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BLACK MIGRANTS, CITIZENSHIP AND THE TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS OF
RACE IN POSTWAR BRITAIN

By

Kennetta Hammond Perry

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of History

2007

ABSTRACT

BLACK MIGRANTS, CITIZENSHIP AND THE TRAN SNATIONAL POLITICS OF
RACE IN POSTWAR BRITAIN

By
Kennetta Hammond Perry

This dissertation examines the political implications of postwar black migration to
Britain. Following World War II, unprecedented numbers of people of African descent
migrated to Britain from the Caribbean colonies, exercising their claims to the rights of a
transracial British citizenship status guaranteed under the provisions of the British
Nationality Act of 1948. As a result of these postwar black migrations, during the 19503
and early 19608 the black population in Britain increased some tenfold, thereafter
transforming existing racial dynamics. This study explores how race structured the
experiences of black migrants and effectively precluded them from enjoying the full
privileges and social entitlements of their British citizenship.

To engage this issue, this dissertation pays particular attention to how instances of
racial violence, namely the Notting Hill “race riots” of 1958 and the murder of Kelso
Cochrane in 1959, served as critical events exposing glaring inconsistencies between the
ideal of a transracial egalitarian British citizenship and the potent realities of socially
sanctioned practices of racial discrimination in housing and employment, popular
representations of black men as economic and sexual predators, racially motivated attacks
on black citizens and the existence of a widespread climate of antipathy in regards to the
increasing black presence in Britain. To be sure, all of these elements, informed by a
broader imperial history of race-based economic exploitation, political exclusion and

social marginalization, provided a context in which black migrants interpreted their

second class citizenship status and consequently framed a grassroots black rights
movement advocating police protection, greater regulation of organized racist campaigns,
anti-discrimination legislation and opposition to migration restrictions designed to
exclude black workers. I argue that in the process of making claims to British
citizenship— through the very act of migration and by constructing and articulating a
civil rights agenda— not only did black migrants contest and redeﬁne ideas about race
and British national identity, but more importantly, they participated in and were
inﬂuenced by a transnational postwar dialogue on race, political rights, human rights, and
the meaning of democracy.

To demonstrate the complexity of the politics of race in postwar Britain, I situate
the experiences of black migrants in Britain and the shifting racial dynamics prompted by
postwar black migration within a broad transnational context that underscores the
relationships engendered between local politics and racially charged international issues.
In the postwar period, some of these issues included the emergence of the United
Nations, the Cold War, decolonization, apartheid in South Africa, and the United States
Civil Rights Movement. In doing so, this study highlights the extent to which the quest
for black rights in postwar Britain was not simply a domestic affair, but rather
represented a critical moment in the political history of the African Diaspora, interfacing
the histories of people of African descent in Britain, the Caribbean, Africa and the United

States.

Copyright by
KENNETTA HAMMOND PERRY
2007

To the spirit of perseverance present in the lives of Mary Hammond and Louise Patrick.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No project of this magnitude is possible without the assistance, guidance,
encouragement, and prayers of a broad coalition of interested parties. This dissertation
began as a series of research papers completed as part of the requirements for Darlene
Clark Hine’s Comparative Black History research seminar and Leslie Page Moch’s
course on Migration in Twentieth Century Europe. Not only did these two courses
provide an especially rich intellectual space for me to formulate and explore questions
related to the history of black migrant communities in Britain, but more importantly, they
offered me critical venues to expand the trajectory of my scholarly interests. Both Dr.
Hine and Dr. Moch, who served as co-chairs of my dissertation committee have made an
indelible impact on my career as a graduate student and evolution as a historian and
young scholar. I am thankful to Dr. Hine for being a source of inspiration, a gateway to
opportunities and a constant reminder of the limitless possibilities available to
persevering black women in the academy. I will always be grateful to Dr. Moch for
gently prodding me to clarify my ideas in a concise manner and for being available to
listen, advise and offer her invaluable time to give close attention to my work.

Throughout my tenure at Michigan State, I have had the privilege to interact with
and learn from a number of thoughtful and engaging scholars. In addition to Darlene
Clark Hine and Leslie Page Moch, Laurent Dubois and Daina Ramey Berry of the
Department of History and Steve Gold of the Department of Sociology all formed the
nucleus of a supportive and stimulating dissertation committee. Dr. Berry was especially
key in helping me to develop manageable systems for tackling the tedious nature of

conducting archival research at an early stage in this project’s development and has

vi

always been a treasured source of professional advice. During my ﬁrst semester at
Michigan State, I had the opportunity to take a Historical Methods course with David
Bailey. As a result of my encounters with Dr. Bailey, I gained a profound sense of my
ability and capacity to make a worthwhile contribution to the historical profession and the
broader enterprise of producing new knowledge. Without that, my career as a graduate
student and aspiring scholar might have been quite different.

I am appreciative of a number of funding opportunities awarded through the
Graduate School and Department of History at Michigan State which aided me in
completing my graduate studies in a timely manner, providing critical monetary support
to pursue coursework and research for this dissertation. Likewise, I am grateful to the
Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia for providing generous funding
to complete the writing phase of producing a dissertation. The research for this project
could not have been completed without the assistance of helpful and encouraging
archivists and librarians at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, the National
Archives (Jamaica), Spanishtown Archives (Jamaica), the Public Records Ofﬁce
(London, UK), the London Metropolitan Archives, the British Library, the London
Metropolitan Trades Union Congress Library, the Manchester Labour History Archives,
the Larnbeth Archives (London, UK) the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries and Duke University
Libraries. I am also thankful to Donald Hinds for allowing me to consult his private
collection of papers on Claudia Jones and extremely grateful to Arrnena Richards for

opening her home to me while I conducted research in London.

vii

 

 

Had it not been for relationships with a host of mentors and friends completing
my doctoral work would have been next to impossible. I thank Carlton Wilson, Sylvia
Jacobs, Percy Murray, Lydia Lindsey, Freddie Parker and Reginald Hildebrand for
developing my interest in the study of History while at North Carolina Central
University. To my CBH “crew” at Michigan State—Sowande’ Mustakeem, Eric D.
Duke (my writing partner), Marshanda Smith, Meredith L. Roman, John Grant, Kenneth
Marshall, Mona Jackson and Leslie Rollins—as well as other colleagues in the History
Department including Marcie Cowley, Mary Clingerrnan, Jamie McLean and David
Carletta, I am fortunate to have had you all to share this journey with. Also, I am
grateful to my colleagues at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, Vicki Brennan, Sarah
Silkey, Brian Brazeal, Jamillah Karim, Yarimar Bonilla, Todd Cleveland, Regine Jean-
Charles and Cynthia Hoehler—Fatton for helping form a stimulating community for me to
present new ideas and extend the resonance of my arguments across disciplinary
boundaries.

1 will forever be indebted to my parents, Kenneth and Evelyn Hammond for
always inspiring me to dare to dream the impossible dream and reminding me to keep the
faith. Most importantly, I thank my husband, Brandon Perry, who came into my life at
the very moment when this project began to come to life. Thank you for loving me
because of and in spite of who I am, and for keeping me attuned to what matters most.

