With cheers of jubilation the crowd toppled Edward Colston’s statue to the ground. Soon the protesters had attached ropes to it and were dragging the heavy object with great enthusiasm towards its destination – Bristol Harbour – where they unceremoniously dumped it. Some called it an act of vandalism, but for Black Lives Matter it was a just act, fuelled by the death of an American-African, George Floyd, just two weeks before on 25 May 2020, which had opened up a deep well of hurt, rejection and anger. When George Floyd lay on a Minneapolis street crying out, ‘I can’t breathe!’ because of a policeman’s knee on his neck, nobody would have predicted the eruption over racism that would burst out from millions. Within weeks celebrities, sports teams, politicians, and multitudes of the general public were ‘taking the knee’ in solidarity with black people. But where did this powerful symbol come from?
In 1778 the Supreme Court of Scotland in Edinburgh witnessed an historical day. Joseph Knight, a runaway black slave from West Africa, was liberated from his Scottish master, John Wedderburn of Ballindean. Furthermore, a law was passed in Scotland that year outlawing slavery in the nation. Lord Auchinleck declared that slavery is not ‘agreeable to humanity, not to say to the Christian religion. Is a man a slave because he is black? No. He is our brother; and he is a man, although not our colour; he is in a land of liberty, with his wife and his child: let him remain there.’ Before the Christians Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce led the charge to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire (1807), and in the colonies (1833), the Scottish people, inspired by the Christian faith, were showing the way. The abolition movement in 1787 took for its symbol a black African in chains ‘taking the knee’ with Lord Auchinleck’s words around him: ‘Am I not a man and a brother’.
In 1788 Revd Robert Walker of Canongate Kirk in the Royal Mile, challenged the church leaders in Edinburgh, and they petitioned Parliament in Westminster to abolish slavery in the British Empire. After former slave, Olaudah Equiano, gave his account to the Church Assembly in Edinburgh in 1792, Scotland sent 185 petitions to Westminster. It was not until 1807 that international slave-trading was abolished in the British Empire through the Slave Trade Act. However, many slaves still worked for their masters abroad.
Among the key Scots who worked to abolish slavery in the British Empire, were Zachary Macaulay, William Dickson, James Ramsay, James Stephen and Henry Brougham. Zachary Macaulay from Inveraray experienced an evangelical conversion in 1789, and went on to be the key founding member of the Anti-Slavery Societyin 1823. His indefatigable work to liberate slaves alongside Wilberforce and others, has been celebrated in Westminster Abbey by a memorial showing the figure of a kneeling slave and the words ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother’– seemingly taken from Lord Auchinleck’s statement in Edinburgh in 1778. This became the motto of the abolitionist movement. James Stephen, who was born of Scottish parents and was educated in Aberdeen, was the architect of the Abolition Bill. It is also of note that the Glasgow Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1822, rallying together as an abolitionist stronghold.
In 1830, Revd Dr Andrew Thomson led the movement here to put pressure on Parliament to abolish slavery altogether. The politician, Sir Henry Brougham from Edinburgh, worked hard in London to get laws passed against slavery. All of these Scots were key players in the victory over slavery with their fellow Christians in England, such as the evangelicals, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and others. It was through the untiring work of the Quakers and other evangelicals in England and Scotland, that the social conscience was pricked, inspiring many influential people of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, also to speak out. In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act was passed by Parliament, outlawing slavery completely in the British Empire.
‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28, NKJV).
Image: Josiah Wedgwood, William Hackwood and Henry Webber, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons