Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  As Dr Harold Moody was doing pioneering work for black people while he was based in London, an aspect of his personal life – his relationship with a white woman and their mixed-race children16 – was seen as a point of great contention in British society at that time. Mixed-race relationships were controversial in the early twentieth century, and in the north-west of England these relationships were considered disturbing enough to justify academic research. In the late 1920s, the University of Liverpool was solidifying its social sciences department, headed up by anthropologist Rachel M. Fleming. Her research was on what she called ‘hybrid children’ – those with black fathers and white mothers.17 With Liverpool being a port city, there were plenty of black seamen who had taken up permanent residence. Academics estimate that Liverpool’s black population was five thousand at the time. Against the backdrop of race-fuelled riots and the lynching of Charles Wootton, mixed-race relationships did exist, but were seen by many as a social problem that needed to be stamped out.

  It was in this context that Rachel Fleming won the support of Liverpool’s authority figures to research Liverpool’s ‘wretched’ – read: mixed-race – children. She founded the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children in 1927. Muriel Fletcher, a University of Liverpool graduate working as a probation officer, was tasked with writing the association’s first report. Her work meant that through welfare services she had contact with some of the poorest families in the city, and it was through this skewed lens with some of Liverpool’s poorest mixed-race families that she conducted her research.

  The Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports was published in June 1930. It concluded, with scant evidence, that venereal diseases were twice as likely to be found in black seamen than white seamen, and that mixed-race – or to use the language of the report, ‘half-caste’ – children were more likely to be sickly because of this. ‘The children seemed to have frequent colds, many were also rickety, and several cases were reported in which there was a bad family history for tuberculosis,’ wrote Ms Fletcher. Perhaps reflecting popular attitudes at the time, Fletcher deemed mixed-race girls and women as tainted by their race, writing ‘only two cases have been found in Liverpool of half-caste girls who have married white men, and in one of these cases the girl’s family forced the marriage on the man.’18 In her report, Muriel Fletcher organised the white women who chose to have relationships with black men into four categories: the mentally weak, the prostitutes, the young and reckless, and those who felt forced into marriage because of illegitimate children.

  Children who were researched in the study had their eyes examined and their noses measured, with their facial features categorised as either ‘Negroid’ or ‘English’. Commenting on the fact that mixed-race young adults struggled to find work, Fletcher wrote: ‘mothers of a better type regretted the fact that they had brought these children into the world, handicapped by their colour.’ Echoing the hugely popular eugenics movement at the time, it seems that Muriel Fletcher thought that race mixing – or, as eugenicists called it, miscegenation – was such an abomination that the children of mixed-race relationships had ‘little future’.

  Popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, the British eugenics movement believed that social class was determined by biological factors such as intelligence, health and the vague criteria of ‘moral values’. Eugenicists argued that those with desirable qualities should be encouraged to reproduce, while those without should be discouraged. The racism was inherent here: whiteness was to be aspired to, whereas any hint of black heritage was considered a kind of contamination, leading to a hard line against mixed-race relationships and mixed-race people. Despite support from influential names like John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw, there was no legislation passed in Britain to cement eugenics into the workings of the state (for example, forced sterilisation), and a 1931 Private Members Bill advocating this was outvoted in Parliament.

  On publication, Muriel Fletcher’s Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports had a national impact, with a representative of the Anti-Slavery Society calling it an ‘extraordinarily able document’ containing ‘the most impressive and authoritative detail’. In a recent study on the report, academic Mark Christian argued that it had a long-lasting negative effect on the black people of Liverpool, and cemented the use of the term ‘half-caste’.19

  The aftermath of yet another world war brought with it fresh labour demands, and Britain once again encouraged immigration. When the SS Empire Windrush sailed from the Caribbean to England, it carried 490 Caribbean men and two Caribbean women, all of whom were prepared to muck in with the job of restoring a post-war Britain.20 The Windrush docked at Tilbury in Thurrock, Essex on 22 June 1948. That same year, the government introduced the British Nationality Act – a law that effectively gave Commonwealth citizens the same rights to reside as British subjects.

  The country’s black population continued to rise. Between 1951 and 1961, the Caribbean-born British population grew from 15,000 to 172,000,21 with the majority of those people from Jamaica (an increase in population from 6,000 to 100,00022).

  By 1958, Nottingham’s black population numbered 2,500. But a decade of legislation explicitly welcoming Commonwealth citizens to Britain had not changed attitudes on the ground. Quotes from a local newspaper reported a colour bar in Nottingham’s pubs, with black men expected to stand aside until white people had been served. White resentment towards the city’s black residents was rife, and black resentment at white resentment was simmering. On 23 August 1958, an altercation in a pub between a white woman and a black man spiralled out of control. Reports on what sparked the following events are sketchy. What we do know is this: later that day, a thousand people had crowded into St Ann’s Well Road ready to riot. Razors, knives and bottles were used as weapons, and eight people were hospitalised.