To God be the glory.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................... x
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1

I-IISTORICIZING RACE, EMPIRE
AND BRITISH CITIZENSHIP25

CHAPTER 2

MIGRATION, RACE AND THE

RECONSTRUCTION OF “CIVIS

BRITANNICUS SUM” ......................................................................... 66

CHAPTER 3

IMAGES OF VIOLENCE AND

SHIFTING NARRATIVES OF

RACE .................................................................................................. 1 30

CHAPTER 4

“ARE WE TO BE MAULED DOWN
JUST BECAUSE WE ARE BLACK?”:
BLACK BODIES ANDTHE GENDERED

DIMENSIONS OF GRASSROOTS RACE POLITICS .................................. 176
CHAPTER 5

THE EVOLUTION OF OFFICIAL

RACE POLICY ................................................................................. 212
CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 284
APPENDICES ....................................................................................... 292
BIBILIOGRAPHY .............................................................................. 295

ix

 

LIST OF TABLES

APPENDIX A
ESTIMATED NET COMMONWEALTH
MIGRATION (1953-1962) .................................................................... 293

APPENDIX B
NEW COMMONWEALTH MIGRATION
(AUGUST 1960-AUGUST 1961) ............................................................ 294

 

INTRODUCTION

In the companion history to the BBC series Windrush (1998) commemorating the
ﬁftieth anniversary of the arrival of 492 Caribbean migrants in Britain aboard a vessel
known as the Empire Windrush, journalists Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, whose
respective families had migrated to Britain from Guyana in the early 19508, noted,

In the last ﬁfty years the minority to which we belonged had become an authentic

strand Of British society. If we were engaged in a struggled, it wasn’t about our

‘acceptance’ as individuals. Instead, it was about our status as citizens, and it

seem obvious that if our citizenship was to mean more than the paper on which it

was written, it would be necessary for the whole country to reassess not only its

own identity, and its history, but also what it meant to be British.1
These insightful reﬂections provide a critical point of departure for analyzing the history
of postwar black migration to Britain from the perspective of migrants themselves and
raise an important set of issues conceming the relationship between migration, citizenship
and the meaning of British national identity. This dissertation contributes to a growing
body of scholarship detailing the history and impact of black communities in Britain by
examining how black migrants in postwar Britain constructed themselves as British
citizens, negotiated to substantiate the meaning of their citizenship status, and
subsequently in the process appropriated, fractured and reconﬁgured notions of British
national identity.

Following World War 11, an unprecedented number of people of color settled in
Britain arriving from different parts of the Commonwealth. Before 1945, the total

population of people of color in Britain was estimated between 10,000 and 30,000;

however, by 1961, when the British government introduced the ﬁrst in a series of

 

I Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London:
Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 5.

 

migration controls designed to limit non-white migration, Britain’s population of color
had increased more than tenfold.2 During the 19503 and early 19605 these migrants
primarily consisted of people of African descent moving from the Caribbean colonies.
Under the terms of the British Nationality Act of 1948, Commonwealth migrants
possessed full British citizenship rights, which included the right to settle and work in
Britain. This study explores how race structured the experiences of black migrants and
effectively precluded them from enjoying the full privileges and social entitlements of
their British citizenship. One of the central concerns of this study centers on the ways in
which migrants made claims to British citizenship through the very act of migration and
by constructing and publicly articulating civil rights agendas in an effort to counter their
marginal citizenship status. In the process, not only did black migrants contest and
redeﬁne ideas about race and British national identity, but they also actively participated
in and were inﬂuenced by a transnational dialogue on race, political rights, human rights,
and the meaning of democracy.

To demonstrate the complexity of the politics of race in postwar Britain, this
study situates the experiences and activities of black migrants in Britain within a broader
transnational context that underscores the relationships engendered between local politics
and racially charged postwar international issues including the shifting dimensions of a
multiracial egalitarian British Commonwealth ideal, the emergence of the United
Nations, the Cold War, decolonization, apartheid in South Aﬁ'ica, and the United States
Civil Rights Movement. In doing so, this study highlights the extent to which the quest
for black rights in postwar Britain was not simply a domestic affair, but rather

represented a critical moment in the political history of the African Diaspora, interfacing

 

2 Ruth Glass, Newcomers: The West Indians in Britain (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd), 1.

the histories of people of African descent in Britain, the Caribbean, Aﬁica and the United
States.
Black Life in Britain Before 1948

Although it was not until after World War II that substantial numbers of people of
African descent permanently settled in Britain, the history of the black presence in Britain
dates back over ﬁve hundred years. The history of visible black community life began in
earnest with the growing British monopoly over the transatlantic slave trade and the
expansion of British interests in sugar-producing regions in the Caribbean colonies
during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. During this period and
throughout the early nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of black people in
Britain entered and resided as the enslaved laborers of absentee colonial planters,
government ofﬁcials, military officers and other more afﬂuent and elite sectors of British
society.3 Historians including Douglas Lorimer and Peter Fryer have noted that the
abolition of slavery in metropolitan Britain was largely deﬁned by a process of gradual
self-emancipation unfolding throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
as enslaved men and women in Britain abandoned their duties, ran away, deﬁed the
authority of owners and renegotiated the terms of the labor.4 After the ofﬁcial abolition

of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, for the remainder of the nineteenth century most

 

3 Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co.,
1972), 12-20; Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 1555-1833 (London: Oxford University Press,
1977), 3, 6-8; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press,
1984), 1-66.

‘ Douglas Lorimer, “Black Slaves and English Liberty: A Re-Examination of Racial Slavery in England,”
Immigrants and Minorities 3, 2 (July, 1984): 121-150; Fryer, Staying Power, 132. See also James Walvin,
Black and White: The Negro in English Society, 1555-1945 (London: Penguin Press, 1973 ), 192; Seymour
Drescher, “Manumission in a Society Without Slave Law: Eighteenth Century England,” Slaver and
Abolition 10, 3 (December, 1989): 85-101; William R. Cotter, “The Somerset Case and the Abolition of
Slavery in England,” History 79, 255 (February, 1994): 31-56.

permanent black residents of Britain tended to congregate in major trading ports
including London, Bristol, Liverpool and Cardiff. While there is evidence that black
people labored in a number of areas as domestics, journalists, artisans and entertainers,
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in most cases, the black
population was predominately comprised of male seafaring workers.5

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were a number of
notable black personalities who made valuable contributions to reform movements
including anti-slavery and temperance and participated in working class politics and anti-
racist causes including Mary Prince, Robert Wedderburn, Mary Seacole, and Celestine
Edwards.6 However, during this same period, there was an overall decline in the black
population in Britain.7 Demands of the wartime economy during World War I and
World War II reversed this trend as the British Government recruited thousands of black
colonial workers to fulﬁll shortages in essential military support industries. Although it

was not until after World War II that the black working classes in Britain began to

 

5 Douglas Lormier, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), 37-44; Fryer, Staying Power, 237; David Killingray,
“Tracing Peoples of African Origin and Descent in Victorian Kent,” in Black Victorians, Black V ictoriana
ed. Gretchen Gerzina (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 51-52.

6 Born enslaved in Bermuda, Mary Prince (1788-1833) moved with one of her owners to England in 1828,
where she eventually ran away and joined forces with Thomas Pringle of the Anti-Slavery Society who
assisted her in publishing her slave testimony, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave in 1831.
Robert Wedderburn (1762-?) was a key agent responsible for shaping a transatlantic dialogue between the
anti-slavery movement in Britain and working class radical movements in England during the early
nineteenth century. Wedderburn is most well known for his scathing critiques of slavery which can be
found in such writings including Axe Laid to Root Or a Fatal Blow of Oppressors, Being an Address to the
Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica (1817) and The Horrors of Slavery (1824). Mary Seacole
(1805-1881) was born a tree person of color in Jamaica. In 1854 Seacole traveled to England a later served
along with Florence Nightingale as a nurse in the Crimean War. In 1857, she published an
autobiographical travel narrative, The Wonderﬁd Adventures of Mrs. Mary Seacole in Many Lands.
Celestine Edwards (1858-1894) was active in the British temperance movement and was widely known for
his condemnation of American race relations and his support of Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaigns in
Britain. For more on these individuals see Fryer, Staying Power, 213-214, 220-227, 246-252, 277-281.

7 Fryer, Staying Power, 236.

concentrate in industries outside of maritime labor as the postwar domestic economy
generated deﬁcits across the industrial sector in key areas including construction, coal-
mining, transportation, textiles and health care, even before World War I, the
demographic composition of the black presence in Britain became more diverse as an
array of black colonials, including students, civil service personnel, merchants,
professionals and diplomats, visited and settled in Britain.8

Winston James has recently chronicled the ways in which black communities in
early twentieth century Britain organized and participated in a vast array of social and
political activities which demonstrated an awareness of certain shared interests and
experiences conditioned by the “metalanguage of race.”9 In 1900, Trinidadian-bom
barrister, Henry Sylvester Williams and members of the London-based Aﬁican
Association convened the Pan African Conference which brought together an elite cadre
of black intellectuals and activists primarily from regions throughout the Anglophone
world to engage a broad range of issues concerning the conditions faced by people of

African descent “under European and American rule.”l0 Although the Pan African

 

8 Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain, 1901-1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1998);
Winston James, “The Black Experience in Twentieth-Century Britain” in Black Experience and the Empire
eds. Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), 349-355. It is important
to note that the black population still remained largely male.

