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Shades of Black

Political and Community Groups

INTRODUCTION

On 4 and 5 June 1977, as Britain was readying its street parties, processions, and Union Jack bunting for the queen’s forthcoming Silver Jubilee, the Handsworth-based African-Caribbean Self-Help Organisation (ACSHO) hosted Birmingham’s inaugural African Liberation Day. The idea had first been mooted by newly independent African states in the late 1950s, and the date had been set as 25 May to mark the anniversary of the formation of the Organisation of African Unity, a coalition committed to ending all colonial influence across the continent.¹ A decade later, African Liberation Day began to be picked up across the black globality. In the United States the Black Power activist Owusu Sadaukai envisaged that it would be a means of drawing public attention to events in apartheid South Africa, as well as emphasizing “‘the relationship between what is happening to our people in Africa and what is happening to us in the United States and other places.’” Drawing on a network of support that included prominent civil rights and Black Power groups, Sadaukai’s 1972 Liberation Day comprised a demonstration in Washington, D.C., of thirty thousand participants and protests outside the Portuguese and South African embassies.² In Handsworth five years later, events consisted of poetry readings, music, drama, and workshops, and culminated in a march of one thousand people from a local school to Handsworth Park. The ACSHO shared Sadaukai’s rationale for a Liberation Day as a means of emphasizing the transatlantic connections between liberation movements in Africa and political struggles across the diaspora and, given the historic role of jubilee events as a means of generating loyalty to the British Empire, no doubt recognized the political symbolism of staging the event over jubilee weekend. In the context of recent declarations of sovereignty in Angola and Mozambique, the group pitched its Liberation Day as a simultaneous celebration of victories in the struggle against colonialism and an expression of a commitment to defeating “‘the last colonial outposts’” overseas, as well as what was understood as domestic neocolonialism in contemporary Britain. The overarching theme of the event was “‘Africans in struggle at home and abroad.’”³

Similar events were subsequently held in London and Manchester, though by the 1980s the ACSHO had become the main organizational driver behind African Liberation Day in Britain.⁴ The group had been established in the mid-1960s to attempt to combat the racism black communities faced across British society, but it maintained a line of analysis that placed these struggles in the context of worldwide anticolonial and antiracist movements past and present. It was therefore part of a long-standing tradition of black political organization in Britain stretching back at least to the 1930s, when London in particular had become a focal point for Pan-Africanist mobilization thanks to the activities of black students, intellectuals, and other sojourners, who used the city as a base for the development of campaigns against empire and demands for the advancement of the rights of black populations within it.⁵ A more immediate influence on the ACSHO was the political associations and pressure groups that were set up to advocate on behalf of the growing black population in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the battles fought in this period were largely stimulated by domestic flashpoints, activists again emphasized a perspective that encompassed the black Atlantic. Activists such as the Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones drew parallels between the struggles of “‘Afro-American freedom fighters’” and domestic campaigns against racist violence, the British color bar, and the onset of increasingly discriminatory immigration legislation.⁶ The transatlantic nature of these currents was signified in 1965 when, following the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths’s shock election victory in Smethwick, the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) extended an invitation to Malcolm X to pay a visit to Griffiths’s new constituency, two miles from the IWA’s base in Handsworth. If his earlier spells in London and Oxford had contributed to his characterization of the sun finally setting on the “‘monocled, pith-helmeted’” British colonialist, Malcolm X’s stint in the midlands prompted him to reach for another analogy: black people in Smethwick were, he told reporters, being treated “‘in the same way as the Negroes . . . in Alabama—like Hitler and the Jews.’”⁷

Focusing on the ACSHO, the IWA, and other local organizations, this chapter unpicks the nature of black politics in Handsworth over the long 1980s. As the ACSHO’s rhetoric around African Liberation Day suggests, what Kennetta Hammond Perry has underlined as the “overlapping imperial, diasporic and global valences” of black politics in the 1950s and 1960s continued to resonate in the politics of Handsworth-based organizations in the later period.⁸ What was distinctive, however, was the extent to which this perspective was able to contribute to mobilizations across ethnic lines, as a growing South Asian population took up residence alongside African Caribbean communities in Britain’s inner cities. To varying degrees, it has been argued, groups in the 1960s emphasized the importance of an inclusive politics based on mutual experiences of discrimination and a shared relationship to empire. In February 1962, for example, the newly established Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference urged all “‘Afro-Asian-Caribbean citizens’” of Britain to march on the House of Commons to protest against the imminent passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Other groups likewise adopted an inclusive outlook that was at once “transracial, multiethnic and universal,” something anticipated by Claudia Jones in 1959 when she renamed her campaigning organ The West Indian Gazette so that it included the epigraph And Afro-Asian Caribbean News.⁹ By the later 1960s, influenced by the spread of Black Power across the Atlantic following the visits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and other American-based activists and the formation of groups such as the Universal Coloured People’s Association (UCPA), this unity began to manifest itself among immigrant communities with a shared embrace of the semiotic power of “black.”¹⁰ Just as Carmichael had emphasized the importance of the “Third World” jointly mobilizing under the Black Power program, so in this milieu a “peculiarly British notion of ‘blackness’” was said to have emerged in which the generalizations and stereotypes immigrants faced upon their arrival in Britain were reappropriated into an internationalist tool of political unity. According to Ambalavener Sivanandan, the Sri Lankan activist and one-time affiliate of the reconstituted UCPA, black had begun to be understood as a “political colour” to which Africans, Caribbeans, and Asians could each lay claim.¹¹

This is an important reminder of the malleability of black in postwar British discourse. In order to examine the nature of black politics in Handsworth, in this chapter it is necessary to include an interrogation of those South Asian organizations that also sought to mobilize under the same inclusive banner. Indeed, the long 1980s have been identified as the period during which the encompassing notion of black fragmented, giving rise to a “community of communities” that focused on cultural differences rather than on sites of mutual solidarity.¹² This has commonly been attributed to the state’s embrace of a policy of multiculturalism in the early 1980s, in particular its monetary arm, which increasingly allocated funds to minority groups on the basis of ethnicity.¹³ Following the recommendations of the Scarman report on the 1981 Brixton riots and the lead of Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council (GLC), local authorities in Birmingham and across the country began to roll out comprehensive multicultural programs that made funds available on the basis of increasingly narrow definitions of ethnicity. The result, it has been claimed, was the breaking down of black as a political color. The cohesion that had previously characterized black politics was eroded as the state began to absorb a generation of ethnically distinct, self-professed “community leaders” into its machinery. Black politics had been taken off the streets and into the council chamber, where, divided and then subdivided along ethnic lines, it became a scramble for state resources to fund what was now understood to be primarily a salaried exercise.¹⁴

This chapter offers an alternative story. While the specter of public funding has been presented as a marker signaling a shift from one form of politics to another, the relationship between a group’s decision to accept state monies and its political ideology was in practice complex. In the first instance, as the opening section of the chapter demonstrates, the state had already begun to develop a pluralist conception of multiculture in the context of mid-century anxieties about decolonization and the viability of the Commonwealth, which coincided with moves to direct funds toward inner-city areas with large black and Asian populations. By the high point of multiculturalism of the 1980s, moreover, groups such as the IWA emphasized the importance of a unified definition of black and ongoing connections to global anticolonial struggles, yet simultaneously accepted state funds. The ACSHO argued vociferously against the practice of political organizations accepting state monies but subscribed to a version of Black Power as a global, yet explicitly narrow, African Caribbean identity. As shown here, the funding system undoubtedly favored those predominantly white, antiracist organizations born out of the New Left, which were often better placed to speak the state’s language of multiculturalism. But there was no straightforward relationship between the proximity of a group to the state and its political agenda. Much more relevant was the expanded role local organizations increasingly sought to play. In the context of demographic shifts that saw the majority of the population of areas such as Handsworth become either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, by the long 1980s the inadequacies of the state in addressing the issues faced by these communities had become apparent. The dedication of local organizations was such that many increasingly sought to simultaneously perform the roles of social agencies and campaigners, in an attempt to develop practical solutions to the inequalities that were experienced by their constituents. The problem for those subscribers to black as a political color, however, was that at the local level these issues were often manifested in ethnically specific ways.

