Donald MacDonald interview: A cross to bear

DONALD MacDonald witnessed first hand the racial bigotry of the American South in the 1950s. Today, he takes part in a radio programme that examines the Scottish influence in the southern states, which hasn't always been an admirable one, hears Jim Gilchrist

'THERE was a mob howling at this child going to school, they were spitting and throwing stones and holding up "Go home nigger" placards…" Donald MacDonald is recalling the appalling scenes of unfettered racial hatred 52 years ago in Charlotte, North Carolina, where, as a reporter on the local and liberally-inclined Charlotte News, he and a fellow journalist were walking alongside a courageously self-possessed 15-year-old Dorothy Counts, the first black student to enter the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School.

"It was horrendous," recalls MacDonald, now 83, sitting in his home in Edinburgh – for he has lived in Scotland, a country he loves deeply, since 1961. "We went back and wrote it up and told it like it was. And we were really angry because they toned it down. The editor said he didn't want Charlotte to be another Little Rock," he says, referring to the bloody race riots in Arkansas around the same time, when paratroops were drafted in to keep the white mob at bay as African-American students ran the gauntlet of horrific racial abuse, to take their first tentative steps into integrated education.

MacDonald, who worked with The Scotsman for some years after arriving in Scotland in the early Sixties, is one of the interviewees on a BBC Radio Scotland programme today, The Fiery Cross, in which broadcaster and oral historian Billy Kay looks at the rise of the Civil Rights movement in America's southern states during the 1960s and its effect on politically and culturally-minded Scots. Kay also speaks to Scots who spent time in the United States during these turbulent years and, in this Year of Homecoming when many Americans are embracing their Scots ancestry, also examines the impact of emigrant Scottish culture on the American South and some of its less savoury manifestations.

Donald MacDonald is a transatlantic lad o' pairts, an amiable concatenation of good ol' southern boy, effusive Obama enthusiast, expat American, Scotophile and founder of one of the largest events of its kind in the United States, the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in his native North Carolina. He grew up immersed in Scottish culture and history, but also in the fiercely segregated society of the Carolinas.

When he was growing up, in a farm household with black employees, the question of racial injustice tended to pass over his head, he admits. "We had black farm workers with us, black cooks … and we loved them. And that doesn't sound good, I know, it sounds patronising. The only way I can explain it is that we didn't know what we were doing."

But the eruption of sheer human beastliness he witnessed that day at Harding High School was a wake-up call. "And let me say this," he adds. "I was a police supporter until then. There were policemen there that I knew and was quite friendly with, but these were the guys who were egging the crowd on. It was horrible."

Around that time, shortly after they were married, his wife, Marietta – a singer and actress from the Isle of Lewis who died in 1983 – became involved in some anti-racism protest of her own and was promptly fired from her job in a department store in Charlotte, for sitting down in sympathy with demonstrating black students who entered the store's segregated restaurant.

MacDonald grew up in a house which had been set on fire by Sherman's army during the Civil War. His father's family had been cleared from Skye in the 19th century; his mother, a MacQueen, also had roots in Skye, "where her ancestors were a different class, tacksmen and ministers, of all things" – for, once settled in the US, his mother's forbears had been slave owners, he adds. And, as he points out on the Radio Scotland programme, "the last hold-out of racial segregation in the South was the church. It's incredible".

His words are born out on the programme by a Scot, the Rev Iain Whyte, who recalls his time in the 1960s as a divinity student working in Meridian, Mississippi, on the Freedom Summer project to register black voters, when three student volunteers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. While providing "pulpit supply" in Alabama, he overheard members of the congregation discussing what to do if "they" – ie African-Americans – should enter the church. He decided that if any black person was denied entry, he would walk out, but the situation didn't arise, leaving him deeply uncomfortable about his situation.

Kay himself visited the United States in 1970 – drawn not so much by protest songs as by the black American soul music he and his peers listened to back in Ayrshire, but he was also interested in the black struggle for rights as someone who regarded his own Scots language and culture subjugated at home. Southern society he found warmly welcoming to Scots, but he also found racism institutionalised. "They were charming hosts, as long as you kept quiet on the subject of racial equality," he says. Whyte's experience was similar: engaged in convivial conversation with a judge, he raised the topic: "It was like a steel shutter coming down."

