The US lawyer bringing slavery museum to Scotland to highlight country's role

Scotland needs to recognise its role in the global slave trade, a US human rights lawyer has said, as he relocated his slavery museum to the Edinburgh International Festival.

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, said Scots need to be taught about the country's past involvement in the slave trade. Scotland had more enslavers per head than anywhere else in the UK.

Mr Stevenson, who also founded the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the US, called for Scotland to have a national day to celebrate Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist who visited Scotland to lobby the Free Church of Scotland for accepting financial contributions from slave-owning American churches.

His exhibition, The Legacy of Slavery, is on display at the Playfair Library at the University of Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in the first ever tour of the museum’s work - after being invited to Edinburgh by festival director Nicola Benedetti. He now hopes to take the touring version of the museum around Europe.

The exhibition looks at Scotland’s involvement in slavery, including the fact that Scotland had the highest number of enslavers per capita than anywhere else in the UK due to a high level of immigration to the south of America.

Harvard Law School graduate Mr Stevenson, who also spoke in a panel discussion with former prime minister Gordon Brown at the Global Ideas Stage as part of the EIF on Tuesday night, said his own great grandparents were enslaved, while he was unable to attend public school initially as schools were segregated, describing himself as “a product of the civil rights movement”.

He said: “Before the Civil War it was the UK that was enslaving people in the American colonies and Scotland had a particular role in that. Scotland was very active in its support of slavery, very active in benefiting from the institution of slavery.

“There were Scots who supported the Confederacy during our Civil War and that information in history is really important for people who live in this country to know and to understand.

“But there was obviously a very strong abolitionist movement here as well. Frederick Douglass came to Scotland, he came to Edinburgh and spent time here and he even said he wanted to live here.

“We have part of our exhibit that talks about Scotland's role in creating, maintaining and trying to preserve slavery in America, which is important for for this nation to be mindful of as we continue to deal with the struggles created by how we sometimes navigate difference among people and between people.”

However, Mr Stephenson said it was “up to Scots” to decide whether streets named after Scottish slave owners should be renamed, or statues removed, saying he had no plans to speak directly to politicians while in Scotland.

In Edinburgh in 2021, the council put in place a permanent interpretative plaque at the Melville Monument in St Andrew Square to explain Henry Dundas's role in delaying abolition at the Melville Monument.

He said: “I think there is a greater need to strengthen curricula and education across the country. I think every child needs to have a more informed perspective on the role of Scotland and the transatlantic trade and once we have that information, it will inspire new conversations about who should be honoured.”

“There are a lot of people who did extraordinary things in this country who have not been well recognised, who I think should be including non-Scots like Frederick Douglass, who came here and played such an important role in the abolitionist movement.”

The panel at the EIF's Global Ideas Stage. | Scotsman

He added: “If in America, we can have a day dedicated to a non-American, Christopher Columbus, why should Scotland not have a Frederick Douglass day?

“In terms of how we relate to other nations and how we think about foreign policy and how we think about human rights, I think we should be making the same commitment of ‘never again’ with regard to human trafficking, with regard to slavery, with regard to racial bigotry and racial bias that we've made in other contexts - and I think all of that begins with education and a deeper and more detailed understanding of this history.”