9 Winston James, “The Black Experience in Twentieth Century Britain,” 349-366; Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, 2 (Winter,
1992): 251-274. Although Higginbotham focuses on the existence of a “metalanguage of race” as a
deﬁning element crucial to unpacking to the history of Aﬁican American women, the notion of race as a
“metalanguage” with transformative effects “on the construction and representation of other social and
power relations, namely gender, class and sexuality,” serves as a useful means of understanding how race
structured, but did not necessarily silence the multifaceted dimensions of black community life in Britain.

m Owen Charles Mathurin, Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement, I 869-
191 l (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 49-50, 62; Peter Fryer, Staying Power, 281-282. See also
Jonathan Schneer, “Anti-Imperial London: The Pan-African Conference of 1900” in Black Victorians,
Black Victoriana ed. Gretchen Gerzina (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003): 175-186.

Association, established to promote the transnational agenda for racial uplift and progress
as envisioned by the delegates of the Pan African Conference, was short-lived,
nonetheless, the historic gathering served as a key moment in the emergence of Britain as
a center of Pan-African activity during the early twentieth century.

During the interwar period black professionals, students and workers founded a
number of Pan-African-oriented organizations, networks and institutions including the
African Progress Union (1918), the Society of People of African Origin (1918), the
League of Coloured People (1931), the International African Service Bureau (1934) and a
number of periodicals including the African Times and Orient Review, the A ﬁican
Telegraph (1914), The Keys (1933) and the International Aﬁican Opinion, which was
edited by George Padmore during the late 19308. '1 The political platforms of many of
these organizations oftentimes amalgamated issues relevant to the speciﬁc conditions
faced by black people in Britain and broader transnational anti-colonial and anti-racist
projects linking the experiences of people of Aﬁican descent in different parts of the
world. In particular, the League of Coloured People (LCP), arguably the most inﬂuential
black political organization in Britain during the 19308 and 19408, tackled a range of
causes affecting black community life in Britain, providing aid to orphaned black
children, managing the establishment of a govemment-sponsored hostel for black
colonial students and consistently lobbying government Ofﬁcial to end racial
discrimination in public places, civil service jobs and in the distribution of military

commissions. To be sure, the members of the LCP championed these domestic issues

 

" For a comprehensive discussion of these organizations and their speciﬁc agendas for Pan-African unity
and racial progress see Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan Aﬁicanism in
America, Europe and Aﬁ'ica, trans. Ann Keep (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1974); P. Olisanwuche
Esedebe, Pan-Aﬁicanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776-1991 (Washington, DC: Howard University
Press, 1994.

just as they maintained a diasporic focus, issuing resolutions on the Scottsboro case in
1933, advocating for a self-goveming West Indies Federation and aligning with other
Pan-African organizations including the International African Service Bureau in their
condemnation of the Abyssinian War of 1935 and support for an ofﬁcial investigation
into the sociO-economic conditions that resulted in labor uprisings throughout the
Caribbean colonies during the 19308.‘2

In 1945, the London-based Pan-African Federation convened the ﬁfth Pan-
African Congress meeting in Manchester, England. Organized on the heels of the end of
the Second World War, the 1945 Congress represented a watershed moment when the
intellectual vanguards of Pan-Africanism joined forces with mounting nationalist
campaigns, civil rights advocates and emerging labor movements in Anglophone Africa,
the Caribbean, the United States and Britain. Alongside declarations urging colonial
workers to use the “weapons” of strikes and boycotts to combat imperialism and to make
demands for self-govemment in the colonies, the Congress beseeched the newly formed
United Nations for greater representation by political organs concerned with the “rights
of African Negroes and descendants of Africans in the West Indies and the United States
of America.”13 Fitting on the one hand because the bulk of the organization and
preparation for the Congress had been conducted by black coalitions in Britain, and on

another because Britain remained a critical diasporic space of cultural and political

 

'2 Geiss, The Pan African Movement, 342-346, 358-359; Fryer, Staying Power, 326-334; David Killingray,
“ ‘To Do Something For the Race’: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples,” in West Indian
Intellectuals in Britain ed. Bill Schwartz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 51-70; Ron
Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot: Gower Publishing Co., 1987), 100-
137.

'3 George Padmore, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity: A Programme of A ction (London: The
Hammersmith Bookshop, Ltd., 1963), 6-8. The original version of the conference proceedings were
published under the same title by Padmore in 1947.

encounters between black global communities inﬂuencing the development of Pan
African politics throughout the early twentieth century, the opening day of the Congress
focused solely on the issue of “The Colour Problem in Britain.” At the close of this
session, F.O.B. Blaize of Nigeria reiterated areas of concerns including unemployment
among black dock workers and orphaned black children which had been raised by
delegates from Britain and suggested that the Pan African movement had a vital role to
play in addressing the conditions of black communities in Britain. Blaize implored:

We must see that these people get justice. . .those born in Britain have the right to

stay here. If the British people think they have the right to live in Aﬁica, then we

have the right to stay here. We have the right to get together and see that

something is done for us here.'4
The manner in which delegates of the 1945 Pan-African Congress positioned the
“problem” of race as experienced by black people—and in particular black workers—in
Britain against the backdrop of a broader program of transnational race politics serves as
an important pretext to examine postwar campaigns involving the struggles of a largely
ﬁrst generation black migrant population to combat racism and actualize the full
possibilities afforded them via their citizenship and legally guaranteed rights of belonging
in British society.
Historiographical Interventions

This dissertation seeks to unite three key historiographical trajectories. The ﬁrst
of these relates to the history of the black presence in British society. Coinciding with
the arrival of the Empire Windrush and the passage of the British Nationality Act in 1948,

the publication of Kenneth Little’s pioneering study Negroes in Britain represents the

ﬁrst scholarly monograph examining black life in metropolitan Britain. Primarily a

 

'4 Padmore, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity, 31.

sociological study of black communities in the port cities of Cardiff and Wales, Little’s
work provided demographic evidence about the black population in these areas and
focused largely on social relations between black workers and indigenous white residents.
Placing race relations at the center of analytical inquiry in such a way that emphasized
how indigenous whites interacted with and responded to the presence of growing
numbers of black residents, Little’s study established an important paradigm that would
deﬁne the manner in which scholars examined black community life both contemporarily
and historically for over three decades.‘5

In the wake of steadily increasing black migration throughout the 19508 and in the
aftermath of episodes of racial violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill, the Institute of
Race Relations, an independent educational organization, was established to survey,
collect, publish and disseminate information that social and welfare associations and local
and national government authorities might be able to use to improve race relations in
Britain. Throughout the late 19508 and 19608 afﬁliates of the Institute of Race Relations
including James Wickenden, Michael Banton, Ruth Glass, Sheila Patterson, Ceri Peach
and E]. B. Rose conducted a number of sociological studies of black ‘irnmigrants’ within
the context of a race relations model that analyzed the experiences and conditions faced
by black migrants largely by exploring the attitudes and behaviors of white Britons
towards rising black populations in major urban centers including London, Birmingham

and Nottingham.l6 Recently, Chris Waters has noted that just as many of these studies set

 

'5 Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1972; original, 1948).