Some have blamed it all on Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticised view of Scotland was widely embraced by the antebellum Deep South – so much so that Mark Twain accused Scott of being responsible for the American Civil War – "For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them," wrote Twain. "Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter … (who] had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war."

It has been suggested that, following the confederate defeat in the Civil War, these states identified with the Jacobites of the previous century. Whatever, out of the romanticised Highlands of Scott's Lady of Lake, widely taught in southern schools, came the fiery cross, adopted as a grim symbol of racial hatred, as clansmen became Klansmen.

"They used to call the South Scott Land, because he was so popular there," says MacDonald, who grew up in a rural South Carolina Community called, confusingly enough, Carolina, where, he says "every Highland name you can think of could be found. In my mother's family, one man had a complete set of the Waverley novels, and he was so proud of them." MacDonald, who has written about the rebirth of Scottish identity in the South, including in America's Braemar, his compendious history of the Highland games he founded, is the first to agree that the Scottish influence in the southern states hasn't always been an admirable one.

He first established the Grandfather Mountain Highland games when he was still a journalist in Charlotte, after being much taken with the Braemar Games during a holiday in Scotland in the late 1950s. "Most of the US Highland games at that time were in California; there was nothing in the south-east. Nobody there knew what Highland games were anyway." He was offered the use of the MacRae Meadows site on Grandfather Mountain, a cool 4,280ft up in North Carolina's Blue Mountains, by Agnes MacRae Morton, whose family owned the mountain. "It's a wonder my own newspaper, the Charlotte News, didn't fire me because I was so busy writing promotional material (for the first games]."

The event proved an immediate success, with 1,000 people turning up. That was 1956: today the Grandfather Mountain Games notches up attendances of around 40,000. It may not be the largest Highland Games in the world, but its organisers boast that more clansmen and clanswomen gather there than at any other place on Earth. MacDonald laughs that he sometimes thinks he created a tartan Frankenstein.

Not everyone found it funny, though. Since he retired from anything other than honorary involvement in the games, he confesses to being slightly disquieted by a more recently established "torch-lighting ceremony", in which clansmen light burning torches to form a giant blazing Saltire on the games ground. "I'd seen Ku Klux Klan meetings when I was working in the South – the bedsheet brigade," he comments. "I was told that the first year the games had this ceremony, some African-Americans driving past stopped and were absolutely horrified because they thought they were witnessing a Klan gathering."

The ceremony's benign symbolism was explained and, says MacDonald, nothing more came of it, but is there a tendency for those who so embrace the traditions of "the old country" to be conservative, sometimes to the point of racism? He dismisses the suggestion, although he concedes that such events can attract "Kentucky colonel types". Do African-Americans patronise the games? The sporting events, yes, he says: "Two or three times they've been the Games sportsman of the year". The reason why many don't come, he says, is simply the lack of cultural tie-in for them.

He also appreciates that in Scotland, we can be patronising about the American obsession with clan heritage. "We act silly sometimes. I can understand it, though. You take anyone away from the life they have known and they're going to long for the traditions and culture he's lost, even generations on. I'm four generations away from Scotland and I was so keen to get there when I was growing up."

MacDonald has now spent most of his life in Scotland. But in an astonishing full circle, in 1985, two years after his wife died, he was back visiting family and friends in Charlotte when he went with a friend to a club. And a one-time fellow journalist who had worked for a rival newspaper to his own in Charlotte, back in the 1950s, rushed over to him – "and he says, 'Donald, you'll never guess who's just come in, Dorothy Counts.'

"Dorothy was dancing with her escort and I went over and introduced myself to her." So almost three decades on, MacDonald found himself dancing with the girl he had last accompanied as she ran the gauntlet of appalling racist abuse as a teenager (he has since joined her on a lecture platform). "So many things had changed. What used to be a whites-only nightclub had become bi-racial, and here we were dancing together."

• The Fiery Cross is on BBC Radio Scotland today at 11:30am (repeated Saturday, 8:30pm).