  What happened in Nottingham was also occurring in other parts of the country. On 20 August in Notting Hill, west London, a group of teddy boys – young rock-and-roll-loving white men who wore creeper shoes and suits – set upon the streets with the sole objective of attacking black people. They called themselves the ‘nigger hunters’. That night, their violent spree put five black men in hospital.23

  At the time, Notting Hill was a poor and overcrowded area of London, with desperation for housing exploited by the notorious slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman’s reputation was so poor that his name became a synonym for bad treatment of tenants. Chambers 21st Century Dictionary defines Rachmanism today as ‘exploitation or extortion by a landlord of tenants living in slum conditions’.24 It was black people who fell prey to Rachman’s small dilapidated properties and extortionate rents. They had very little choice. Oral histories from those who lived through these times report ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs in the windows of other, more respectable properties.25 This only exacerbated poor race relations in the capital.

  Nine days after the nigger-hunting spree from Notting Hill’s teddy boys, and a mixed-race married couple – a black man and white Swedish woman – were arguing outside Latimer Road tube station. It was an August bank holiday. With many off work, the argument drew a crowd of white men, who jumped in to defend the woman, perhaps believing that she was under attack. Spotting the onslaught, some black men got involved to support her husband. They began fighting each other.

  Later, interviews with white rioters suggest that there was a rumour going around that a black man had raped a white woman.26 This scuffle outside a train station quickly escalated into two hundred white people roaming the streets chanting racist abuse. As the fighting intensified, some white rioters berated the police for holding them back from attacking black people. The riots stretched on for three whole days. Swastikas were painted on to the doors of black families. Black people fought back with weapons and makeshift Molotov cocktails. Those black people who were stopped on the street by the police during the violen
ce stressed their need to defend themselves. No fatalities were recorded, but over a hundred people – the majority of them white – were arrested.

  In 2002, prematurely released government files revealed that police detectives had successfully convinced then Home Secretary Rab Butler that the Notting Hill riots weren’t about race, but instead were simply the work of hooligans. ‘Whereas there certainly was some ill feeling between white and coloured residents in this area,’ wrote Detective Sergeant M. Walters, ‘it is abundantly clear much of the trouble was caused by ruffians, both coloured and white, who seized on this opportunity to indulge in hooliganism.’ No mention was made of the nigger-hunting teddy boys.27

  After Nottingham and Notting Hill, race relations in Britain were rapidly deteriorating. It was becoming clear to post-Windrush black people in Britain that they would not be allowed to live quietly, to work, pay tax and assimilate. That instead they would be punished for their very existence in Britain. Black and brown labour had proved integral to Britain’s success in both world wars, but black people themselves would face extreme rejection in the decades that followed.

  Throughout the 1950s, the government was reluctant to recognise that the country had a problem with racism. But there was some movement. In 1960, backbench Labour MP Archibald Fenner Brockway repeatedly tried to bring forward a Race Discrimination Bill with the aim of outlawing ‘discrimination to the detriment of any person on the grounds of colour, race and religion in the United Kingdom’.28 Every single one of the nine times he tabled the Bill, it was defeated.29 On the other end of the spectrum, in 1959, Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, saw fit to return to parliamentary politics after stepping down in 1930. He stood in a constituency near Notting Hill and advocated the repatriation of immigrants, losing with an 8.1 per cent share of the vote.

  It wasn’t until less than a decade after both the Nottingham and Notting Hill race riots that the state attempted to pose a solution to Britain’s racism problem. Coming into effect on 31 May 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act drastically restricted immigration rights to Britain’s Commonwealth citizens. Even the wording was different. The 1948 British Nationality Act used the words ‘citizens’ to describe those from Commonwealth countries; in 1962 they were described as ‘immigrants’, adding a new layer of alien to people who had enjoyed the right to reside just fourteen years earlier. With a new emphasis on skilled workers, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act stated that those wishing to move to Britain now needed a work permit to settle in the country.30 The logic behind this still prevails today.

  Then, in 1965, Britain’s first-ever race-relations legislation was granted by parliament. The Race Relations Act was an odd move for the British government, having made such a strong statement against the free movement of its Commonwealth citizens just three years earlier. The Act stated that overt racial discrimination was no longer legal in public places – although it didn’t apply to shops or private housing. At the time, the BBC reported those specific acts of discrimination included ‘refusing to serve a person, an unreasonable delay in serving someone, or overcharging’.31 A Race Relations Board was created as part of the Act.32 Its purpose was to receive complaints of, and monitor, racist incidents – no mean feat, when the 1961 census had put the general population at 52,700,000.33 There was no way of knowing the exact number of non-white people living in Britain as the census didn’t include a question on race until 1991. Barely any complaints were made to the board, and those that were made were almost futile. It had no authority to punish those against whom complaints were made. Instead, its role was one of mediation between the complainant and the organisation or person being complained about.

