Over the last hundred years, since Rev Wilks’ critical biography was first published, Colston has been  increasingly scrutinised by residents, who themselves have experienced first-hand incidents of racial  unrest. In recent times, not only has Bristol been compelled to grapple with the issues of  contemporary racism exposed by certain flashpoints – namely the 1963 ‘Bus Boycott’ mirroring that  of Montgomery nearly a decade earlier and the infamous 1980s ‘St Pauls Riots’ incited by incessantly discriminatory policing practises – but its citizens have also actively sought to confront the career realities of their city’s chief benefactor.  

Britain’s hub for distilled alcohol and sugar refining production, the coastal Bristol unsurprisingly  played an integral part in the ‘triangular’ network of slavery, with over two thousand voyages,  accounting for transportation of approximately half a million slaves, charted from the Avonmouth by  local merchants throughout the 1700s. Assuming his father’s occupation, Colston established himself  as Deputy Governor of the monopolistic Royal African Company, which was personally culpable for  the murder of nearly a quarter of the estimated 84,000 slaves forcibly shipped from the continent’s  Western seaboard. 

From the 1990s, when the explicit phrase “F-ck off” was graffitied onto the Colston statue’s podium,  a vandalism justified by the sole contemporary black councillor, Ray Sefia, in comparing the  memorial’s appropriateness to an equivalent commemorating Adolf Hitler, a palpable antiracist  sentiment has exploded onto the scene. Since channelled into a concerted lobbying effort for concrete  policy change, both the renowned music venue of Colston Hall and Colston Primary School have  enacted a process of erasure via respective rebranding. Courtesy of the work conducted by  ‘Countering Colston’, despite the acquisition of more than 10,000 petition signatures in opposition to  the move, the former’s board of trustees voted to alter Colston Hall’s name as part of its 150th anniversary refurbishment. True to their word, in September 2020 the steeped arena opened under  the moniker Bristol Beacon. Following suit, in the instance of the latter, Colston Primary School  undertook a three-month consultative procedure that’s awareness drive resulted in the institute’s  rechristening as Cotham Gardens Primary.  

Catalysed by the preceding Summer’s popular protests, the likewise eponymously named Girl School,  that’s 1891 inception had been funded by a Colston financial endowment, announced on 6th November 2020 it would henceforth be known as Montpelier High School. Of the thirteen strong list  for other potential options, the new name, referring to the diverse bohemian vicinity that the school  is situated in, was approved by an overwhelming 62% of students and staff. On one hand, Principal  Kerry McCullagh proclaimed that it would “allow the school to forge a new identity that represents its  diverse and inclusive community”. On the other, Hemlata Pant, the head student delegate on the  deliberation, revealed her “excitement” at the prospect that this “moment” symbolised “the  beginning of something much bigger” than merely “helping to shape the future of the school”. Following removal of their own internal statue of Colston in June, the academy’s ultimately decisive  action represented a reversal of the governing Venture Trust Board’s initial stance, which, as of  November 2017, had resolutely resisted calls for the “no benefit” name change. On this note, the tale  of Colston Girl’s School is testament to the impact of the disposition of the original slave-trading statue.  

That said, whilst the reckoning of renaming has ostensibly played out with regards to all major public  buildings bearing Colston’s title, the ramifications of the storm’s collateral damage still linger. After  council authorities had overseen the statue’s retrieval for restoration in the M Shed museum, Avon  and Somerset Police launched an investigation into the incident. Consequently, on 9th December 2020  it was disclosed that four people – Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford, Jake Skuse and Sage Willoughby – were to be charged with criminal damage, set to appear in Magistrate’s Court on 25th January 2021.  Pleading innocence, after posting bail amidst protests conducted virtually and in real-life, which led to  four more arrests for breaches of coronavirus legislation, the ‘Colson Four’ exercised their right to trial  by judge and jury; being scheduled a plea hearing on 2nd March in Crown Court, where it is expected  that the full criminal case will not be heard until 2022. 

Hence, the reactionary pushback against citizens taking matters into their own hands has called into  question the ethical legality of direct action in contesting histories of public spaces. The people of  Bristol may have taken down Colston in a figurative sense, but the sheer weight of the city’s historical ties to the slaver’s legacy continue to prove inextricably difficult to legally disentangle.  

Originally published via EuroClio News on 12 February 2021.