For example, the IWA and the Asian Youth Movement (AYM), another group made up of South Asian activists, increasingly found that their time was spent attempting to help Handsworth residents deal with the threat of deportation—something that, following changes to the law in the 1980s, particularly affected South Asian communities. The ACSHO, in contrast, focused on the provision of alternative education for African Caribbean youth in the context of a growing awareness of the acute disadvantages this section of the community experienced in mainstream schooling. This was undoubtedly part of a wider story of the fragmentation of political identities in Britain. In Handsworth, women activists were also positing their own demands for a modification of black politics that would recognize—in opposition to what could often be the masculine organizational structures of many groups—the critical importance of issues such as domestic violence and the gendered, as well as raced, inequalities that black and Asian women faced. For all groups, it was the practical experience of black Handsworth—conflict with the police, racism in schools, a lack of suitable housing, the threat of deportation—that rendered the black globality both intelligible and, in the eyes of many, a political necessity. In Handsworth, the local facilitated the global. But it was also at the level of the local that ideas about an encompassing black political color weakened, particularly as the provision of ethnically tailored services increasingly took center stage. The issue was not so much the rise of the community leader, but rather the extent to which by the long 1980s the political activist was in many ways also compelled to perform the role of the dedicated social worker. Whether groups accepted state funding or not, in the context of the long 1980s a unified notion of blackness was becoming difficult to maintain.

STATE INTERVENTION

Both local and national governments had played a limited role in black and Asian community relations prior to the turning point of the 1981 urban unrest. In Birmingham the local authorities took the lead. In 1950, for example, Birmingham City Council established the Co-ordinating Committee for Coloured People, which consisted of representatives from local religious and voluntary organizations, and four years later it was the first authority to create the post of liaison officer for colored people, with the aim of acting as a bridge between the council and black community representatives.¹⁵ Such initiatives were undoubtedly modest, and they also demonstrate the extent to which this fledgling approach to race relations was shaped by the legacies of empire; there were no black representatives on the Co-ordinating Committee, for example, and the post of liaison officer was initially held by a white former colonial officer who had served in Africa.¹⁶ Nationally, the gathering pace of decolonization saw community relations manifested in other ways. In the early 1960s, influenced by the ongoing shock caused by the Suez Canal crisis as well as concerns about the viability of the Commonwealth in light of racial atrocities in South Africa, the British government agreed to sponsor an arts festival as a means of articulating a renewed vision for the Commonwealth. The festival took place in 1965. The aim, as Radhika Natarajan has shown, was to curate it in pluralist terms, as a means of generating cross-Commonwealth respect for diversity and difference. Planners often presented a nostalgic representation of Britain’s imperial past, however, and virtually ignored the by now substantial Commonwealth populations actually residing in Britain. Moreover, the contrast between the festival’s emphasis on equality and the government’s concurrent, discriminatory attempts to restrict immigration was widely noted.¹⁷ It was indicative of the then Labour government’s ambivalence on the issue of race that the festival also coincided with what might be seen as the genesis of the multicultural policies that would be adopted on a much larger scale in later decades.

Nationally, the key marker was the 1965 Race Relations Act, which although limited in practice nevertheless for the first time formally outlawed racial discrimination in public places.¹⁸ The Local Government Act of the following year also represented the moment the state began to play a significant monetary role in intercommunity relations. The act included a funding package for local authorities with large numbers of immigrants, which was primarily used to employ teachers with the relevant skills to teach English to Asian pupils in schools.¹⁹ By 1969 the central government was contributing £15 million under the terms of the act, and there was a more general recognition among policy makers that inner cities—with their vastly disproportionate levels of unemployment, poverty, and immigration—were in a state of acute crisis.²⁰ Initially, wider policy responses were ostensibly concerned with structural issues such as unemployment and housing, though local authorities in particular often used these issues as a de facto way of dealing with race. The Urban Programme, influenced by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the United States and introduced in October 1968, signaled a more explicit focus, with the channeling of resources to areas where more than 6 percent of the school population was pupils from immigrant backgrounds. By the mid-1970s and the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act, which made it a statutory duty for local authorities to legislate to end racial disadvantage and encourage equality of opportunity, the program was explicitly being aimed at ethnic minority organizations.²¹ However problematically and incoherently, then, the vision of pluralism and equality ostensibly articulated at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival had also begun to inform both local and national government in the shaping of a domestic multiculturalist agenda—increasingly in monetary terms.

Because of a lack of clear direction from the central government, the period following the passage of the 1976 act was characterized by diverse and sometimes confused responses from local authorities. In Birmingham, this largely continued into the 1980s. If the GLC took the lead in establishing the multicultural model, the Birmingham council embarked on a more cautious path. In 1984 the Labour administration created the Race Relations and Equal Opportunities Committee, but rather than implement the GLC blueprint it made a conscious effort to avoid being identified with the “looney Left.”²² The committee focused on the process of defining the council’s equal opportunities policy; even as late as 1985, it claimed it did “not have a specific fund for supporting organisations of ethnic minority people.” Two years later, because of concerns that its work could harm support among Labour’s electoral base, the committee was abolished and replaced by the Personnel and Equal Opportunities Committee.²³

In spite of this reticence, throughout the 1980s more funds were being directed by the council toward black and Asian groups and projects, usually under the euphemism “inner-city aid.” In March 1985, for example, the Birmingham City Council’s Economic Development Committee reported that it had made £400,000 available to projects that aimed to improve the employment opportunities of those living in inner areas of the city, where 75 percent of the city’s “ethnic population” lived.²⁴ The West Midlands County Council (WMCC) explicitly set out to fund better community relations and most obviously adopted the language of multiculturalism. The race relations subcommittee of the council was established in 1981 with a remit to “consider matters affecting ethnic minorities” and allocate monies to “voluntary sector organisations involved with ethnic relations matters.” The subcommittee’s response to the rioting certainly illustrates the tendency of the state to assume that if there was a problem in black areas, the remedy could straightforwardly be found with the distribution of funds. In the aftermath of the 1985 rioting in Handsworth, the immediate response of the committee was to express concern about whether black and Asian organizations had been able to gain equal access to the funding that was available. To address this problem the council assigned a community liaison officer to “advise, support and consult voluntary organisations on various issues affecting themselves and the county council.” The subcommittee then set up an emergency “Handsworth Disturbance fund” of £11,000, which was signed off on just days after the riots and was made available specifically to black and Asian groups in the area.²⁵

The county council system was abolished following passage of the Conservative government’s Local Government Act of 1985 in the context of its ongoing battles with the GLC and attempts made by authorities in the north of England to implement “local socialism.”²⁶ Other bodies began to play a greater role, including the charitable Cadbury Trust, which between 1985 and 1986 allocated a total of £186,933 to “race relations” projects in Birmingham in an attempt to help fill the gap left by the county council.²⁷ And the mid-1980s also witnessed national government becoming increasingly active. According to David Waddington, the Home Office minister responsible for racial minorities between 1983 and 1987, the strategy was to “try and identify the leaders of the various communities with whom the government could deal” with a view to the allocation of monies.²⁸ Following the 1985 riots, Kenneth Clarke, then minister for employment, identified Handsworth as the pilot area that would receive the attention of an inner-city task force, a scheme conceived by the government for areas that were “showing acute signs of economic and social distress.” Almost £5 million of central government money was made available to various projects in Handsworth with the primary object of increasing the employability of people in black and Asian communities. This was to be a “proactive” project, developed alongside community representatives to target particular ethnic minority groups. The task force was regarded as a success, with 73 percent of projects funded regarded as meeting targeted audiences. In 1987 further funds were made available for task forces in sixteen inner-city areas across the country.²⁹

Policies such as these show how in spite of Thatcher’s rolling back of the state, there was also a parallel willingness on behalf of the government to sanction the kind of focused investment that is rarely associated with the politics of Thatcherism.³⁰ This is not to say that the idea of an inner-city task force did not cause unease within the Thatcher administration. In response to earlier proposals from Home Secretary Douglas Hurd that a program of positive action was required to remedy what he diagnosed as a “thoroughly dangerous situation” in Britain’s inner cities, Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth, then junior policy advisers to Margaret Thatcher, warned against any further distribution of funds. In overtly racialized terms they suggested that it was unlikely that any increased investment would have a positive effect, given that “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale.” The inner-city unrest, Letwin and Booth made clear, had been caused “solely by [the] individual characters and attitudes” of those involved. As long as this persisted, “all efforts to improve the inner cities [would] founder.” Any funds that were allocated, it was suggested, would merely end up subsidizing the “disco and drug trade” or “Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops.”³¹

