The reputation of historical figures can change. This can cause problems when they have been celebrated by previous generations by raising public statues making the current generation literally look up to them.
Times and atitudes change and these statues become sources of distress and dispute. Americans will be familiar with the arguments for and against retaining statues of Confederate soldiers. While the UK does not have that problem, there are certainly controversies over statues in some cities. This can even be over 20th century figures. The fairly recent statue of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris has been vandalised in protest at the fire bombings of German cities, notably Dresden, at the end of WWII which may consider war crimes.
A complicating factor is that often these figures from the 17th to 19th century made money in a way that would be unacceptable today but those were ignored when the statues were erected, overshadowed by the literal donations they made to the place honouring them. An example of this is the statue of the racist colonialist Cecil Rhodes over the college in Oxford he endowed. He also gave a large endowment to fund white colonialists to study at Oxford in order to better administer the empire he helped expand. Fortunately the original idea was soon dropped by the later administators of the Rhodes Scholarships.
The turn of the 19th and 20th century was a period when many places sought to honour their “native sons” for the benefits they brought to the town. One such was the port city of Bristol in the west of England. Edward Colston, a wealthy businessman, had dontated to churches and endowed schools, hospitals and almshouses in the city of his birth. He had loaned money to the city corporation and was MP for the area for a period. His business activities had built up the port city as a centre of trade and greatly increased its wealth and status. He traded in cloth, wine, sugar and slaves. In 1680 he had become an official of the British African Company which held the monopoly of the slave trade for which he got most of his wealth.
Coltson name featured in many parts of Bristol on schools etc. By the start of this century, like many port cities, Bristol had a significant BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) communities. Note in the UK “Asian” is used primarily to refer to the 5.3% in the 2011 census whose heritage is from the Indian sub-continent. In Bristol the BAME communities make up 16% of the population compared to 14% who identified themselves as non-white in the census.
Since 2008 Britain’s involvement in the slave trade has been a compulsory part of the national curriculum for Key Stage 3 (11-13 year olds). The 2015 bicentennial celebrations of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire was a time for retrospection as well as celebration. (Although slavery had been declared to have no legal status in England and Scotland in 1762/3 and slavery itself abolished in the Empire in 1835). This historical re-examination had already led to Coltson’s name being removed from several institutions.
In April 2017, the charity that runs the Colston Hall, the Bristol Music Trust,[25] announced that it will drop the name of Colston when it reopens after refurbishment in 2020. There had been protests and petitions calling for a name change and some concertgoers and artists had boycotted the venue because of the Colston name.[26] Following the decision, petitions to retain the name of Colston reached almost 10,000 signatures, though the charity confirmed that the name change would go ahead.[27]
In November 2017, after decades of debates, Colston's Girls' School announced that it was not going to drop the name of Colston because it was of "no benefit" to the school to do so.[28] In February 2019, St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School announced that it would be renaming Colston House as Johnson House, after the American mathematician Katherine Johnson.[29]
The city council had also been petitioned to remove the 1895 statue of Colston from the streets, including suggestions that it be moved to a museum as part of the history of the port and to put it in context. In anticipation of the Black Lives Matter demonstration on Sunday.
A brief history of ethic minorities in the UK: While there have been black Africans since Roman times and contacts with North Africa back into pre-history, the BAME communities in the UK expanded considerably after WWII. In particular there was a campaign to recruit the “Windrush generation” to work in the transport sector and the then new NHS from the West Indies. Even today the transport sector and NHS rely on ethnic minorities and immigrants. While there are many distinguished BAME doctors, the lower paid nurses, support staff, service sector and transort workers like bus drivers are disproporionally represented. They often have poorer housing and live in more multi-generational households than their ESWI (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish ie white British) compatriots. Like the USA, these situations have led to the BAME community in the UK being disproportionately more affected by COVID-19 and with higher death rates. This has been well publicised with a recent report detailing this and has added to the sense of discontent in the BAME communities and increased solidarity from other groups. Like the US, the British BLM demonstrations are comprised of all races. Altough not as prevalent, police discrimination against minorities has also caused tensions.
So on Sunday, the insult to the particularly Afro-Caribbean community in Bristol having Colston celebrated boiled over.
The canvas covering, which had already been targeted by egg-throwers, was torn off with some people saying they wanted to look the man in the eyes. Soon ropes had been tied round the bronze monument and the process of removing it began.
Once the covering was removed, three protestors climbed atop the statue to fasten two ropes around the head.
Thirty seconds later Colston was on the floor. Many jumped on the fallen statue, others holding a Black Lives Matter banner climbed the plinth where it had stood.
There was not so much joy when the statue hit the ground as anger, but the crowd had not finished with the monument.
The statue was finally dumped in the docks from where Colston’s ships sailed on the first leg f the “triangle trade”.
The disgraceful part of this has been the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, demonstrating her inherited racism by completely ignoring the basis of the action against the piece of metal. She is a nasty, extreme right wing Thatcherite which may seem incongruous coming from a Briton of Asian descent. Unfortunately that descent came via Uganda where there was a mutual antipathy between many in the black and Indian communities. The latter were, and in many ex-British Empire African countries still are, an entrepreneurial class. In colonial days they were brought in to build and run the railways and then established shops and became professionals. Patel’s family was expelled by Idi Amin in his exploitation of this resentment against the “Ugandan Asians”.
The tone-deafness about BLM reached almost Trumpian proportions
Ms Patel told the BBC: "I think that is utterly disgraceful. That speaks to the acts of public disorder that actually have become a distraction from the cause people are actually protesting about.
"It is a completely unacceptable act. Sheer vandalism and disorder are completely unacceptable.
"It's right that police follow up on that and make sure that justice is taken with those individuals responsible for such disorderly and lawless behaviour."
She got push-back from what might seem a surprising source.
This is one of the few occasions I find myself in agreement with that smug git.