When early Brits said black Irish it was apparently literal. It did not mean “Spaniard” or “tanned” as some American Irish like to say. The same goes for Scotland’s early blacks. I found this passage in J. A Rogers book, NATURE KNOWS NO COLOR LINE, published 1952.

“MacRitchie adds that ‘the legends and the history of the Scottish highlands are both witnesses to the existence of a purely black people there.’ Boswell and Dr. Johnson saw descendants of these black people when they visited Scotland. In his “Journey to the Hebrides, September 1, 1773, Boswell wrote of one clan, the McCraes, ‘some were as black and wild in their appearance as any American savages, whatsoever.’ Martin who had visited these Western Islands eighty years before Boswell said of the people of Jura, “black of complexion ,’ of Islay, ‘generally black’. and of Arran, ‘generally brown and some of a black complexion. ”

The quote from David MacRitchie came from the book, Ancient and Modern Britons, published in 1926. MacRitchie a British archeologist also said “So late as the tenth century three of these provinces were wholly black and the supreme ruler of them became for a time the paramount king of Transmarine Scotland…….We know as ah historical fact tha nigher El Dubh has lived and reigned over certain black divisions of our islands – and probably white divisions also – and that a race known as the sons the Black succeded him in history….. p. 32. This is on page 70 of Roger’s book.

The name Douglass is supposedly derived from the word Dubh – as in Dublin?!

The quote from Boswell according to the book is from the book, WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND, a 1934 reprint of edition from the year 1703, see pp. 236, 272.