Such comments offer an insight into the inability of some in government to comprehend the black inner city as anything other than profoundly alien. In spite of this, the projects and organizations that were supported by local and national funds—many of which were small grants that covered the cost of new equipment or the employment of temporary project workers—do illustrate the extent to which the inner areas of Britain’s major cities had by the 1980s become sites of a remarkable tapestry of diversity. In Birmingham, organizations supported by the city council included the Bangladeshi Women’s Association, the British Association of Muslims, and the Midlands Vietnamese Association; among the many others the county council supported were the Bethel Church of Jesus Christ, the Selly Oak Punjabi School, the Birmingham Jewish Council, the Sikh Youth Service, the St. Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla Society, and a project to develop resources for teaching black history in schools.³² Thus what Bill Schwarz has described as the haphazard “black locality” of an earlier period, traceable through the presence from the 1950s onward of new black businesses and shops in areas of immigrant settlement, had by the 1980s become a global sensibility that corresponded with a voluntary and local political sector that attempted to advocate on behalf of the particular community it claimed to represent.³³

Criticisms of this process have been twofold. First, the extent to which groups were actually representative of the constituents on whose behalf they claimed to speak was not always apparent. Certainly groups that were successful in their funding applications possessed no democratic mandate. The 1980s witnessed the rise of the community leaders, generally men from comparatively middle-class backgrounds who, because of their ability to speak the language of the state, were often presumed to be the authentic gatekeepers to the particular ethnic group they claimed to represent. Reflecting on his own ministerial responsibilities, David Waddington admitted that the government was regularly mistaken about “who the real community leaders were” and was too often seduced by “noisy chaps” whose claims of influence within a particular community often did not match reality.³⁴ More than the unaccountability of these processes, however, for Sivanandan and others it was the way in which the state’s embrace of multiculturalism in the 1980s was seen to provoke ethnic divisions that was the program’s most damaging legacy. People began to see their ethnic identity—as opposed to the more inclusive identity of black—as the only way of obtaining either influence or money. The state’s policies “did not respond to the needs of communities,” the writer Kenan Malik has argued, “but to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people.”³⁵ If the emphasis on plurality and diversity in the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival occurred in the context of the disorientation experienced by Britain at the moment of decolonization, to Sivanandan the program of multiculturalism that was aimed at black Commonwealth citizens and their descendants in Britain was—echoing the language used by the ACSHO at its African Liberation Day—nothing less than a form of “domestic neocolonialism.”³⁶

It is certainly striking that the groups who were awarded funding in Birmingham in the 1980s often defined themselves in narrow terms—for example, as the St. Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla Society, as opposed to the black or even Caribbean society. Allegations of corruption in the distribution of state resources were also commonplace and were often couched in interethnic terms.³⁷ With respect to the attitude of the state, however, a confused picture has emerged. The council actually began to liaise with black community groups from the mid-1960s, adopting the language of plurality and equality and beginning to play a monetary role in community relations. When the multicultural moment definitively arrived following the 1981 rioting, the Birmingham Labour authority, at least, adopted it ambivalently in light of concerns about the effects it would have on their white working-class vote. Nationally, following the 1985 unrest the government allocated a considerable sum of money to Handsworth, ostensibly with the aim of job creation, though this was met with vocal opposition from others inside government. As discussed in this chapter, there were divisions along ethnic lines in Handsworth, but it is simplistic to suggest that this was solely because of the way in which state funding had come to be distributed. In fact, within many organizations this was a process that was already under way independently from the often-confused reach of the state.

ANTIRACISM

In 1970 a group of teachers, academics, and campaigners organized a march on Edgbaston cricket ground, a venue in the south of the city that was due to host a match in a series between England and a whites-only South African team. The march was part of a national Stop the Seventy Tour campaign, led by the activist and future Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain with the support of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). In the event, the protests were a success; the planned matches were abandoned. But the organizers of the Birmingham march—which included local businessman John Plummer; Leslie Mitton, a teacher at a local Methodist College; and John Hick, a prominent lecturer in religious philosophy at Birmingham University—pressed ahead, transforming it into a demand for better community relations. Nine hundred people attended the march, out of which a new organization was born: All Faiths for One Race (AFFOR). From 1974 the group operated out of premises at the corner of Finch Road and Lozells Road in Handsworth, where it continued to be active throughout the 1980s. Initially its members were dismissed as “angry young men intent on stirring up trouble.” Not everyone active in AFFOR was either male or young, Hick later recalled in his memoirs. But it was true “that we were angry—about the injustices of racism.”³⁸

AFFOR had emerged out of a particular conjuncture with respect to the Left’s engagement with Britain’s black population. As Jodi Burkett has suggested, although an anticolonial stance was at the heart of organizations such as the AAM, this did not mean they stood apart from the wider ambivalence about Britain’s imperial past that had emerged in the context of decolonization. In the 1960s, the focus of such organizations on what was understood as the growing imperial status of the United States and the “little empire” that was seen to have developed in South Africa not only displaced the memory of Britain’s own imperial past but also meant that the experiences of its formerly colonial subjects living in Britain could often be overlooked.³⁹ There was a reluctance, as Stuart Hall has reflected with respect to his own experience in the New Left, to explicitly comprehend the black presence as being the product of a colonial formation.⁴⁰ By the end of the decade, however, the passing of successive race equality acts, immigration legislation and the arrival of Powellism meant that it was virtually impossible for the largely white membership of groups such as the AAM to ignore the domestic race relations scene. As Hain reflected, the prospect of a deterioration in community relations if the South African tour of England were to be allowed to go ahead had become a central plank of the Stop the Seventy Tour’s campaign.⁴¹ In Birmingham the transformation of a protest against a segregated South African cricket team into AFFOR, an agency that would both conduct antiracist campaigning and run services for local black communities in Handsworth, was a signal of this broader direction of travel.

By the mid-1970s, prompted by the increasing visibility and electoral successes of the NF, a national antiracist movement had emerged.⁴² Like AFFOR, it was led primarily by white activists. A key driver was Rock Against Racism (RAR), a coalition established by the Socialist Workers’ Party that capitalized on the popularity of the punk, reggae, and “two-tone” scenes by staging consciously multiracial festivals featuring both white and black acts. This culminated in a carnival in London in 1978 that was attended by more than seventy thousand people. By this point, RAR had been joined by the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), a group formed in 1977 to give the antiracist movement a formal political voice. Its central aim, through the organization of protests and marches and the distribution of its campaign literature, was to expose and raise awareness of the Nazi sympathies of the NF. Between 1977 and 1979 it was estimated that there were 250 ANL branches across Britain and more than forty thousand members.⁴³

The ANL, in particular, has been subject to criticism from those who saw its focus on exposing the “sham patriotism” of the NF as accepting the debate on the nationalist terms of the Far Right. For Paul Gilroy, the ANL closed down what were the broader concerns of RAR and honed in on the Nazism of the NF “to the exclusion of every other consideration,” including the NF campaign of street violence and myriad other forms of racial discrimination that black communities faced on a daily basis.⁴⁴ Both RAR and the ANL were relatively quiet in Handsworth. In 1978 there had been a failed attempt to stage a “musical march,” for example, partly due to the divided nature of the local ANL branch and its inability to attract the support of local black communities.⁴⁵ AFFOR, in contrast, continued well into the 1980s. It was undoubtedly at more than one remove from the politics of RAR and the ANL. While AFFOR undertook antiracist campaigning and attempted to uncover the Nazism of local NF members, this was always counterbalanced by a localized politics that was explicitly focused on attempting to meet the varied needs of local black and Asian communities. There could be tensions between these twin ambitions. In 1977 AFFOR summarized its core dilemmas as being “to what extent it should concentrate on casework and to what extent on ‘campaigning.’”⁴⁶ But it was the focus on local casework that was arguably the critical factor in the group’s ability to outlast RAR, the ANL, and other antifascist organizations following the NF’s decline as an electoral force from 1979 onward.

