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Black Handsworth
Edited by James Vernon
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Like all historians, I am an outsider to my subject. Moreover, although the germination of Black Handsworth came with my own formation in inner-city Britain in a different time and space, I have never had firsthand experience of what bell hooks famously described as the “killing rage” that the prevalence of racial discrimination can induce.73 If a key aim of this book is to emphasize the importance of everyday cultures and ordinary experiences, this is not—as Raymond Williams reminded us—to vacate the arena of politics.74 The black structure of feeling had far-reaching implications. In the context of the long 1980s and the resolute presence of Britain’s postcolonial amnesia, it was part of a process of confronting Britain with the implications of its imperial past and, in so doing, of moving toward the belated decolonization of the metropole itself.75 But the importance of race in 1980s Britain should also be understood on its own terms. What I describe in the pages that follow represents just one manifestation of what might be conceptualized as the “diaspora-ization” of urban Britain.76 Propelled by the transatlantic energies of the black globality, this was a process that, paradoxically, was enabling a black community to arrive at a sense of rootedness in the one-time mother country. Black Handsworth in the long 1980s is just one chapter in the continuing story of the making of black Britain.
A key plank of the ideology of both organizations was the adoption of a strategically wide political viewpoint that situated their contemporary activities in Britain alongside both historical struggles against empire and present-day global liberation movements. The IWA’s constitution included a commitment to waging “militant . . . struggle in every possible way against racialism and fascism,” for example, and to “support the national liberation struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples.” Similarly, the AYM pledged to “fight against racism in all its forms” and “to support all anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles.”63 References to historic anticolonial figures featured prominently within each organization. In May 1978, for example, the IWA opened a welfare center at 346 Soho Road, Handsworth’s main shopping street, less than two miles from AFFOR’s base on the Lozells Road. The center was named after Shaheed Udham Singh, the Indian anticolonialist who in 1940 murdered the lieutenant general of the Punjab in retaliation for his ordering of a massacre of more than three hundred people. Singh also featured in AYM literature, including in a 1986 calendar that attempted to situate the group’s activities in Handsworth in relation to historic anticolonial struggles. On one side of the calendar was a photograph of Udham Sing following his arrest for the 1940 murder; on the other was a photograph of a contemporary demonstration that had been organized by the AYM.64
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