A riveting story

I REMEMBER it well.

In the summer of 1985, I was in New York with George MacLeod – 91 years old, nearly deaf and lame – (that’s George, by the way, not me) – on a visit to raise funds to build a new youth and family Centre on the island of Iona. The old trouper was also in the Big Apple to receive the prestigious Union Medal from Union Theological Seminary where George had been the first ever visiting Fosdick Professor 65 years previously. Nearly 1500 pastors from all across America crowded into Riverside Church for the occasion.

Next morning, Maxwell MacLeod and I decided to go to a service in a black Baptist Church in East Harlem. The singing of the gospel choir was exuberant and inspiring. The congregation joined in joyfully, creating new harmonies and swaying to the rhythm of the music. The preaching was also electrifying.

Having studied black theology at Duke University in North Carolina, I immediately recognised the preacher’s themes. For centuries, Western theology had been dominated by white affluent males. But the emerging black theologians of the 1960s and 1970s turned traditional theology on its head, re-envisaging Christianity from the point of view of the oppressed. During the preacher’s sermon, the congregation shouted “Amen” and “Right on!”

Encouraged by the shouts, the minister responded with enthusiasm. The words poured out of him. The sermon thus became a joint eff ort; from time to time the choir burst into exuberant multi-coloured singing and clapping. What energy was in that sanctuary! I knew I wasn’t in Scotland. These memories have been triggered by a book which has landed on my desk from the Deep South (Edinburgh). It’s called A Singing Revolution: Slavery to Civil Rights, and it’s by the Rev Ian Y Gilmour, former minister of St Andrew’s and St George’s West Church in Edinburgh. A keen jazz lover, Ian has made four study visits to both USA and Africa. He was keen to explore the relationships between music and the growth and development of civil rights movements. Hence his book.

Full disclosure: Ian Gilmour – a fine preacher and a fine man – and I go back a long way. We met when he was growing up in Easterhouse and I was community minister in the housing scheme. It was there that Ian first learned the hymns and spirituals that would make so much sense to him when he studied the liberation music of the churches in Africa and the American South, as oppressed people, burdened by poverty and racism, learned to “live upwards” into the knowledge of their own power as children made in the image of a loving God. Ian’s booklet sketches the power and profound influence of black gospel music in the struggle for human rights and dignity among people who had endured denigration for decades. The author also traces, particularly through the researches of Scotland’s pre-eminent historian Sir Tom Devine, how Scotland benefitted hugely from the slave trade. In a chapter titled “Scotland and Slavery – it wisnae us!” Ian Gilmour writes: “Scotland had succumbed to amnesia and worse to an explicit denial of ever having any part in the business of transatlantic slavery.”

“Ian’s booklet sketches the power and profound influence of black gospel music in the struggle for human rights.

Within the covers of a 40-page book, the author can only key in some of the main developments in what is a riveting story. It is published by Fresh Start (a charity supporting homeless people in Edinburgh). A donation of £5 will secure a copy. (freshstartweb.org.uk)