In 1976 Clare Short, a local activist who like Hain would go on to become a Labour cabinet minister, became director of AFFOR. She characterized the group as a “hub of anti-racist activity” in which the guiding principles were “respect [for] each other’s religious institutions” coupled with an “absolutely uncompromising” position on racism.⁴⁷ The group published articles discussing the nature of fascism and an exposé of a local NF leader’s comments regarding the supposed “swamping” of Britain by “coloured invaders,” comments that echoed those later made by Margaret Thatcher in the run-up to the 1979 general election.⁴⁸ As with the ANL, this tactic of exposing the fascism or Nazism of the Far Right often stemmed less from a desire to counter the effects of racism on minority communities and more from a concerted effort to appeal to as broad a white audience as possible. Thus the author of one AFFOR pamphlet, So What Are You Going to Do About the National Front?, urged “white society” to recognize that “compared with the hurt and bitterness and anger of many black Britons” the distaste white communities felt at the presence of a neo-Nazi party in Britain was “minute.” Other articles published in AFFOR’s quarterly newsletter highlighted the legal problems faced by local ethnic minorities and lobbied the Commission for Racial Equality to expand on its remit in relation to the needs of ethnic minorities across the city.⁴⁹

Yet unlike either RAR or the ANL, AFFOR maintained a strong connection to a particular locale. The initial decision to base AFFOR in Handsworth was made because it was felt that this was the area in which the group would best be able to make tangible improvements in the lives of black communities. From the perspective of the university campus, where the group’s founding member, John Hick, spent his working life, there was an exoticism to “multi-racial Handsworth” as a place of comparative excitement and turmoil. Situating AFFOR in Handsworth was, one activist wrote in 1979, about “taking sides . . . with the black communities . . . choosing an innercity area and trying to cope with the advantages and disadvantages of such a place.”⁵⁰ While the initial depiction of the group as angry young men was an easy characterization to make, the group’s commitment to developing practical responses to the inequalities experienced by the local population meant that by the 1980s it had undergone a significant transformation from the direct action associated with the Stop the Seventy Tour to being among the most established players on the local race relations scene, regularly obtaining some of the largest funding grants with the most regularity.⁵¹

Throughout its existence local casework was never off AFFOR’s organizational agenda. In the aftermath of the 1971 Immigration Act, for example, the group provided assistance with the act’s new requirement that family members obtain work permits before entering the United Kingdom. Following the establishment of the Asian Resource Centre (ARC) in 1976 (discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter), the emphasis shifted to providing social security advice, though in practice AFFOR continued to deal with a wide range of cases. As was made clear in the group’s 1977–1978 annual report, “One cannot turn away individuals who turn to you for help. . . . [T]he door remains open and people arrive when they choose to arrive with problems ranging from social security, to immigration, to conflicts with the police, the need for a job, a divorce, a death certificate, etc.” AFFOR’s community worker described having to represent an elderly Asian man who had been refused reentry into the United Kingdom on the grounds that his face looked too young for his passport photograph; helping a recently widowed black woman who was unable to pay her energy bills following the death of her husband; and enabling a man whose union was on strike to gain access to benefit money. By the 1980s the group was also becoming increasingly active in local education. In the context of belated attempts by local authorities to introduce better provisions for ethnic minority pupils, AFFOR ran workshops for local teachers on “multicultural education” and on the effects an ethnocentric perspective could have in the classroom.⁵²

The group’s focus on local issues generally chimed with its wider campaigning program, but there were also tensions. A moment of crisis came in the mid-1970s when AFFOR campaigned for an inquiry into the increasingly fraught relationship between police and the black community in Handsworth, with the ambition of bringing the issue to a wider audience. The campaign eventually resulted in John Brown, an academic at the Cranfield Institute of Technology and a supposed expert on police-community relations, receiving sponsorship from both AFFOR and the Barrow-Cadbury Trust to conduct an investigation, whose results were published in 1977 as Shades of Grey.⁵³ In the event, the report exacerbated the already-fraught climate of anxiety around black youth, the inner city, and street crime. It fudged the issue of police harassment, focusing instead on what Brown described as a “hard-core” group of black youths who had “taken on the appearance of followers of the Rastafarian faith” and were notionally responsible for the high crime rates in the area—the victims of which, Brown suggested, were often white elderly women. As Paul Gilroy has argued, Shades of Grey often deployed Powellian imagery that painted a pathological picture of the supposed inadequacies of black familial structures as the cause of the growth in crime, a narrative that inevitably captured significant media attention. In the aftermath of the report’s publication, for example, the Birmingham Evening Mail ran a series of features under the banner “Terror Gangs Shock,” and the report also captured the imagination of the national media.⁵⁴ The emphasis Brown placed on groups of black youths merely shifted the terms of the debate from a focus on an individual black mugger to what was perceived to be a growing collective threat. In effect, it was a precursor to what would, particularly following the rioting that in September 1985 engulfed the very street on which AFFOR was based, become the dominant narrative around the black inner city.⁵⁵

AFFOR immediately disowned Shades of Grey and ordered a new investigation into policing in Handsworth. The group obtained a small grant, sufficient to buy a tape recorder and a transcribing machine, and commissioned Carlton Green, a local bus driver, to interview members of the black community about their relationships with the police. The result was Talking Blues, a forty-seven-page pamphlet summarizing local opinion. Twenty-two hundred copies of Talking Blues were sold in the first year, and copies were distributed to senior officers in the West Midlands Police. Its aim, Clare Short wrote, was to “attempt to communicate . . . the experiences, frustrations and sense of bitter injustice of black people concerning police behaviour.” Five years later, the group produced a follow-up, this time detailing the black community’s disillusionment with the education system.⁵⁶

If the Shades of Grey episode was an illustration of the pitfalls involved in AFFOR attempting to remedy local issues by bringing them to the attention of wider, often white audiences, locally the group’s ability to respond to the needs of both black and Asian communities was its strength. The ANL’s brand of antiracist politics hinged on a patriotic reading of Britain as a country with a historic respect for freedom, democracy, and difference. While this may have proven successful in the eventual hampering of the NF’s electoral appeal, it was a platform that further demonstrated the extent to which the memory of colonialism had been disavowed in Britain, on the Left as well as the Right. Moreover, it left little room for serious engagement with the diversity of issues faced by Britain’s black and Asian communities. AFFOR, in contrast, attempted to respond directly to these issues. For instance, the group ran “language recognition” classes for teachers on Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and Patois, as well as an “interpretation and translating service.” In light of a local unemployment rate four times the national average in the mid-1980s, the group produced leaflets in four Asian languages to promote awareness about how to claim unemployment support.⁵⁷ In many ways, AFFOR’s embeddedness in the community and willingness to campaign on a range of social issues meant that it was less a part of the ANL’s brand of antiracism than of the radical social work movement that emerged out of the post-1968 era of experimentalism and that emphasized the need for solidarity with clients in defense of the wider community.⁵⁸

Unlike many of the radical black organizations that operated alongside AFFOR in Handsworth, the group’s ability to work with clients across ethnic communities did not arise out of any ideological commitment to black as a political color. Rather, local clients perhaps associated AFFOR’s whiteness with neutrality and recognized the cultural capital that this well-funded organization had to offer. AFFOR’s success in obtaining grants undoubtedly demonstrates the way in which the funding system could often favor groups that were better able to speak the language of state multiculturalism—an issue that was the subject of apparent resentment from other local groups.⁵⁹ And as the Shades of Grey episode indicated, there were tensions between the group’s emphasis on local casework and its wider campaigning stance. Given the moral panic around black street crime and mugging and the fact that Handsworth was already lodged in the national imaginary as a key crucible for such anxieties, AFFOR was undoubtedly naïve in its expectation that an academic who reportedly also had ties to the police would be able to contribute to a meaningful discussion.⁶⁰ Yet the group was also evidently valued by its clients, who had “almost always tried the normal channels and have come to the point where they do not know what to do next.” As shown in the following discussion, for those groups that maintained an ideological commitment to a unified politics of black, tensions could often be much more pronounced.⁶¹