‘6 James Wickenden, Colour in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1958); Michael Banton, White
and Coloured: The Behavior of British People Towards Coloured Immigrants (New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1960, original, 1959); Ruth Glass, Newcomers: The West Indians in London (London:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960); Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the

out to collect data which might be used to support measures leading to the incorporation
and integration of black newcomers into British society, they simultaneously
appropriated and reproduced many of the same discourses of race and nation that
essentially erected boundaries of national belonging which excluded black migrants and
effectively constructed them as social outsiders who did not conform to mainstream white
society’s notions of Britishness, despite the fact that they were legally bona ﬁde British
citizens.17

During the 19708 and 19808 one ﬁnds a shift from sociological analyses of black
communities in Britain to a sustained historical conversation about the black presence in
Britain. The publication of Edward Scobie’s Black Britannia (1972), James Walvin’s
Black and White (1973) and Folarin Shyllon’s Black People in Britain (1977) added new
dimensions to the study of black life in Britain and consciously set forth to provide a
wider frame for viewing contemporary black community formations by connecting

British involvement in the slave trade and broader Atlantic economy with a more visible

 

Absorption of a Recent West Indian Group in Brixton, South London (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1963); Ceri Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography (London: Oxford
University Press, 1968; E.J.B. Rose, Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (London:
Oxford University Press, 1969).

'7 Chris Waters, “ ‘Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963,”
The Journal of British Studies 36, 2 (April, 1997): 207-238. Similar arguments have formed the basis of
the emergence of black British cultural studies pioneered in the seminal volume Empire Strikes Back: Race
and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982) produced by the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. See also Paul Gilroy, Ain ’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural
Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Houston Baker, Manthia
Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996). While these studies have been critical to conceptualizing historical narratives that
consider the ways in which race has structured British identities that have been inherently conceived as
antithetical to blackness, and correctly take issue with sociological models of race relations that reinforce
dichotomies between blackness and Britishness, one of the major shortcomings of much of this scholarship
is the inattention to the longer imperial history of black people’s struggles to strategically appropriate and
assume their own visions of Britishness and create more inclusive deﬁnitions of British national identity
even before mass black migration to Britain during the postwar period—an issue which this study intends
to foreground in analyzing postwar black migration.

10

black presence in Britain.18 In addition to chronicling the emergence of black
communities within the context of their relationship to British imperial interests and
maritime exchanges, Walvin’s work, in particular, foregrounds a discussion of the
development of English racial ideologies by focusing attention on images and stereotypes
manufactured as a part of the political rhetoric and policies associated with slavery and
colonialism, which he notes effectively served as a means to rationalize and sustain
racialized systems of economic exploitation.l9

Walvin’s attention to racial imagery and ideas about black people (and more
speciﬁcally black men) overlapped with the central themes of important studies by
Christine Bolt and Douglas Lorimer, also published in the early 19708, which were more
speciﬁcally concerned with shifting Victorian racial ideologies conditioned largely by
imperial encounters and metropolitan responses to events including Reconstruction in the
United States and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in J arnaica.20 While Bolt’s study was
more conﬁned to examining disparaging ideas about black people that emerged in the
Empire and circulated in various metropolitan public spheres traversing all sectors of
British society, Lorimer’s point was to trace the emergence of anti-black forms of racial
prejudice in British society, no doubt as a means of historicizing contemporary race
relations discourse which again focused on white society’s perceptions of and reactions to

black migrants. Lorimer found that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

 

'3 Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co.,
1972); James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555-1945 (London: Penguin
Press, 1973); Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, [555-1833 (London: Oxford University Press,
1977).

'9 Walvin, Black and White, 159-176.
2° Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); Douglas

Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978).

ll

centuries, “racially prejudiced individuals undoubtedly existed, but on the whole, no clear
pattern of institutionalized or socially sanctioned discrimination [towards people of
African descent] was in evidence.”2| However, by the mid nineteenth century Lorimer
insisted that a range of factors including scientiﬁc theories of race, perceptions of failed
projects of emancipation in the Americas and, most importantly, the hardening of class
hierarchies in metropolitan society made the concept of black gentlemanliness a
contradiction of sorts that opened the gateway to anti-black racism that were sustained by
associating black people with an enslaved past and resigning them to the lowest position
within a shifting Victorian social order.

The appearance of Peter Fryer’s ground-breaking comprehensive survey, Staying
Power in 1984, provided a major historiographical shift in the study of the history of the
black presence in Britain. Fryer’s study melds an impressive body of sources ranging
from plantation records, travel narratives, newspapers, journals, speeches, literature and
music to present a long history of the black presence in Britain. One of the many
conceptual strengths of Fryer’s work is his attention to the connections between
imperialism and slavery in the development of racial ideologies that inﬂuenced the
experiences of black people both in the colonial setting and in the metropole over time.
To be sure, the most signiﬁcant historiographical contribution of Fryer’s work is its
incorporation of black agency and strategies of resistance. Throughout a discussion
weaving together narratives of enslaved community life in Britain during the eighteenth
and nineteenth century, the formation of black social and political organizations in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, episodes of racial violence against black

seamen in the interwar period, the development and institutionalization of racism and

 

2' Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, 31.

12

racial discrimination, and the impact of postwar black migration to Britain, Fryer
consistently traces black people’s responses and resistance to their marginalization in
British society. Fryer highlights how black people challenged the conditions, practice
and legality Of their enslaved status and the institution of slavery in the Empire,
participated in working class radical movements, fortiﬁed anti-colonial and anti-racist
coalitions, and devised an array of programs to combat racial discrimination in an attempt
to substantiate the meaning of their British citizenship and right to belong in British
society during the twentieth century. In doing so, Fryer’s monumental study
demonstrated that the black presence in Britain had long endured and destabilized the
notion that the signiﬁcance of the black presence in Britain only emerged as a postwar
phenomenon.22
More recent studies of the black presence in postwar Britain tend to draw upon
F ryer’s bottom up approach in constructing social histories of black life which highlight
black people’s active participation in structuring the terms of their experiences in British
society. Studies produced by Carlton Wilson, Gretchen Gerzina, Norma Myers, Jeffrey
Green, Jon Newman and David Killingray all interrogate a range of traditional and non-
traditional historical sources including parish registers, census records, diaries, court

records, literature, music and visual imagery in an attempt to reconstruct and quantify the

history and interiors of black life in Britain.23 While these studies range in temporal and

 

22 Although there have been other comprehensive studies of black life in Britain, most notably, Ron
Ramdin’s The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (1987), considering its sources and wide-
ranging perspective, Fryer’s study remains the deﬁnitive and unparalleled survey of the social history of
black people in Britain through the early 19808.

23 Carlton Wilson, “A Hidden History: The Black Experience in Liverpool, England, 1919-1945,” Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992; Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life
Before Emancipation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Norma Myers, Reconstructing
the Black Past: Blacks in Britain, 1 780-1830 (London: Frank Cass, 1996); Jeffrey Green, Black

13

spatial considerations, they have a common interests in examining the everyday lives of
black people in Britain, and thus move beyond earlier historical studies privileging the
activities of exceptional black personalities whose presence in Britain were more visible
through traditional archival sources including ofﬁcial government documents and other
written materials. Drawing upon similar sources and methodologies present in these later
studies of the black presence in Britain, this study also attempts to present an analysis of
the politics of race, citizenship and migration in postwar Britain that incorporates the
voices, perspectives and concerns of black migrants as envisioned on their own terms and
demonstrate how their activities inﬂuenced broader debates about the meaning of British
national identity and images of race relations in Britain.

