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CHAPTER 1

Becoming Black in the Era of Civil Rights and Black Power

IN JULY 1967, Stokely Carmichael came to London. A civil rights activist in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Carmichael had gained international fame — or infamy — for his call for "Black Power" at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966, popularizing the slogan that came to define the global politics of radical blackness for over a decade. He visited London at the height of his fame, at the start of a five-month world tour that his biographer describes as "the culmination of his personal desire and political need to forge relationships with global revolutionaries." For black Britons, as the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite later recalled, Carmichael's visit "magnetized a whole set of splintered feelings that had for a long time been seeking a node." Interviewing London's Black Power groups for her undergraduate sociology degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1969, the Trinidadian student Susan Craig found his visit remembered as "the single crystallizing experience which carried them over the threshold into 'becoming Black.' Two years later, the fervour with which Carmichael and his message were received was spontaneously described by many militants as a 'conversion.'" Carmichael was a confrontational black man in London, and, significantly, a Trinidadian by birth. "Here, for the first time, was 'one of us' telling the whites 'where to get off,'" Craig wrote.

Craig's interviewees were not alone in their "conversion" to blackness through Black Power. "The era of blackness in the USA," the Guyanese-born journalist Mike Phillips remembered, "seemed to show us a direction." Indeed, when Phillips interviewed black Britons of Caribbean descent in the late 1990s, he found them time and again identifying televised images of American Black Power with "the time in which they became black." This chapter asks why Carmichael's presence, and the politics he represented, resonated in Britain, and looks at how British activists took up Black Power, and what the consequences were for the reformulation of the politics of blackness, anti-racism, and anticolonialism. It also, though, refuses a reading of Black Power simply as America's "global export." Black Power was forged globally. Those African Americans whose visits to Britain in the mid-1960s accelerated the building of a new black politics were themselves formed by personal histories and political movements that traversed the black Atlantic — in his youth in a Trinidad in the wake of major labor rebellions, Stokely Carmichael grew up with the electrical charge of anticolonialism "in the air"; Malcolm X, who visited Britain before Carmichael, also to great acclaim, had grown up schooled in the Garveyite politics of black internationalism and West Indian anticolonialism. They came to a Britain in which black internationalism had a long history. And black Britain of the mid-1960s had important links with challenges to neocolonialism and racialized sociopolitical orders in other global locations. The Caribbean politics of decolonization, indeed, played a formative part in reconfiguring blackness in Britain. This chapter shows how becoming black in Britain in the global moment of Black Power was transformative, albeit reworking rather than replacing a longer history of transnational black anticolonial and anti-racist politics. That transformation marked the beginning of the "thinking black" that this book examines.

Becoming black in the era of civil rights and Black Power involved a balancing act. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, with whose visits this chapter begins, were influential in Britain precisely because of how they were changing the profile of black politics in the United States, but their pull also threatened to marginalize or erase from view long traditions of activism within Britain, and the long, transnational coordinates of black internationalism. When, on the eve of Carmichael's departure, C. L. R. James sought to capture and explain the energy unleashed by his visit, he underlined Carmichael's presence as integral to how "the slogan Black Power reverberate[s] in the way that it is doing in political Britain; and even outside of that, in Britain in general." This, James insisted, was "a testimony not merely to him but to the speed with which the modern world is moving politically." It marked a conjunctural shift — a point from which, as Hall describes the conjuncture, there was "no 'going back.' [...] The terrain changes." But for James, this did not mean a clean break, or the substitution of one politics for another; rather, it involved a reorganization and repositioning of the resources of black resistance. "I have to add that much that I shall now say to you I knew before," James explained, "but I could never have said it in the way that you will hear, unless I had been able to listen and to talk to the new Stokely, the Stokely that we have been hearing."

The first half of this chapter looks to why Black Power reverberated in Britain when U.S. activists visited in the mid-to-late 1960s. These visits were disruptive and transformative, sharpening the existing tensions within British race politics and promising new futures. The second half the chapter, though, turns to James's other concern — the question of how those things "known before" were now to stand in relation to Black Power. The dominance of events in the United States and the visibility of U.S. activists on the world stage were both enabling and restricting. For many of its adherents, Black Power's draw was that it seemed to offer solutions, whereas older politics appeared compromised or ineffective. But this "diasporic resource" — to borrow Jacqueline Nassy Brown's terminology — was utilized through the unequal power relations of diaspora. Using it also meant carving out a space for oneself in the face of marginalization. American activists came to Britain as familiar figures, but their very familiarity as a result of the British media's ready coverage of U.S. race politics, and the different modes of their political engagement compared to those dominating anti-racist politics in Britain, often served to hide the continuities that existed between black British politics pre– and post–Black Power. It made this longer history of black activism either invisible or harder to recognize as "black." Negotiating this was the balancing act that black Britons had to perform.

AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS AND BLACK POWER IN BRITAIN

Carmichael's London visit was part of a much longer tradition. In the lead-up to the American Civil War, many African Americans traveled to Britain, raising funds and building support in the movement for abolition. After abolition, many continued to make the journey, seeking to escape American racism for what they often believed to be the less prejudiced shores of Europe. But Britain also remained an important campaigning location in the development of African American civil rights, and for the involvement of African Americans in anticolonial politics, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the new titans of the U.S. civil rights movement also came to Britain. First, in 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King visited London on their return from Ghanaian independence celebrations. King returned several times over the following decade, accompanied often by other leading figures in the American civil rights movement. In 1964, Malcolm X came to Britain, again on the first of several tours, the last just days before his assassination.

Coming to Britain, these Americans entered a charged political field. Periodic anti-black riots in Liverpool in 1948, Deptford in south-east London in 1949, and London's Camden Town area in 1954 preceded large-scale rioting in Notting Hill in west London and the city of Nottingham in England's Midlands region in 1958 involving crowds of whites in the thousands. The significance of the events of 1958 is hard to overstate. Average return migration among West Indian migrants in the year following the riots increased from 150 per annum to 4,500. For the Barbadian writer George Lamming, after Notting Hill, "racial antagonism" was "an atmosphere and a background against which my life and yours are being lived." The following year, an Antiguan carpenter, Kelso Cochrane, was murdered in Notting Hill in a racially motivated attack. Cochrane's murder, and apparent police indifference to catching his killers, saw thousands gather for his funeral, including political representatives from the West Indies Federation, the South African anti-apartheid movement, and leaders from the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the London section of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The 1958 riots hastened political changes that had been in gestation since the early 1950s. On the one hand, they served to draw support for race relations legislation. Since 1950, Labour members of Parliament had proposed legislation against racial discrimination, Fenner Brockway MP leading the campaign with a series of private members' bills in the House of Commons throughout the decade. In late September 1958, just three weeks after the Nottingham and Notting Hill disturbances, the Labour Party's National Executive Committee finally backed this campaign and pledged to introduce race relations legislation if returned to office. On the other hand, the riots provided added stimulus for anti-immigration politicians and lobbyists to argue for the introduction of restrictions on immigration. Though the riots were widely condemned in the British press, and stringent sentences were meted out to perpetrators, many were quick to connect a need to curb immigration to the events of Notting Hill and Nottingham. Many Conservative Party ministers were privately angry about the effects of the riots in setting back the introduction of immigration controls — since such controls might be read as concession to racist violence — but calls for restriction quickly passed from the newspapers to the floor of the Commons. In 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Conservative government proposed legislating new immigration restrictions. Home Secretary Rab Butler, who presided over the passing of the 1962 Immigration Act found its "great merit" to be that, though ostensibly color-blind, "its restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost exclusively." The ruse was easily called out. The Dominican journalist Edward Scobie, whose Flamingo magazine had long reported on what he termed the "lunatic fringe" of Britain's Far Right, concluded that the fascist Union Movement and the Conservative Party "could well join forces; it seems after all that there is not very much to choose between them."