BLACK AS A POLITICAL COLOR? SOUTH ASIAN GROUPS IN HANDSWORTH

In postwar Britain, South Asian politics was dominated by the IWA. Initially set up by Indian peddlers in London and Coventry in the 1930s to agitate for Indian independence, in the 1950s IWAs reemerged with a focus on providing welfare support for the increasing number of Punjabi immigrants who were settling in Britain. The groups were often heterogeneous in their ideological approach, however, and even after the establishment in 1958 of a national organizing body they remained susceptible to splits, particularly over loyalties to an Indian Communist Party that had itself divided into Marxist and Marxist-Leninist factions.⁶² By the mid-1970s the IWAs had been joined by a newly politicized, younger generation of largely British-born South Asian activists. Although it retained an internationalist perspective, the AYM was much less influenced by the factionalism of far-left politics on the Indian subcontinent. Instead, it was the growth of racist street violence that Asian communities increasingly found themselves subject to that often provided the initial driver. A turning point came on 4 June 1976, when an Asian teenager, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was stabbed to death in a racist attack in Southall, West London, outside a welfare center run by the Southall IWA. The IWA’s response to the murder was perceived by younger generations as hesitant and acted as a lightning rod for wider concerns about IWA democracy and accountability. The formation of the Southall Youth Movement bypassed the IWA and took the lead in organizing the response to the Chaggar case and protests against a perceived lack of police protection. The group’s visibility helped inspire a rapid growth in AYMs across the country. In Handsworth, however, where the IWA maintained a greater level of political independence than its Southall counterpart, the newly established AYM took part in many of the same campaigns and shared broadly similar political perspectives with the older organization.

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

Arguably the most significant convergence between the two organizations was their ideological commitment to black as a political color. Like the early ideology of the British Black Panthers, which was influenced by the radical politics of figures such as the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, within the IWA this came from a particular reading of Marxism. Avtar Jouhl, a senior member of the IWA in Handsworth who drank with Malcolm X on the latter’s 1965 visit to a Smethwick pub, argued that it was important for black and Asian communities in Britain to unite because he understood them to be at the forefront of a wider struggle against capitalism. Immigrant communities were regarded as playing a particularly important role in this struggle, both because of a recognition of the racism of parts of the white working class and from the conviction that black and Asian workers alike could draw directly on their own experiences of struggle against empire and colonialism abroad, as well as against contemporary racism in Britain. Unless black workers “raise their voice the solidarity will not be there. Black people’s unity,” Jouhl emphasized, “is of utmost importance.”⁶⁵

For the AYM, a unified black identity was necessary because, according to one activist, it would allow “a solidarity to develop in the struggle against the racism of the street.”⁶⁶ The influence of Black Power on the group was emphasized by the decision of the Southall Youth Movement to use the clenched fist as its logo.⁶⁷ In the aftermath of the 1985 riots in Handsworth, both the AYM and the IWA were vocal exponents of the need for interethnic unity. Writing in the IWA’s journal Lalkar, for instance, Jouhl warned of a plot to “set the Asians and the Afro-Caribbeans at each other’s throats” and reminded his readers that his organization was “for the unity of the West Indians and Asian communities.”⁶⁸ Likewise, the AYM’s organ Asian Youth News—which on its masthead also displayed the Black Power clenched fist—called for its readers to see through portrayals of the unrest that presented it as the result of interethnic tensions. The police, the newsletter warned, were “trying to divide our community by making a pretence of sympathy towards the Asian shopkeeper”; people “should not to let this affect relations between Asian and African communities where they live side-by-side.” The AYM denounced the actions of community leaders in the aftermath of the rioting, who they claimed had “strong links within the racist Tory party” and were willing to “sell their communities for the reward of white status and privilege.” The AYM instead urged its readers to see what happened in Handsworth through a global lens. The United States and Europe were seen to “hold the world’s purse strings while our countries in Asia, Africa and South America are wracked with poverty and starvation.” The “black ghettos” of Handsworth, Brixton, and elsewhere, which “our parents and grandparents struggled for years . . . to build” and which in the 1980s had become scenes of violence and looting, should be seen from a geo­political perspective. They were, the AYM concluded, the inevitable result of the continued “racism of white domination.”⁶⁹

Unlike the older generations active in the IWA, a significant number of AYM activists were university students and were influenced by political theory—specifically by the writings of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who, having usurped the white establishment of the London-based Institute of Race Relations in the mid-1970s, set about radicalizing both the institute and its journal so that both adopted class-based, anticolonial campaigning stances. Just as Sivanandan viewed the multiculturalist programs of local and national authorities alike as a tool to “blunt the edge of black struggle,” Bhopinder Basi—who was active in the Handsworth AYM throughout the 1980s—understood that “the real purpose behind multiculturalism wasn’t to help us all live together better, but to create the necessary divisions in our communities so that an oppressive process could be maintained.”⁷⁰ Just as Sivanandan—writing in the Institute’s newly radicalized journal Race and Class—argued that Asian and Afro-Caribbean activists in the 1970s were united over their “parallel histories of common racism,” the Handsworth AYM in 1985 pledged to “work for black unity . . . against divisions based upon caste, religious, national and cultural prejudices.” The writings of Sivanandan were reproduced in AYM journals, and Basi even remembered quoting him directly at AYM meetings.⁷¹

There was, however, often a schism within these organizations between an ideological commitment to a unified black platform and practical programs that focused on more ethnically specific themes. There was an ambivalence toward ethnicity in the politics of these groups. On the one hand, the appeal of Black Power corresponded with a commitment to secularism that saw many activists consciously refuse religious social codes. Yet on the other hand, both the IWA and the AYM printed much of their campaign literature in South Asian languages and used Punjabi slogans and musical instruments at demonstrations, while religious institutions inevitably continued to exert an influence through family and other ties. This ambivalence was to some extent embodied by Sivanandan himself, who cultivated ties with Black Power but in a celebrated essay simultaneously stressed the political potential of a particular community using its own traditions, cultures, and languages as a tool of opposition to British racism.⁷² Certainly by the late 1970s and 1980s, in its practical operations in Handsworth if not in its ideological approach, the IWA in particular had seemingly begun to function primarily as an advocate for the Indian community specifically.

These tensions are apparent in the IWA’s internal correspondence. In one 1982 memo, for example, IWA members were reprimanded for their “absolutely disgraceful” behavior in not attending a specifically inclusive conference of all “the various organisations of black people in Britain.” But the same memo also called for members to be vigilant with respect to the threat posed by the Punjabi separatist group Akali Dal in British Sikh temples, an issue that could have had little or no resonance beyond the Sikh community.⁷³ By the 1980s such ethnically distinct themes had begun to dominate the IWA’s agenda. Thus, although the Udham Singh Welfare Centre claimed to offer welfare and legal advice on a broad range of issues relating to immigration, police harassment, housing difficulties, and passports, the latter had taken precedence because of the large number of Indian migrants who had arrived in Britain with forged papers, a situation that required bilingual negotiations with both British and Indian officials.⁷⁴ The IWA was able to distinguish itself from the services offered by white groups such as AFFOR by drawing on its expertise in issues that specifically affected South Asian and particularly Indian communities, in the native language of Indian immigrants. The group spoke out against other issues of particular significance within the Asian community. It took a leading role in campaigning against domestic violence, for example, issuing a leaflet expressing its concern “about the mounting violence against women” in Asian communities. In March 1986 it organized a public meeting to discuss these issues, with the intention of drawing attention to the presence of “feudal customs” within Asian communities, which, the IWA stressed, “must not be tolerated.”⁷⁵

If ethnicity was a source of incongruity, the position of women within the IWA and AYM alike was often overtly problematic. That the IWA, by the mid-1980s, was beginning to address issues such as domestic violence was the achievement of women within such organizations, who fought against what was seen to be their “distinctly masculine” cultures.⁷⁶ Historically, in the view of one activist, “if women were incorporated [into the IWA], they were incorporated as the secretaries or the food makers, rather than being represented in their own right in terms of what was best for women.” Women often found it difficult to be heard at meetings, and when they did speak often found they were being humored, while the men continued to make decisions behind the scenes without serious consultation.⁷⁷ In the 1970s this issue was so acute that it contributed to the formation of separate, breakaway women’s bodies such as the Liverpool Black Sisters and Brixton Black Women’s Group (both founded in 1973) and, by the end of that decade, the Southall Black Sisters and Birmingham Black Sisters (BBS).⁷⁸ Although these organizations had some African Caribbean members, the vast majority were South Asian women. The well-publicized industrial disputes at the Imperial Typewriters factory in Leicester in 1974 and subsequently at a film-processing plant in Grunwick, North London, had already signaled the growing visibility of radical activism among Asian women in Britain, belying the stereotypes often peddled by journalists and social scientists alike regarding the supposed passivity of South Asian women.⁷⁹ Participants in Black Sisters groups were generally younger, were often university educated, and largely came not as a result of disillusionment with conditions in the workplace but in response to the masculine cultures of groups such the AYM and the IWA, as well as the ethnocentricity of existing feminist organizations.⁸⁰

