on Twitter@GeeTDee