After 1958, a consensus on race relations politics grew, developing, by the mid-1960s, into an informal race relations settlement. This race relations policy, summed up in the Labour MP Roy Hattersley's famous aphorism that "without integration, limitation is inexcusable; without limitation, integration is impossible," aimed to remove issues of race and immigration from party political debate and electoral politics, to be managed by a coalition of governmental and research bodies, community relations "experts," and local and national voluntary associations. After Harold Wilson succeeded Hugh Gaitskell as leader of the Labour Party in 1963, Labour abandoned its previous opposition to immigration controls, supporting the continuation of the legislation introduced under Macmillan. Balancing this commitment to immigration controls, Wilson passed the 1965 Race Relations Act and an accompanying program of race relations management. The Conservative front bench in Parliament broadly supported both the measures introduced, and the principle on which these were based. But while the mid-1960s are often remembered as the "liberal hour" of British race relations, before Powellism, the Kenyan Asian "crisis," the 1968 Immigration Act, and the rise of the populist Right both brought "race" firmly back into political life and placed anti-immigration at the center of this politics for both parties, many black Britons were less ready to find cause for celebration in the terms of a race relations settlement that balanced limited protection from racism with support for a racially coded immigration system. In opposition to a race relations politics that traded anti-discrimination legislation for immigration restrictions, Kennetta Hammond Perry notes that "Black British constituencies [...] made it clear that their citizenship status was just as much about rights of mobility as it was about the freedom to establish roots and claim Britain as a permanent home."

The 1964 general election saw Labour return to power on a commitment to continuing immigration restrictions, and saw considerable gains for anti-immigration politics in several key seats. The Conservative town councilor Peter Griffiths won the seat of Smethwick in the West Midlands on an explicitly racist platform, defeating Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker. The Tory campaign was accompanied by stickers and posters produced by local activists carrying the slogan "If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour!" Griffiths denied responsibility for the slogan, but also refused to condemn it, claiming it to be a legitimate expression of public feeling. He won the seat with a swing of 7.5 percent, despite a national swing to Labour of 3.2 percent. In the same election, Fenner Brockway lost his seat in Eton and Slough, while anti-immigration candidates gained significant votes in Southall and Birmingham Perry Bar. Patrick Gordon Walker stood again three months later in a by-election in Leyton, but again was defeated. Despite the efforts of the leadership of all parties, the Leyton by-election was fought primarily on the issue of immigration.

The events of the 1964 election hung heavy in the minds of Britain's black communities. The West Indian Gazette, a vocal supporter of Brockway's campaigns, worried whether manifesto promises on anti-discrimination legislation would be honored. Others felt wholly excluded from politicians' concerns. One Leyton constituent, a 28-year-old Jamaican man who remembered reading about Patrick Gordon Walker as a youth in the West Indies, told the new black British newspaper Magnet that the by-election campaign there was "a choice between Caesar and Caesar." As secretary of state for Commonwealth Relations in 1951, Gordon Walker had played a key role in exiling Seretse Khama, the chief of the Bamangwato tribe in the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland, after pressure from the South African government over Khama's marriage to a white woman, Ruth Williams. Unconvinced that Gordon Walker had "changed all that much since then," and noting that "the other candidates [...] were talking in such a soft voice about people like me that I never heard them," this voter wondered whom he had left to vote for. With a memory of colonial racism extending back to his time as an adolescent in colonial Jamaica, he felt unrepresented in British parliamentary politics, from the local platforms of right-wing backbenchers to the international diplomacy of the Labour cabinet. This was the context in which American civil rights leaders visited Britain.

Martin Luther King Jr. visited London in December 1964, two months after the general election and just as Gordon Walker began his by-election campaign. On arriving, King met with the Lord Chancellor and a group of MPs "to discuss racial matters." The appointment spoke to the politics of the emerging race relations settlement, in which matters of racism and anti-discrimination reform were to be managed beyond the play of party or popular politics. King's traveling companion, the civil rights campaigner Bayard Rustin, was similarly appealed to by parliamentarians, and on his return to Britain in the summer of 1965, Rustin advised a group of MPs on civil rights reform in Britain. Alongside these appointments, though, King and Rustin also spoke with local West Indian, African, and South Asian campaigners. Rustin worked with the Trinidadian anti-racist activist Marion Glean, organizing a meeting between King and a party of thirty civil rights campaigners to discuss the foundations of what would become the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, a national organization aimed at coordinating Britain's various anti-racist campaigns. Alongside further engagements at the Africa Unity House and with Fenner Brockway's Movement for Colonial Freedom, King also delivered a widely reported sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral, in which he condemned Britain's immigration laws, and warned against racial discrimination in housing. He also reacquainted himself with Claudia Jones, C. L. R. James, and the Grenadian Labour politician David Pitt, whom he had met on his earlier visit to the capital in 1957. The Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey, who interviewed King for BBC radio three times in his short 1964 stay, remembers him galvanizing many black Britons "as persons in a political struggle," and also recalls Rustin being particularly influential.

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Excerpted from "Thinking Black"
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