The BBS consciously decided to avoid any contact with the state—whether monetary or otherwise—because of fears that this would jeopardize its independence. Like the IWA and the AYM, the BBS was also drawn to the political power invested in “black” following Black Power’s crossing of the Atlantic a decade earlier.⁸¹ For Surinder Guru, who was active in the BBS throughout the period, this was because of an appreciation of the shared legacies of colonialism, on the one hand, and their mutual experiences of racism in Britain on the other. “We came under the banner of ‘black,’” she recalled,

because our responses were to white racist society, we were organising around the histories of our people. There was a commonality of experiences with racism. . . . [W]e recognised that if there was a trajectory to organise separately, with different groups for Africans, Caribbeans, Asians. . . . [W]e weren’t going to get anywhere. It was that recognition that brought us together to make us strong.⁸²

The first BBS newsletters appeared in 1988 and were distributed only to black women. In the second issue, the newsletter encouraged contributions in languages other than English and stated that it was important for “black women of Asian and African-Caribbean descent to come together and express the sort of oppression which we as black women face in this racist, patriarchal, capitalist society.”⁸³

What increasingly occupied the focus of the BBS, the IWA, and the AYM was the growing precariousness of black and Asian communities following the passing of the 1981 British Nationality Act, which introduced a streamlined definition of British citizenship along crudely racialized lines, and the 1988 Immigration Act, which gave the state increased powers of deportation by limiting potential avenues for appeal. Between 1986 and 1989 the number of people being deported from the United Kingdom more than doubled, to over four thousand per year.⁸⁴ It was this precariousness that increasingly took up the attention of each organization. The AYM provided regular legal advice in its newsletter, explaining the difference between deportation and removal orders and encouraging readers to organize demonstrations, meetings, and social events to increase the publicity for their campaigns. A critical strategy was to focus on individual cases as a way of demonstrating the perceived inhumanity of the state.⁸⁵ AYM drew on its professional expertise to highlight inconsistencies in the law. In the mid-1980s the group helped win an important victory in the case of Baba Bakhtaura—a Punjabi folk singer in Handsworth who was threatened with deportation for overstaying his visitor’s permit—by pointing to a legal loophole that meant that any Commonwealth citizen was able to stand as a UK electoral candidate even if his or her right to reside in Britain had been removed. The AYM’s focus on campaigning against deportation was epitomized by what would become the group’s key political slogan: “Here to stay, here to fight.”⁸⁶

It is significant that the causes the BBS primarily focused on concerned women, particularly given that the changes to immigration laws were often experienced in highly specific ways by women—symbolized most acutely by the revelation in 1978 that prospective female immigrants from the Indian subcontinent could be subject to vaginal examinations in order to “prove” their marital status.⁸⁷ Increasingly, the BBS also mobilized on behalf of women in Britain who were the victims of domestic abuse. A key moment was the campaign the group fought on behalf of Iqbal Begum, a Kashmiri woman who in October 1981 was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. Begum’s dealings with the police had been prejudiced by the fact that she spoke little English and by the consistent failure of the police to find an interpreter who spoke in her native Mirpuri dialect. At her trial, when asked to enter a plea, Begum was reported to have responded with gulti, which in Mirpuri Punjabi translates as “I made a mistake,” but at the trial was recorded as guilty.⁸⁸ The BBS “fought a campaign for her within our own communities,” drawing attention to comparable cases involving white women in which the defendant was acquitted on the basis that she was acting in self-defense.⁸⁹ The group was eventually successful in persuading a judge to overturn Begum’s conviction on the grounds that she was not granted access to an adequate translator.⁹⁰

Such campaigns had some impact on the outlook of male-dominated organizations. Anandi Ramamurthy has shown how both the Bradford and Manchester AYMs supported the BBS with respect to the Begum case and also took part in the concurrent Black Wages for Housework campaign. The Birmingham AYM, in contrast, was perceived as being particularly macho and often attacked the BBS on the basis that its membership was supposedly too middle class and out of touch with the experiences of black and Asian workers.⁹¹ But by the mid-1980s the Birmingham AYM was at least paying lip service to the importance of gender politics, devoting a section of its Asian Youth News to exploring the status of women both in Britain and across the Indian subcontinent to mark International Women’s Day.⁹² The campaigns by women activists to persuade larger, male-dominated organizations to recognize the specific inequalities that women faced might be seen as part of a continuum that took in the demands made by women workers at Grunwick and elsewhere for adequate trade union recognition. If the class-based attacks on the BBS from without were eminently familiar to the spectrum of feminist activities in this period, internally it was the issue of ethnicity that was rendering these activities increasingly fraught. The focus on campaigning against deportations had contributed to tensions, particularly given that unlike other organizations the BBS did have a number of African Caribbean members. As has been pointed out, although there were cases that affected Afro-Caribbeans, this was a demographic that even in the 1960s made up a minority of actual deportee cases. By the 1980s, the fact that Asian communities were most at risk of deportation—coupled with the traumatic experiences of Asian women in particular when attempting to navigate Britain’s increasingly racist and sexist immigration laws—meant that this issue resonated most clearly among the South Asian members of the BBS.⁹³ There was reportedly increasing disillusionment among the few African Caribbean members that other issues were not being taken seriously. There was a perception, Guru admitted, that the group was only about “tackling south Asian women’s issues.” Increasingly, rifts had developed within the BBS, and its few African Caribbean members left the group. Shortly afterward, the BBS folded.⁹⁴

In 1976 an organization was established in Handsworth explicitly to provide ethnically specific services to Asian communities. In contrast to the stress Sivanandan and others would place on black unity, according to Ranjit Sondhi, one of its cofounders, the ARC was established because of a commitment to the importance of an “autonomous and physically distinct base” for Asian community activity.⁹⁵ As Anil Bhalla, who worked at the ARC during the 1980s, explained, organizations like AFFOR often lacked either language skills or cultural awareness and therefore had only a limited attraction in the context of the heterogeneous cultural and linguistic frameworks within Asian communities.⁹⁶ Sondhi described what he saw as the ARC’s typical client:

Just imagine a villager coming from India, who had not even been to the big cities in India like Delhi, and comes straight out of a rural way of life to a big city in England . . . finding themselves [living] next door to people they had never before seen in their lives. Not just the English, but the Caribbeans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, and the Pakistanis if you were Indian, and visa versa. People never really developed an in-depth understanding of [the significance] of different cultures.⁹⁷

The ARC attempted to fill this perceived gap by providing services that were specifically tailored to the needs of different Asian communities “through the use of their own mother-tongues, with a deep understanding of the religious, cultural and national aspirations of the people it serves.”⁹⁸ On the first day the ARC opened, Sondhi recalled, “forty people lined up outside. Soon we had 500 visitors a week. Suddenly we had created a little cocoon, a little oasis in which people could move around with ease. We had opened the floodgates.”⁹⁹

The ARC offered advice and assistance on issues relating to social security, debt, immigration, nationality, asylum, and housing, and provided practical help with letter reading and form filling. It also responded to broader issues within Asian communities and, perhaps indicating the success of the campaigns waged by the BBS, ran a hostel in Handsworth for female victims of domestic abuse. In the early 1980s the ARC also began to respond to the increasingly important issue of elderly homelessness within South Asian communities. Running counter to assumptions often made by local authorities about the durability of Asian family care networks, the problem had grown partly due to the perennial lack of adequate housing. The ARC responded by collaborating with a housing association to set up an eleven-bed, self-contained hostel specifically for the Asian elderly on St. Peter’s Road, Handsworth. The ARC was the subject of significant criticism from within Asian communities for “bringing shame on the community” by revealing the problem, though for the ARC such concerns were superseded by a commitment to responding to the practical issues that faced Asian communities. Although the claims made by one caseworker that the group’s approach was simply to “respond to what is required” downplayed the radicalism of attempting to tackle such potentially controversial issues, it is undoubtedly striking that in comparison with other organizations, the ARC lacked an explicitly ideological agenda.¹⁰⁰ In Handsworth, the AYM and the BBS consciously refused to accept any form of state funding or involvement in their activities. The ARC, in contrast, from the outset survived on grants from the state and various charitable bodies. Although the ARC “celebrated the ethos of self-help,” its commitment to providing services for the Asian population led it to the conviction that funding was essential.¹⁰¹ In 1979 the ARC received funds from, among others, the City of Birmingham Social Services Department, the Inner-City Partnership, and the Barrow-Cadbury Trust. By the early 1990s the group was receiving grants of over £100,000 from Birmingham City Council.¹⁰²