In addition to providing a contribution to the history of the black presence in
British society, this study also intends to engage scholarly debates concerning the
relationship between race, citizenship and migration in the postwar period. Essentially,
the crux of current scholarly literature in this area concerns the extent to which British
Government officials actively participated in institutionalizing a marginal citizenship
status for black migrants with the implementation of race-based migration controls
beginning with the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. While earlier studies on
this subject by scholars including Paul Foot, Nicholas Deakin and Colin Holmes asserted
variations of the central premise that British ofﬁcials were pressured by popular opinion
and political expediency to institute migration restrictions targeted to control a largely

black migration in 1962, since the release of Cabinet records from the 19508 and 19608 in

 

Edwardians: Black People in Britain, 1901-1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1998); John Newman, Windrush
F orbearers: Black People in Lambeth, 1 700-1900 (London: Lambeth Archives, 2002); David Killingray,
“Tracing People of African Origin and Descent in Victorian Kent” in Black Victorians, Black Victoriana
ed. Gretchin Gerzina (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

14

the early 19908, a host of scholars including Lydia Lindsey, Robert Miles, Ian Spencer
and Kathleen Paul have challenged these arguments and demonstrated the active and
sustained interest of successive British governments in limiting black migration and
essentially the growth of black communities in Britain throughout the 19508.24

In addition to establishing Government ofﬁcials’ interests in controlling black
migration well before the issue became a subject of public debate in the aftermath of
highly publicized incidents of racial violence occurring mainly between indigenous white
residents and largely West Indian black migrant communities in Nottingham and Notting
Hill during the summer of 195 8, the dominant paradigm present in recent scholarship has
focused on the extent to which racism and a racialized visions of the boundaries of
Britishness guided the reactions of ofﬁcialdom to increasing black migration in the
postwar period and determined their motives in considering and introducing migration
controls. Collaborative works by Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi as well as
monographs by Kathleen Paul and Ian Spencer all posit that the state, independent of
popular opinion, actively participated in constructing and appropriating negative
stereotypes of black workers throughout the 19508 and early 19608 which were then used
as a premise to rationalize racially discriminatory policies which relied upon and

remapped racialized imperial hierarchies of Britishness and effectively excluded black

 

2’ Paul Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1965); Nicholas Deakin,
“ The Politics of the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill,” Political Quarterly 39 (1968), 25-45; Colin
Holmes, John Bull ’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (Houndsmill: Macmillan Press,
1988); Lydia Lindsey, “The Role of Immigration Policy, Race, Class, and Gender in Shaping the Status of
Jamaican Immigrant Women Workers in Birmingham, England, 1948-1962” Ph.D. Dissertation, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992; Lydia Lindsey, “Halting the Tide: Responses to West Indian
Immigration to Britain, 1946-1952” Journal of Caribbean History 26, I (1992); Ian Spencer, British
Immigration Policy Since 1939 (London: Routledge Press, 1997); Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain:
Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). See also Robert Miles,
“Nationality, Citizenship and Migration to Britain, 1945-1951,” Journal of Law and Society 16, 4 (Winter,
1989), 426-442 and Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race
Relations ' in Post- War Britain (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992).

15

Commonwealth citizens from exercising the full rights and privileges of their British
citizenship.25

Randall Hansen’s, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain has Offered the
most recent critique of this argument. Hansen insists that the “racialization thesis” does
not account for the plurality of opinions existing within ofﬁcialdom about the issue of
black migration and refutes the claim that migration controls of the 19608 were the
culmination of state-sponsored racism occurring absent from a range of social forces.26
As will be discussed in further detail in subsequent chapters, this study ﬁnds value in
Hansen’s challenges to the dominant framing and interpretation of the state’s role in
institutionalizing racialized visions Of British citizens, but intends to move the discussion
beyond the conﬁnes of ofﬁcialdom to examine a host of perspectives on the meaning of
migration restrictions. British officials were not the only players in the politics of race
and citizenship which emerged in relation to increasing black migration in the postwar
period. As this study will demonstrate, black migrants actively and consistently
challenged circumscribed notions of Britishness in their struggles to qualify their rights as
British citizens. To be sure, not only did their very presence in British society ﬁ'acture
the racial exclusivity of British national identity as conceived by British ofﬁcials, but it
also occasioned mainstream white society to reevaluate their own conceptions and sense

of Britishness.

 

2’ Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, “The 1951-1955 Conservative Government and the
Racialization of Black Immigration” Immigrants and Minorities 6, 3 (1987): 335-47; Bob Carter, Clive
Harris and Shirley Joshi, “Immigration Policy and the Racialization of Migrant Labour: The Construction
of Natioml Identities in the USA and Britain,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 19, l (1996), 135-57; Ian
Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939; Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain.

26 Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain: The Institutional Origins of a
Multiracial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10-16. See Chapter 5 of this study.

16

A third branch of scholarly studies that this dissertation intents to incorporate and
contribute to relates to the transnational politics of race in the postwar period. Recent
historical scholarship has begun to develop deeply nuanced analyses of interactions
between domestic race relations and foreign affairs during the postwar period. Scholars
of American history including Penny Von Eschon, Mary Dudziak, Brenda Gayle
Plummet, Carol Anderson and Thomas Borselmann have emphasized the degrees to
which black civil rights reform agendas commanded center stage in a contested
international sphere deﬁned by the racial politics of the Cold War and decolonization, yet
this idea has not been fully explored as it related to Britain as a model of Western
democracy, and more speciﬁcally has it affected political mobilization strategies among
migrant communities of Aﬁican descent in Britain. 27 This study hopes to address these
silences by situating evolving Ofﬁcial and grassroots race politics in relation to a broader
transnational dialogue about race, civil rights and democracy. Just as black Americans
drew international attention to the cause of black rights in the United States and used
international sympathies to inﬂuence the development of civil rights policies, black
political agents in postwar Britain were also very much aware of the international
dimensions of race and the potency of images of domestic race relation in the global
postwar political arena Likewise, as policy makers considered introducing legislation

designed to control black migration to acknowledge and address racial discrimination in

 

27 Penny Von Eschon, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American
Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstlemann, The Cold War and the
Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Brenda Gayle Plummet, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US. Foreign Affairs, 1935-I960 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and
the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).

17

British society, they did so mindful that their actions would be scrutinized in an
international climate sensitive to issues of race.

Sources and Methodology

This dissertation incorporates a range of archival sources including ofﬁcial

government documents, newspapers, Parliament records, manuscript collections,
organizational records, migrant narratives, statistical records, contemporary sociological
studies and musical lyrics. In doing so, this study is largely concerned with
foregrounding the voices and perspectives of black migrants within a broader discussion
of the politics of race, citizenship and migration in postwar Britain. Considering the role
of non-state actors in shaping, interpreting, and appropriating public policy rhetoric and
initiatives requires asking new questions of sources to unmask the voices and
perspectives of black migrants. Studies including those of Lawrence Levine and Thomas
Holt provide important methodological insights for understanding the ways that
historians can begin to understand how those whom traditional sources may have
constructed as objects of history were indeed agents of history.28 This study places
government documents in conversation with musical lyrics performed by Calypsonian
Lord Kitchener, the meeting records of grassroots black political organs and the recorded

testimonies of ﬁrst generation West Indian migrants to construct a wide-ranging portrait

 

2’ Lawrence Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness: A fro-A merican Folk Thought From Slavery to
Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Levine’s work represented an important
methodological shift in the study of slavery in the United States by utilizing non-traditional sources
including folk cultural artifacts to understand the history of slavery ﬁom the perspective of enslaved
people; Thomas Holt, “ ‘An Empire Over the Mind’: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British

West Indies and the American South,” in Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann
Woodward eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982),
283-313. In this essay, Holt notes that what freedpeople did in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of
slavery offered a window into the ways that they interpreted their own visions, expectations, and realities of
emancipation. See also Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and
Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

18

of the experiences of black migrants and their responses to conditions mediated by race in
British society.

This study uses the term ‘black migrant’ to describe a largely West Indian migrant
population of African descent in Britain. Although studies including Laura Tabili have
employed references to black identity as a construct encompassing virtually all non-white
populations in Britain including Africans, West Indians, Indians and Asians, this study
resists the this conceptual model because it largely represents perceptions of race and
racial categories as deﬁned by white Britons, rather than the people to which they
applied.29 In the postwar period, one ﬁnds a historical moment when grassroots black
political organs in Britain described their struggles and aligned their programs in relation
to a vision of themselves as part of a transnational black community connected to other
diaspora communities of African descent in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa.
Theoretical models conceptualizing race and blackness by scholars including
Evelynbrooks Higginbotham, Barbara Fields, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy inﬂuence the
manner in which this study incorporates discussions of race. 30 Higginbotham’s notion of
a race as a “metalanguage” is useful in understanding moments when race reconﬁgures
and distorts class, gender and, in the case of this study, the island nationalities that
simultaneously comprised what it meant to be both West Indian and British. While

Fields and Hall pay close attention to the ways that race and racial identities are

 

29 Laura Tabili, “ We Ask For British Justice Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

3° Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” 251-274; Barbara
J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor
of C. Vann Woodard eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982); Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structure in Dominance,” in Black British
Cultural Studies eds. Houston Baker, Manthia Diawara and Ruth Lindeborg (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 16-60; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

19

 

 

structured in relation to speciﬁc socio-historical contexts. Likewise, Gilroy’s notion of
blackness as a political condition as opposed to a cultural phenomenon offers a means of
tracing the ways that individual communities of African descent formed transnational
political networks and dialogues at particular moments, even when the experience of race
was mediated by different spatial contexts.