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The Colston statue “removal” is the most dramatic turn in a series of incidents that have found statues at the center of mass protests over the killing of a black man, George Floyd, by police in Minnesota. Last Saturday, protesters placed a noose around the neck of a statue of a Confederate general and toppled it from its plinth in a park in Richmond, Virginia. A few days earlier, a statue of Philadelphia’s former mayor and police chief, Frank Rizzo, an avowed racist, was removed by the city when the statue became the focus of mass protests, as reported on this blog.

As one of Bristol’s leading slave traders and most generous benefactors, Edward Colston is omnipresent in this southwestern port city. Statues, schools, parks, streets and even pastries bear his name. The main cathedral has a large stained-glass window commemorating Colston, and each year November 13 is celebrated as “Colston Day.” At Colston’s Girls’ School, the pupils wear “Colston’s flower” (chrysanthemum), and during the school ceremony read passages of his will while hearing a sermon on the good Samaritan. They were never told about the 85,000 people enslaved on Royal African Company ships while he was involved with the company.

Bristol’s confrontation with the Edward Colston legacy dates to 1921 when a biography written by Rev Wilkes questioned Bristol’s “cult of Colston”, detailing Colston’s involvement in slavery. It took another 70 years for the controversy to come to broader public attention. In 1998 an activist scrawled the words ‘Slave Trader’ on the statue’s base, and the protest movement became more vocal. In 2015, a new civil society campaign, Countering Colston, was formed, carrying out historical research, cataloguing the various Colston memorializations in the city and publicizing findings in the local press. Countering Colston also lobbied to have the name erased from Colston Hall, the city’s primary music venue, and Colston Primary School.

In 2007 when Nelson Mandela was invited to Bristol to commemorate the bicentennial of the act abolishing the slave trade in Bristol, local activists wrote to the South African president cautioning him that “Bristol is not quite the liberal, multi-racial place it pretends to be”. Mandela declined the invitation. That same year, the BBC reported that the popular Bristol rock band, Massive Attack refused to perform at Colston Hall, where stars like The Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and others have performed.

Marti Burgess, a Countering Colston activist, and a former trustee of Colston Hall, was instrumental in persuading the board to change the name of the Hall. In April 2017, the trustees voted to rename the venue as part of the refurbishment for its 150th anniversary in 2020. Two petitions circulated opposing the renaming, each gathering circa 5000 names. Dr Joanna Burch-Brown from the University of Bristol, an active member of Countering Colston, analyzed the social media responses, as well as the hundreds of letters submitted to the local press. “Letter-writers argued that removing Colston’s name from Colston Hall amounted to erasing history,” Burch-Brown wrote, summarizing a wide range of arguments, “sanitizing the past, destroying heritage, doing injustice to a great Bristolian, pandering to a politically correct minority, removing decisions about Bristolian heritage from Bristolian hands, ignoring the fact that white people too have been exploited and enslaved, indulging a ‘snowflake’ victim mentality, ignoring more important contemporary issues like ‘modern day slavery’ and FGM, and unfairly blaming British people for slavery when it was Africans who enslaved fellow Africans in the first place.” Burch-Brown cites letter-writers who called the renaming Colston Hall ‘a fascist, Stalinesque and Orwellian rewriting of history.’” 1

The movement was also successful in bringing name change to Colston’s Primary School, which, over a three-month period, held an awareness-raising campaign with the school community, after which they voted to rename the school. Unlike the response to the renaming of Colston Hall, the press reported little negative reaction, due perhaps to the consultative process undertaken by the school administrators. In spring 2018, the new lord mayor of Bristol, Cleo Lake, an activist with Countering Colston, ordered Colston’s portrait removed from her office. “I won’t be comfortable sharing it with the portrait of Colston,” Lake told the press. “As part of my role in campaigning with the Countering Colston team, I also think it’s fitting that I don’t share this office with the portrait.”

Deliberations were also underway for the disposition of the Colston statue until last Sunday when Bristol residents took matters into the their own hands. The city must now decide whether to leave Colston at the bottom of the river, fish the statue out and find it a new home, or “put it back up,” as the Sunday tweet observed, and let the debate go on.

[1] Joanna Burch-Brown, “Is it Wrong to Topple Statues& Rename Schools? Journal of Political Theory and Philosophy, 2017 Vol 1: 72-73.

Originally published via EuroClio News on 8 June 2020.

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