There was, however, no clear correlation between the decision of a group to accept state funding and the emergence of ethnicity in its politics. The AYM and the BBS refused to accept any form of state funding and subscribed to the ideology of black as a political color. Yet practically, these groups often engaged in the provision of services and campaigns that were primarily about responding to a particular set of issues as they were experienced by a particular community. From the perspective of the ARC, there was a recognition that reliance on state funding made it vulnerable. In a memo from the early 1980s, for example, it was noted that the “grants are barely paying [the staff] salaries” and that there was a need to expand its income source by approaching other charitable organizations.¹⁰³ Yet this reliance did not make the ARC weaker than any other organization operating in Handsworth. In one sense, perhaps, this is a story of a convergence between groups who saw their primary remit as campaigning and those who focused on service provision. By the 1980s such distinctions had become difficult to maintain. When in the late 1970s the IWA embarked on its project to build the Udham Singh Welfare Centre, it made the decision to do so with the benefit of state monies. This was perhaps a recognition of the direction of travel in which the group was already moving. By the later 1970s the IWA was beginning to leave the Marxism-Leninism of its past behind as it gravitated more closely to the Labour Party.¹⁰⁴ In the same way that AFFOR was able to marry its practical services with a wider antiracist agenda, the IWA’s political commitments began to match more closely the services it now provided. It increasingly became preoccupied—both practically and ideologically—with ethnically distinct issues. Like the ARC, the IWA and its Udham Singh Welfare Centre remained active in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The AYM and the BBS, by contrast, where tensions between ideology and practice were much more pronounced, had by the end of the 1980s ceased to exist.

AFRICAN CARIBBEAN POLITICS

Alongside its African Liberation Day, which it held annually from 1977, the ACSHO maintained an internationalist line of vision that attempted to draw events from across the black diaspora into the everyday lives of the group’s constituents. The group was based at 104 Heathfield Road, a short walk from the Villa Cross pub at the junction with Lozells Road and the nearby Acapulco café (outside which the incident that sparked the 1985 riots took place), an area known locally as black Handsworth’s front line. In December 1972, in the context of rising anxieties about the presence of radical black activism in Britain, a Sunday Telegraph correspondent attempted to visit the ACSHO headquarters. The journalist characterized the ACSHO as Black Power emanating from a terraced house and had obtained a copy of the group’s newspaper, which, it was reported, married allegations of discrimination locally with updates on the progress of anticolonial movements in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.¹⁰⁵ By the end of the decade, in the context of anticolonial victories in Portuguese Africa, the ACSHO turned its attention to events in the south of the continent. It received visits from representatives of the South African Black Nationalist group the Pan African Congress as well as the Zimbabwe African National Union, the future ruling party of independent Zimbabwe.¹⁰⁶ There was also a humanitarian strand to the ACSHO agenda. Under the banner of the Marcus Garvey Foundation, a subsidiary charity run by the ACSHO, the group raised funds to help the victims of Hurricane Gilbert, which in 1988 had killed more than forty people in Jamaica. It also sent fifty tons of medical supplies to help in the response to the Ethiopian famine and made a gift of twenty-five hundred pencils and exercise books to schools in Burkina Faso, where the ACSHO also directed funds toward a new orphanage and hospital. This was a vision of Pan-Africanism rooted in Handsworth through the familiar humanitarian call for charity: “Spare a thought for the starving and the needy,” the ACSHO urged its followers. When “you see our street collectors in Britain’s city centres, pubs, parks and on your doorstep . . . give whatever you can.”¹⁰⁷

As a means of generating solidarity across the Atlantic and throughout the diaspora, these tactics were almost as old as Pan-Africanism itself. For example, the London-based League of Coloured Peoples, established in 1931, encouraged its members to make a practical difference in the lives of those elsewhere in the black globality by raising money for the victims of natural disasters, including a major hurricane strike in British Honduras in 1938. And just as Heathfield Road was used by the ACSHO as a base for cultural activity as well as political mobilization, in 1931 the West African Students Union (WASU) opened a hostel on Camden Road, north London, which not only acted as a destination for sojourners looking for accommodation but also became a meeting point where residents of black London could enact “black internationalist solidarity . . . as much over a spicy rice dish and on the dance floor as through political organising.”¹⁰⁸ The global outlook of such organizations went hand in hand with a concern to remedy the daily discrimination their constituents faced in the metropolis. The need for a hostel of the kind set up by the WASU was crystallized when in 1929 Paul Robeson was refused service at a prominent London hotel, causing a significant public scandal.¹⁰⁹ The incident rang true for the black residents of 1930s London, just as it would have for Handsworth’s black population in the postwar period. As black Britain grew, the pervasiveness of the inequity that faced it became apparent. Like other groups, black organizations such as the ACSHO matched their globalist ideologies with practical attempts to respond to what had become obvious was British institutionalized racism on an industrial scale. And as the ARC recognized with the establishment of its hostel for the Asian elderly, housing proved to be one of the most enduringly problematic issues.

The inequalities that faced black and Asian immigrants in the housing sector had been well known for some time; the sociologists John Rex and Robert Moore, in their influential 1967 study of the Sparkbrook district of Birmingham in the south of the city, positioned immigrant communities as a separate underclass worse off than their fellow occupiers of Britain’s inner-city slums.¹¹⁰ Black and Asian communities were often forced to rely disproportionately on the private rental sector, where, as a result of the unscrupulous practices of “shark” landlords, poor conditions continued to belie postwar narratives of increasing affluence.¹¹¹ Yet the experiences of organizations operating on the community level suggested that within the immigrant underclass there were significant variations that required particular responses. In 1974, for instance, the black teacher and part-time social sciences student Beresford Ivan Henry completed a dissertation based on field research he had undertaken with Harambee, a Handsworth-based organization that had been established two years earlier to attempt to deal with black homelessness. If groups such as the IWA and ARC found that the familial structures often presumed to be present in Asian households were often irrelevant when it came to the problem of elderly homelessness, Henry suggested that the conservative religiosity of some black parents and the growing disillusionment of black youth in the education and employment sectors had led to young people becoming “alienated from parental or home situations” and in some cases being “rejected from their families” altogether.¹¹² Some reports suggested that as many as a fifth of local black teenagers could be classified as homeless.¹¹³ Like the ACSHO, Harambee maintained a globalist, Pan-Africanist stance; the group’s name was taken from the Swahili word for “all together.” But this did not correspond with an interethnic politics based around black as a political color; the commitment to service provision in Handsworth and the particular way in which issues such as housing and homelessness were manifested meant that, like the ACSHO, Harambee focused its priorities elsewhere.