Taking a cue from both black migrants themselves and Winston J ames’s
discussion of the black experience in twentieth century Britain, this study also
acknowledges the ways in which the terminology ‘immigrant’ serves as a discursive tool
that inherently denaturalizes black Commonwealth citizens who migrated to Britain.
James argues that the terms ‘migrants’, ‘settlers’ and ‘black Britons’ as opposed to
‘immigrants’ is preferable when describing black people, particularly in the postwar
period. He notes,

Strictly speaking, there have been relatively few black immigrants to Britain.

Most of those who entered Britain in the twentieth century, including the post-war

years, were simply moving from one part of the British empire to another as

British citizens. . .Unless one is prepared to call Yorkshiremen in London

immigrants, then we should not call Barbadians entering London on British

passports immigrants. The immigrant label attached to such persons largely
developed in the 19608 precisely to deprive black Britons Of their citizenship

rights.
Chapter Overviews

Chapter one of this study, “Historicizing Race, Empire and British Citizenship”
intends to provide a long history of the ways in which the history of race and Empire
provides a vital context for understanding how black people have historically positioned
themselves within and articulated visions of Britishness and the meaning of their British

citizenship. Whereas most studies Of postwar black migration begin with the arrival of

 

3‘ Winston James, “Black Experience in Twentieth Century Britain”, 349.

20

 

 

LI

4’.

5'

the Empire Windrush in 1948, this chapter intends to offer an intervention to
problematize the Windrush narrative which inherently frames the history of black
migration as a metropolitan phenomenon conﬁned to the postwar period. When one
considers the idea that migration represented an act of claim-making and an articulation
of a sense of civic membership and imperial belonging in a transregional, transracial
community of British citizens, one can situate black migration to Britain in the postwar
era as part of a long history of race and Empire in which people of African descent
appropriated the language of Empire to assert their rights as members of the imperial
body politic.

Chapter two, “Migration, Race and the Reconstruction of ‘Civis Britannicus
Sum’” more closely explores the ways that migration represented an act of claim making
by black migrants and locates this discussion within the context of the postwar period. In
doing so, it intends to show how migrants’ choices to move to Britain were made in
relation to their vision of a multiracial British community of citizens to which they
belonged. While policy makers had no intentions that the terms of the British
Nationality Act of 1948, which legalized notions of a multiracial British citizenry, would
materialize to any signiﬁcant degree beyond the small and concentrated non-white
populations in major port cities including Cardiff and Liverpool, the unprecedented
number of Caribbean migrants substantiating their claims to British citizenship certainly
challenged and fractured this ideal. In addition to a discussion of migrants’ visions and
articulations of their sense of the meaning of their British citizenship through the very act
of migration, this chapter Offers an examination of the multiplicity of factors that

facilitated increased black migration from the Caribbean to Britain after World War II

21

 

 

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and detail some of the ways that race structured the experiences of black migrants
particularly as they pertain to certain areas including housing and employment.

Chapter three, “Images of Violence and Shifting Narratives of Race” examines
how images of racial violence between black migrants and indigenous white residents in
Nottingham and Notting Hill during the summer of 1958 drew international attention to
British race relations. This chapter demonstrates that as news of “race riots” traveled
throughout the world, the existence of what I refer to as the “mystique of British anti-
racism” was shattered by images of violent interracial conﬂict. As international
audiences consumed and reacted to news of racial violence in Britain they also exposed
preexisting intemationally-recognized narratives about British national identity that
sustained images of Britain as a beacon of racial progress, the embodiment of
Commonwealth ideals of racial democracy and a foil to Jim Crow America and South
Africa’s apartheid regime. A central goal of this chapter is to examine the ways that news
of ‘race riots’ created an intense questioning of what it meant to be British as images of
violence served to contradict domestic and international perceptions of British racial
liberalism, tolerance and anti-racism. This chapter explores how British responses to the
violence ﬁmctioned as an attempt to preserve the “mystique of British anti-racism” and
reframe a tarnished image of British national identity both domestically and
internationally by explaining the violence as the result of increasing “problem” of black
migration, conﬁned to a deviant sector of British society.

Chapter four, “‘Are We To Be Mauled Down Just Because We Are Black?’:
Black Bodies and the Gendered Dimensions of Grassroots Race Politics” examines the

ways that the murder of Antiguan-born Kelso Benjamin Cochrane served as a critical

22

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moment of political mobilization within black migrant communities. This chapter pays
particular attention to the “black body politics” campaign waged by members of the
Inter-Racial Friendship Coordinating Council, a black migrant organization formed in the
aftermath of the murder to publicly highlight the conditions facing all black migrants
including inadequate police protection and hostility from indigenous white communities
in certain areas, which precipitated Cochrane’s untimely death. In addition to placing the
activities of black migrants into a transnational context that locates their activities within
a international dialogue of race and civil rights inﬂuenced by the US. Civil Rights
Movement, international debates over apartheid in South Aﬁ‘ica, and decolonization, this
chapter also highlights the gender dimensions of grassroots political mobilization and
explores the process through which images of black community life are produced.

The ﬁnal chapter “The Evolution of Official Race Policy” closely examines the
process through which British ofﬁcials came to adopt ofﬁcial race policies in the forms of
race-based migration controls and historic anti-discrimination legislation by the ﬁrst half
of the 19605. While scholars have been able to document how British ofﬁcials actively
participated in racializing postwar Commonwealth migration and problematizing black
migrants to justify implementing exclusionary controls with the speciﬁc intent of curbing
the “inﬂux” of black workers and the grth of black communities, this chapter
incorporates these arguments and pays close attention to how opponents of migration
controls, including Parliament members, West Indian ofﬁcials, black newcomers, and
black communities in Britain played key roles in publicly exposing the racial character of
migration controls. The chapter concludes by suggesting how the origins of the Race

Relations Act of 1965 were intertwined with the success of migration control opponents

23

 

no.

in publicly framing Commonwealth migration restrictions as ofﬁcial policies of
institutionalized racism and racial discrimination. As policy makers considered
tightening controls in 1965, they did so with a keen awareness that the measure would be
regarded as racially exclusionary. As the international community began to champion the
cause of the elimination of racial discrimination in the early 19603, the introduction a
national policy of anti-discrimination served as a conduit through which the British

Government could publicly balance the extension of race-based migration controls.

24

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

Historicizing Race, Empire and British Citizenship

On June 22, 1948 Aldwyn Roberts disembarked from the S. S. Empire Windrush at
Tilbury Docks on the outskirts of London. Joined by another 491 passengers arriving
from Jamaica, Roberts greeted a host of well-wishers, local media, including B.B.C.
reporters and other interested observers with a rousing rendition of his soon-to-be hit
song, “London Is the Place For Me.”32 Roberts, a well-known Calypso singer from
Trinidad who had adopted the stage name Lord Kitchener cheerfully sang:

London is the place for me

London this lovely city

You can go to France or America
India Asia or Australia

You must come back to London city

Well believe me I am speaking broadmindedly
I am glad to know my Mother Country

I’ve been traveling to country years ago

But this the place I wanted to know

London, that’s the place for me

To live in London you’re really comfortable
Because the English people are very much sociable
They take you here and they take you there
They make you feel like a millionaire
So London, that’s the place for me.33
Reﬂecting on the creative energies that produced the lyrics, Roberts explained that with

four days remaining before the completion of the journey from Jamaica to Britain he was

overcome with a “kind of wonderful feeling that I’m going to land on the mother country,

 

32 Trevor Phillips and Mike Phillips, Windrush, 66.

33 Lord Kitchener, “London is the Place For Me,” London is the Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso in
London, 1950-1956 (London: Honest Jon’s Records Ltd, 2002), compact disc recording. Excerpts from
the recorded version can also be found in James Proctor, ed., Writing Black Britain, [948-1998; An
Interdisciplinwy Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 19-20.

