Communipaw

On the edge of the 'Merchant City' - where the names of buildings and streets casually advertise the sources of its wealth in colonial slavery - is this new cafe, honouring the first African American to receive a medical degree, James McCune Smith, a student at Glasgow University from 1832 to 1837.

In the 1850s, McCune Smith was the New York correspondent for Frederick Douglass' Paper where he employed the pseudonym Communipaw. In one article he describes playing chess with a friend and discussing 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. Smith mischievously claims that the lines 'Cannon to the right of them / Cannon to the left of them / Cannon in front of them / Volleyed and thundered' were adapted from an old African war chant. 'Tennyson has stolen the sweep's blanket', he says, and to prove it, reaches out for the Congo original, printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol 4th, page 1040. 'Capital, by Jupiter!' says his companion. 'Hurrah for our mother-land!'