Harambee’s organizational emphasis was encapsulated in the fact that it originally called itself Black Social Workers, though many of its members were also trained teachers and lawyers. Maurice Andrews, an immigrant from Jamaica who cofounded the group and was himself a former social worker, cited a “phenomenal tension” within black households, particularly in instances where marriages had broken down and children were living with a stepparent. Andrews recalled that teenagers as young as fourteen were being evicted from their family homes and sleeping in parks or with friends in bed-sits. Harambee’s ambition was to develop a “positive initiative in order to begin to retrieve the situation.”¹¹⁴ The group obtained funds to purchase a three-story property on Hall Road, a few hundred yards from the “front line” at the Villa Cross pub. This was turned into a hostel that catered not for visiting sojourners or for elderly Asians, but for local black youths specifically. Addressing this issue had become a central feature of Black Power politics following its emergence in Britain in the late 1960s. One of the first hostels for homeless black youths was the so-called Black House in North London, which opened its doors in 1969 and was run by the controversial Trinidadian activist Michael X’s Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS).¹¹⁵ In Handsworth, Harambee’s intention was not only to house and feed homeless black youths, but also to make them “feel more aware of themselves, their situation and the role they can play in society,” as well as “offer opportunities to black adults to regain the trust of the younger generation.” According to the group’s 1974 annual report, there were three stages to Harambee’s interventions: first, an initial rescue operation took black youths off the streets by providing them with short-term accommodation; second, longer-term homes were allocated, often in partnership with local authorities; and finally, an educational program with the overall aim of making young people “more socially aware and self-reliant” was provided. Within seven days of the hostel’s opening all fifteen places in the house had been filled by local homeless young people. By March 1974, seventy young people had stayed at the Harambee hostel, for periods ranging from one night to ten months.¹¹⁶

Throughout the long 1980s Harambee expanded its activities in response to what it saw as the needs of the local black community. It purchased other disused properties in Handsworth and turned them into hostels for black youths, setting up its own housing association to provide low-cost housing in the area. Harambee established an advice center that broached the issue of tensions between police and black communities by offering free legal guidance, and ran a black studies course for residents at its hostels; a nursery was opened to cater for the children of black single mothers, and the group also ran a supplementary Saturday school for older children, which in the mid-1970s became the focus of local newspaper attention because of its status as an “‘exclusive West Indian organisation.’”¹¹⁷ These services were named not after South Asian revolutionaries like Udham Singh but African Caribbean figures such as Marcus Garvey and Harriet Tubman. In the 1970s one of its members summarized its ideology as being “‘influenced by Pan-Africanism, African socialism, and parts of the black power philosophy,’” with the aim of enabling “‘black people . . . [to] carve out for themselves a decent existence in Handsworth.’” As Maurice Andrews saw it, “We had to find our own place in society”; Harambee had emerged out of an insistence that “we had to manage our own affairs. We had our own problems, and it was important we solved them.”¹¹⁸

From the beginning Harambee made a decision that it would seek funding from the state. Unlike the IWA, whose 1978 building of a state-funded welfare center on Soho Road reflected a shift away from the group’s Marxist-Leninist roots, for Harambee using state money was a part of its own radical political rationale, which saw the state as negligent in its duty of care toward black communities. As Andrews conceptualized it, “our theory was that we pay taxes, we are a part of this society,” and therefore it was the state’s responsibility to respond to social problems such as homelessness—if not directly through the provision of adequate services, then indirectly via the funding of locally embedded groups such as Harambee. Although Harambee property was raided by the police three times in the mid-1970s, agencies including the Birmingham Social Services Department, which funded Harambee’s main hostel, clearly valued the group’s ability to work with a section of the community often treated by authorities as impossible to reach.¹¹⁹ In 1975 one funder described the Harambee hostel as “one of the best pieces of self-help work” in the area and saw the group as being “ideally placed to work effectively with young West Indians.”¹²⁰ From the perspective of those who ran Harambee, accepting state funds did not compromise the group’s emphasis on “togetherness and self-help.”¹²¹ To Andrews, at least, calling for the state to fund a group like Harambee was itself a radical position. This was a politics of “self-help backed up with the demand that the state must pay.”¹²²

This attitude was a point of cleavage with the ACSHO, which had been established in Handsworth in 1964 almost a decade before Harambee and three years before a Stokely Carmichael visit to London helped stimulate the expansion of the Black Power movement in Britain.¹²³ The ACSHO became one of the longest-serving black political groups in the country and, like the AYM and the BBS, emphasized the importance of independence from the state. This position was made clear in an article published in the ACSHO’s journal, Jomo, in response to the announcement by the Birmingham City Council in 1989 of funding cuts. For the ACSHO, the cuts were a signal for groups such as Harambee, who had accepted state money, to “learn the bitter lesson of the enemy’s politics.” The ACSHO had been “branded extremists for not wanting to collaborate” but argued that the cuts were an example of the state using its “economic strength to divide and rule” and a validation of the group’s stress on the importance of self-sufficiency. The cofounder of the ACSHO was the Jamaican Bini Brown. If the lesson drawn by the group in 1989 was “never rely on your enemy for liberation,” Brown conceptualized the group’s position even more vociferously: “We don’t like going with our hand begging, begging, begging. If you have to keep on begging somebody for something, what kind of human being are you? You have no dignity. When you’re self-reliant, you do what you do, you’re proud of what you are.”¹²⁴ The group also refused to talk to mainstream journalists and the growing number of white sociologists who, like Rex and Tomlinson, used Handsworth as a case study for their wider explorations of race and immigration.¹²⁵ While London-based Black Power groups such as the UCPA and the British Black Panthers were committed to a class-based analysis that left room for alliances with other nonwhite communities, the emphasis within the ACSHO on autonomy stemmed from a version of cultural nationalism that translated into the most ethnically specific politics of any of the organizations discussed in this chapter.¹²⁶

The ACSHO was formed in reaction to the everyday racism that first-generation immigrants experienced in Britain. “People couldn’t take the pressure of being called ‘wog,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘coon,’ and so on,” Brown recalled. “If you didn’t fight back then you’d suffer serious emotional and psychological problems.” The ACSHO often framed this fighting back in militaristic terms, in keeping with the idiom of Black Power. Just as in the late 1960s Carmichael envisaged an ensuing transnational “‘color clash’” split along binary racial lines, the ACSHO predicted that the collapse of British imperialism and the eventual defeat of apartheid in South Africa would result in the return of “white settlers” to Britain, which would in turn lead to a conflict with an expanded Far Right.¹²⁷ Emulating the Black Panthers, in which all new members were given “military training” that included introductions to intelligence work and the use of weaponry, the ACSHO presented itself as a quasi-paramilitary organization in which prominent members were given titles such as Minister for Information and Minister of Defense and new recruits were required to go through a process of “re-education.”¹²⁸ Concurrent with this vanguardist approach, however, the group also provided a practical program that had the aim of “allowing us to survive in this [the British] environment.”¹²⁹ In one of the first academic surveys of black Handsworth, the black sociologist Gus John described the ACSHO program as “the most hopeful growing-point for an active and relevant community self-help effort” in the area.¹³⁰ Whereas Harambee’s core focus was on housing, the ACHSO took the lead in the provision of alternative education for Handsworth’s black youth.

The ACSHO supplementary school had been established in 1967 in an atmosphere of growing dissatisfaction among black parents at the way their children were being treated by the educational authorities.¹³¹ Two years later in London, a campaign was fought by the North London West Indian Association against the proposed introduction of a “banding” system in Haringey that was designed to dilute the presence of black pupils in schools across the borough and would thus force many to travel significant distances each day. The campaign eventually forced the Haringey Council to abandon its plans, and the support the campaign gained from other black organizations helped put education at the center of the black political agenda.¹³² The focus was often on the disproportionate number of black pupils who were sent to “educationally subnormal” (ESN) schools for children with low ability or learning difficulties. The potential for pathologizing supposed subnormality was obvious, and by 1972 there were five times the number of black pupils in ESN schools than there were in the mainstream system, with the proportion vastly higher in areas of black settlement. Some pupils who had recently arrived from the Caribbean were immediately identified as ESN without ever having attended a mainstream school.¹³³

These problems were well known anecdotally among black communities. What demonstrated the true extent of them was the publication of How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System (1971), a seminal report by Bernard Coard, a Grenadian teacher, postgraduate student, and future key player in Grenada’s Marxist revolution. Coard proved the discrimination at the heart of the ESN system and highlighted the effects of an ethnocentric curriculum underpinned by the stereotypes and assumptions of British colonialism. British schooling was shown to have made virtually no accommodation to the growing black presence. Teachers conflated a child’s use of the patois dialect with poor ability, and when it came to career planning suppressed aspiration by focusing on manual employment for black school leavers. Where black history was taught it was done so according to a narrative of triumphant colonial expansionism.¹³⁴ Coard’s research was published by New Beacon Books, the black publisher attached to a radical North London bookshop run by the activist John LaRose, and sold an unprecedented ten thousand copies. At the heart of his recommendations was a call for the black community to set up its own independent or supplementary schools in order to “make up for the inadequacies of British schools” and “teach our children our history and culture.” If the ACSHO school in Handsworth was an early forerunner, Coard’s work resulted in a mushrooming of black supplementary schools across the country.¹³⁵