25

the soil of the mother country.”34 This “wonderful feeling” lead Roberts to compose a
song which expressed a sense of optimistic expectancy about life in Britain and more
importantly, conveyed an understanding of a historic relationship between colony and
metropole that allowed for the possibilities that ‘London’, the urban epicenter of the
Empire, could indeed represent a new space of imperial belonging to which he could lay
claim.

Roberts’s performance at the Tilbury Docks poignantly captures a critical motif
deﬁning both the history of postwar black migration from the Caribbean to Britain, but
more broadly the history race and Empire. Although the British Empire was premised
upon unequal power relations engineered to exploit black labor, sexuality, culture and
personhood, the Empire’s dependence on black people for its own existence meant that at
times it offered certain possibilities for black people to negotiate the terms of their
subjugation, and indeed undermine the racialized hierarchies of power that marginalized
their position within the Empire.” At the moment when Aldwyn Roberts gleefully belted
out verses of “London, is the Place for Me,” he clearly articulated a sense of belonging
for himself and his fellow passengers squarely within the conﬁnes of the metropolitan
community and the larger British imperial community. For Roberts, ‘London’
represented the quintessential imperial space where he could assume and reinforce his
membership in a transnational, trans-racial British imperial community. Just as Roberts,
a Trinidadian-born, male calypsonian of African descent made claims on ‘London’ as a

symbolic space of imperial belonging, in the process, he essentially imparted a

 

3‘ Trevor Phillips and Mike Phillips, Windrush, 66.

35Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds. Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), vii.

26

 

 

 

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..l-

 

 

democratic vision of Britishness and the British imperial citizenry that united all people
of the Empire across the ﬂuid boundaries of race, nation and space. To be sure, Roberts’
concept of a trans-racial British imperial citizenry did not emerge simply as a means of
positioning himself within the imperial spaces of metropolitan life as a migrating colonial
subject, but rather it existed as a means of self-construction and belonging in the imperial
spaces of colonial society. In Trinidad, this membership allowed him to fashion himself
as both Aldwyn Roberts and simultaneously cultivate a public persona as a Calypso
singer invoking the name Lord Kitchener, a revered British militiaman and Secretary of
State for War during World War I who also served as an iconic referent for the triumph
of British imperial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.36 His ability to
infuse a distinct form of Caribbean cultural expression with images of the British Empire
suggests that for him, and perhaps his Caribbean audiences, their multiple national,
imperial and racial identities were not mutually exclusive, but rather overlapping
constituents of a whole. At the same time that Roberts could be a Trinidadian of African
descent performing Calypso music, he could also evoke a British identity that did not
conﬂict with his Caribbeanness nor his blackness. Roberts embodied the intersection of
race, nation and Empire, and in doing so, amalgamated both the historical “tensions of

Empire” which manufactured markers of racial, spatial and cultural difference as a means

 

3" For more on Lord Kitchener see Keith Surridge, “More Than A Great Poster: Lord Kitchener and The
Image of the Military Hero,” Historical Research 74 (August, 2001): 298-313; Trevor Royle, The
Kitchener Enigma (London: M. Joseph, 1985); AJ. Smithers, The Fighting Nation: Lord Kitchener and
His Armies (London: L. Cooper, 1994); Philip Warner, Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend (New
York: Atheneum, 1986).

27

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of legitimating the superiority of metropolitan whiteness, and paradoxically the
democratic possibilities of a trans-racial imperial community of citizens.”
This chapter examines the ways that black people have historically interpreted
their positions within the British Empire. At the heart of this discussion is a critical
assessment of the workings of what Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have aptly labeled
as the “dialectics of inclusion and exclusion.”38 At times the Empire clearly delineated
rigid boundaries of race that functioned to classify people of African descent as black.
Accordingly, this racial marker of difference or “otherness” was then oftentimes used to
relegate them to inferior positions in the labor market, exclude them from political
institutions and systematically impede their abilities to access certain rights leading to full
participation and inclusion in the economic, social and civil life of society. To be sure, at
other times, the politics of Empire embraced an ethos of racial inclusiveness. Although
the Empire produced gendered racial discourses that marginalized blackness as the
antithesis of a privileged bourgeoisie masculine whiteness, paradoxically, it could also
represent an imagined space of expectation that a sense of trans-racial alignment might be
attained under the banner of Crown allegiance. This allowed for the possibilities that the
stigmas attached to blackness could be supplanted or even silenced by the bonds of
common subjecthood and a shared sense of citizenship between the people of the Empire
abroad and those of the metropolitan community. It is in the multifaceted dialogue

between racial inclusion and exclusion that one can situate the history of black

communities in metropolitan Britain, their contentious relationship to Empire and

 

37Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), l-37.

3’ Ibid, 3; Morgan and Hawkins, eds. Black Experience and the Empire, 2

28

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perhaps more importantly, the ways that their historic locations within Empire shaped
their experiences of migration in postwar Britain and their sense of belonging in the
British community.

In order to properly contextualize the complex relationships between postwar
black migrations to Britain and the broader history of race and Empire, this chapter
begins by examining how the unfolding of the anti-slavery movement produced
universalizing discourses of citizenship linking the demise of slavery with the rise of
nominally free wage labor societies incorporating former slaves into an imperial
community of British subjects. As noted by Christopher L. Brown, the social processes
which eventually resulted in the abolition of slavery were consequentially the deﬁning
tenets through which the British Empire began to recognize and construct black men and
women of the Empire as British subjects, and therefore members of the British imperial
citizenry.” This chapter highlights the ways that the social transactions characterizing
emancipation involved a reevaluation, and indeed a reconceptualization of ideas of
British subjecthood and the imperial community of citizens as envisioned by both British
liberal elites and enslaved black workers. At the center of this discussion is an analysis of
the ways that enslaved abolitionists, and subsequently freed men and women
appropriated and produced discourses of Empire for strategic purposes in their quests to
attain ﬁeedom from enslavement and in their struggles to actualize the meaning of their

freedom on their own terms.

 

39 Christopher L. Brown, “From Slaves to Subjects: Envisioning an Empire Without Slavery, 1772-1834,”
in Black Experience and Empire eds. Morgan and Hawkins, 139; See also Christopher L. Brown, “Empire
Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and

Mary Quarterly LVI (April, 1999): 273-306.

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As was the case under slavery, in the post-emancipation period ‘Empire’
continued to function as a malleable discursive space through which freed people
clariﬁed and actualized their own visions of freedom. By invoking their perceived
relationship to, and sense of belonging in a democratic community of British subjects, the
rhetorical devices and paraphernalia of Empire provided viable instruments for black
people to frame and make claims upon their access to certain rights prescribed by
membership in a trans-racial imperial citizenry. The last section of the chapter explores
these issues, paying particular attention to the ways that struggles concerning land rights
illuminate the contrasting dualities of ‘Empire.’ Just as formerly enslaved men and
women asserted a concept of ‘Empire,’ and essentially freedom that—by virtue of their
sense of belonging as subjects—made them privy to an imperial language of rights
offering certain possibilities for social, political and economic reform, this same ‘Empire’
all too often reinforced the very structures and racialized hierarchies of power that sought
to adapt many of the social dynamics and labor relations present under the system of
slavery to post-emancipation society.

Anti-Slavery and the Construction of the British Citizenry

In 1772, Maurice Morgann published a short essay entitled A Plan for the
Abolition of Slavery. In it, Morgann offered one of the earliest blueprints for gradual
emancipation throughout the British Empire. His essay described an Empire without
slavery that would liberate and civilize former slaves and incorporate, “black subjects of
Britain” into a uniﬁed imperial body politic.40 In that same year, Lord Mansﬁeld issued
his celebrated judgment in the case of an enslaved man by the name of James Somerset

who had absconded from his owner after being brought to England. When authorities

 

4° Christopher L. Brown, “From Slaves to Subjects”, 114-118.