  Britain’s first race-relations act was tepid. It didn’t tackle endemic housing discrimination, and it had enough caveats to allow wriggle room for those who were intent on keeping black people in Britain as second-class citizens. An inadequate antidote to decades of targeted violence and harassment, the Race Relations Board appeared to exist only for posturing reasons. Most black and Asian people in Britain didn’t even know it existed. The 1965 Act’s weaknesses were obvious. The efforts to challenge racism came from the very same state that had sanctioned racism decades earlier with repatriation drives in the face of racist riots – the same state that picked up and disposed of black and brown bodies at its own convenience.

  The Act was strengthened three years later, outlawing the denial of housing, employment or public services on the grounds of race. However, government services were exempt from legal challenges. At the time, the BBC reported: ‘The new Race Relations Act is intended to counter-balance the Immigration Act, and so fulfil the government’s promise to be “fair but tough” on immigrants.’34

  On 7 March 1965, African Americans were beaten bloody on a civil rights march led by Martin Luther King, Jr. They were demanding their constitutional right to vote. Two years before that now iconic day, in the west of England, nineteen-year-old Jamaican Guy Bailey made his way to a job interview with Bristol Omnibus Company, the city’s bus service. Paul Stephenson, a local youth worker, had arranged the interview for Guy, first ensuring that there were jobs available, and that Guy had the qualifications to do the work. But when Guy turned up to his interview, he found that it had been cancelled.

  Recounting his interview to the BBC35 fifty years later, Guy recalled the exact moment he was rejected by the receptionist. ‘She said to the manager “your two o’clock appointment is here. But he’s black.” And the manager said, “Tell him we have no vacancies here, all vacancies are filled.”’

  That Guy was turned down was not a surprise to Bristol’s 3,000-strong black community, the majority of whom had settled in Britain from the Caribbean after the Second World War. For them, racism in the bus service was a long-held suspicion; many had interviewed with Bristol Omnibus Company only to be turned down. Everyone who worked at the bus company was white.

  But Guy Bailey’s interview wasn’t a coincidence. It had been set up by a small group of young men: Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown. The group called themselves the West Indian Development Council. They asked Paul Stephenson to work with them on their plan, and he agreed. Paul already knew Guy, who was a student at the night school he taught at. Guy was a good interview prospect. He was clean cut, already employed, studying part-time, and active in a Christian youth organisation.

  As soon as Guy was refused an interview, the group arranged a press conference. Local reporters crowded into Paul’s flat to hear exactly what had happened. A photo shoot was arranged, with Owen echoing Rosa Parks by sitting at the back of a bus. As both local and national press reported on the case, pressure mounted on the bus service’s general manager, Ian Patey. When the Bristol Evening Post pressed him, he said: ‘You won’t get a white man in London to admit it, but which of them will join a service where they may find themselves working under a coloured foreman?’36

  Paul and the West Indian Development Council won the support of local students, saw speeches in favour of their cause from politicians, and earned sympathetic editorials in the local press. But Paul was also repeatedly ignored by the bus company and the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). Though often divided by work disputes, both management and the trade union found themselves united by racism. They had an agreement, the kind that lent itself well to discrimination: the bus company was not to hire anyone not already approved by the local TGWU branch. Even though Ian Patey’s comments were on the record, Bristol Omnibus Company deflected accountability, instead passing it along to the union. Racism had infected worker solidarity, with a union representative at the time insisting that more black workers would be taking away jobs for prospective white employees, and that employing them would mean reduced hours for current employees.

  As the campaign continued, Paul was harshly criticised. Ron Nethercott, South-West Regional Secretary of the union, wrote an article in a national newspaper calling Paul ‘dishonest’ and ‘irresponsible�
��. For his critics, it was his activism that was the root of the problem, not the colour bar. Some of these statements led to a libel case, which Paul won. Meanwhile, every single one of the city’s West Indian residents were boycotting the bus service. One campaign leader told the local newspaper, ‘Although it is hard to tell, many white people are supporting us.’ The campaign drew support from Trinidad’s High Commissioner Sir Learie Constantine. Over a hundred university students marched in support, and everyone boycotting the bus service either walked or cycled to get around the city.

  The day before Martin Luther King, Jr told an audience of 250,000 that he had a dream, a meeting of five hundred bus employees met and agreed to discontinue Bristol Omnibus Company’s unofficial colour bar. The day after, general manager Ian Patey committed to ending it for good. Speaking at a press conference, he announced ‘the only criterion will be the person’s suitability for the job’. But it is important to note that, to date, Bristol Omnibus, now merged with other companies and eventually renamed First Somerset & Avon, has never apologised for its actions. Neither has the Bristol branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, since merged with Unite the Union.

  I first learnt of the Bristol bus boycott as a graduate in 2013, when I was working at the race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust. A small team of us travelled to Bristol to launch a campaign. As well as running a pop-up ‘come and talk about racism’ shop, we also held evening events around the city centre. One of those events was with Paul Stephenson. By then, he was in his late seventies. Upstairs in the event space of Foyles bookshop, Paul, his voice withered by age and activism and righteous rage, commanded the attention of the whole room. I felt like I was listening to history.