October is Black History Month, coordinated in Scotland by Glasgow-based charity the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights.

There is a huge amount going on in the city over the coming weeks to understand both black history and present-day racism and to inspire anti-racist action.

Relevant to many of the events in this year’s programme is a report published earlier this year by Dr Stephen Mullen, of the University of Glasgow, entitled Glasgow, Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: An Audit of Historic Connections and Modern Legacies.

This report was commissioned by Glasgow City Council to provide a detailed account of Glasgow’s civic associations with transatlantic slavery. It is a meticulously researched, scholarly work which catalogues just how deeply the slave trade and the huge wealth which flowed from it has shaped the city and is still conspicuous to this day.

I didn’t grow up in Glasgow, so the names of the merchants, plantation owners and city grandees aren’t ones I’ve known from childhood, but their stories were familiar.

I grew up in a town called Whitehaven, in West Cumbria. It was at one point the second biggest port in the UK for tobacco imports.

Indeed, Glasgow’s rise to being the pre-eminent port in that trade came after the Act of Union abolished excise duties between England and Scotland.

Whitehaven was actively involved in the transatlantic slave trade between 1711 and 1767. The family names associated with this - notably that of the Lowther family - are memorialised through street names, public parks, and otherwise woven into the town’s fabric.

Cumbria’s best-known culinary contributions - highly-spiced Cumberland sausage, gingerbread, rum butter - reflect this legacy. 

The local borough council issued an apology for the town’s role in the slave trade in 2006 and archivists and activists there have worked to tell the stories and improve contextual understanding of them.

Dr Mullen’s work has in turn deepened my understanding of the city I now call home, including the Pollokshields ward I represent.

Indeed, I learned that Kenmure Street, where I have lived the longest in Glasgow, is named after the estate owned by Archibald Stirling and later purchased by Charles Stirling of Kenmure, a planter in Jamaica and a partner in a key slave shipping firm respectively. In recent times, of course, the street name has been widely known for anti-racist action against deportations.

In the final council meeting before the local elections earlier this year, councillors unanimously welcomed Dr Mullen’s report, apologised fully and unreservedly to the descendants of enslaved people and to the nations they came from, and agreed to convene a special working group to consider and consult on how Glasgow should permanently acknowledge the city’s role in Atlantic slavery and memorialise its victims.

This is a serious conversation and one which needs to be had much more widely, more openly, and without doing it the profound disservice of the nonsense ‘culture war’ framing which some media coverage has sadly reinforced.

Dr Mullen’s work provides the factual, contextual, historical basis to have that conversation and I urge Glasgow Times readers to take time this Black History Month to read the report and to separately listen to and reflect on the testimonies of those whose experiences of the city are still shaped by the profound legacy it details today.