30

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recaptured Somerset, his owner, a Boston, Massachusetts customs ofﬁcial, had made
arrangements for him to return to slavery in Jamaica. Represented by Granville Sharp, a
well-known anti-slavery advocate in Britain, Somerset eventually won his freedom when
the court ruled that English law prohibited slave owners in England “to take a slave by
force to be sold abroad because he deserted his service, or for any other reason
whatever.”41 Although Mansﬁeld’s decision in the Somerset case did not outlaw the
practice of slavery in England, nor signal the emancipation of enslaved persons in
England, it did serve as a deﬁning moment in the evolution of the anti-slavery movement
in Britain. As noted by David Brion Davis, the Somerset decision was widely regarded
as a referendum on slavery that characterized the institution as “un-British” and
essentially incompatible with the underlying principles of British law and tradition. As
the anti-slavery movement unfolded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
leading advocates including William Wilberforce and Thomas F. Buxton framed
abolition campaigns in the same light—as a defense of British tradition and a vindication
of laws designed to protect the interests of the Crown’s subjects. 42

Accentuated by a broader intellectual current shaped by European
Enlightenment thinkers’ preoccupation with ideas of rights and individual liberties, both
the publication of Morgann’s treatise on the meaning of abolition and the Somerset case
represent important examples illustrating how ideas regarding emancipation and the

rhetoric of anti-slavery produced new ways of deﬁning both the imperial community and

 

4' Quoted from Fryer, Staying Power, 125. For more on the Somerset case see Steven M. Wise, Though the
Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led To the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Da
Capo Press, 2005).

’2 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1 770-1823 (New York: Oxford

University, 1999), 375-378; See also Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848
(London: Verso Press, 1988), 99-100.

31

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subsequently, the rights and privileges of belonging to the imperial body politic.
Whereas Morgann envisioned the demise of slavery as a foundation for the creation of a
trans-racial British citizenry, the English court’s recognition of James Somerset’s right
not to be reenslaved in accordance with the tenants of British law and tradition
established the notion that one’s race, class and status did not necessarily prevent them
ﬁ'om certain legal protections enjoyed by all British subjects. To be sure, both outlined a
particular discursive terrain allowing for the possibility that Empire—~and more
speciﬁcally an Empire that denounced slavery—might indeed operate as a space where
black people might come to expect, assume and assert certain liberties, rights and
identities as members of British imperial community of citizens. As the movement to
abolish slavery took more deﬁnitive form during the 18203, the idea that an Empire
without slavery might hold the possibilities of a trans-racial egalitarian citizenry gained
currency as anti-slavery advocates invoked universalizing discourses of citizenship to
denounce slavery and subsequently frame the meaning of emancipation.

In March of 1823, British anti-slavery advocates including William Wilberforce,
Thomas Clarkson and Thomas F. Buxton founded the Society For Mitigating and
Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions which
formed the institutional foundations for the emergence of the Anti-Slavery Society in the
late 1820s and early 18308. Evolving from anti-slavery traditions institutionalized in
such organizations including the Society of Friends, the Society for the Abolition of the
Slave Trade and the African Institution, the original mandate of the society focused on
pressuring Parliament to introduce measures to improve and reform the conditions of

slavery in the colonies and formulate a gradual plan for the abolition of slavery. Whereas

32

{V

earlier campaigns including the abolition of the slave trade and the push for the Slave
Registry Bill of 1816 had been supported by anti-slavery advocates as part of move
towards the eventual demolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, the conveners
of the Anti-Slavery Society hoped to reinvigorate and accelerate a national movement
towards implementing reforms that more explicitly confronted the practice and conditions
of slavery.43

In an important treatise outlining many of the ideological positions that would
later come to deﬁne the mobilization efforts waged by the Anti-Slavery Society during
the late 18205 and early 1830s, Thomas Clarkson vehemently argued “There is not one
English law which gives a man a right to the liberty of any of his fellow creatures.” He
insisted that as a result of their enslavement, “Africans or Creoles, have been unjustly
deprived of their rights,” and contended that the necessary redress was “to compensate to
these wretched beings for ages of injustice” and “to train up these subjects of our past
injustice and tyranny for an equal participation with ourselves in the blessings of liberty
and the protection of the law.”44 Although his appeal came laced with paternalistic
overtures towards enslaved black workers, Clarkson’s writings no doubt challenged the
legalities of slaveholding, insinuated that slavery was a form of disfranchisement and
suggested that emancipation was the only tenable recourse that would lead to the
restoration of rights and the full incorporation of enslaved black laborers into the imperial

citizenry.

 

‘3 David Turley, The Culture ofEnglish Anti-Slavery, 1780-1860 (London: Routledge, 199]), 47-56;
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 421-423.

“ Thomas Clarkson, “Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British
Colonies, With a View to Their Ultimate Emancipation” in Slavery Abolition and Emancipation: Writings
in the British Romantic Period, Vol.3 ed. Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999, original
1823), 99. Italics included as they appear in reprinted version.

33

 

 

Drawing upon a language similar to Clarkson’s emphasizing the actionable nature
of slavery under British law, on 15 May 1823, Thomas Buxton petitioned the British
Parliament to pass a motion for gradual emancipation throughout the Empire arguing that
“the state of Slavery is repugnant to the principles of the British Constitution and of the

Christian Religion.”45

While Buxton’s motion failed to garner the necessary support in
the House of Commons, his efforts along with those of the larger anti-slavery movement
in Britain did succeed in altering the terrain surrounding the contentious debate over the
future of slavery in the colonies. In response to Buxton’s motion, the House unanimously
adopted the somewhat conciliatory resolutions proposed by Conservative leader George
Canning which expressed a Parliamentary commitment towards ameliorating the
conditions of colonial slavery in an effort to gradually effect “a progressive improvement
in the character of the Slave Population” and “prepare them for participation in those
Civil Rights and Privileges which are enjoyed by other Classes of his Majesty’s
Subjects.”46

With the passage of the 1823 House of Commons resolutions, the idea that

abolition would serve as the process through which enslaved black workers of Empire

 

‘5 Substance of The Debate in the House of Commons, on the 15'” May, 1823, on a Motion for the
Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (London: Society for the
Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, 1823), xxvi, University of
London’s Goldsmith’s Library Collection, Duke University Microforms, Durham, NC.

’6 Report From the Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions: With
Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, James Robert George Graham, Chair, House of Commons
Papers, Paper #721, Vol/Page: xx.1 dated 11 August 1832; Substance of The Debate in the House of
Commons, on the 15'” May, 1823, on a Motion for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery
Throughout the British Dominions (London: Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery
Throughout the British Dominions, 1823), xxviii, University of London’s Goldsmith’s Library Collection,
Duke University Microforms, Durham, NC; Roger Anstey, “The Pattern of British Abolitionism in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” in A nti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger
Anstey eds. Christine Bolt and Seymour Descher (Kent, England: William Dawson & Sons, 1980), 24;
Demetrius Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the US. South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 49.

34

might acquire civil rights and gain equal membership within a broad community of
imperial subjects became a repeating motif of anti-slavery rhetoric and political activity.
In numerous resolutions and petitions submitted to the House of Commons in the late
18203 up until the 1833——when Parliament ﬁnally passed the Abolition of Slavery Act—
anti-slavery supporters reiterated the premise of the 1823 Resolution and referenced the
ways that the abolition of slavery represented a gateway to black citizenship within the
imperial community.

At a meeting of anti-slavery supporters in the town of Leicester in December of
1823, members of the Committee of the Leicester Auxiliary of the Anti-Slavery society
resolved that their support of the gradual abolition of slavery was roused by feelings of
“sorrow and shame, that there are eight hundred thousand persons in a state of personal
Slavery. . .deprived of those civil privileges and religious advantages to which, as our
fellow-subjects, they are entitled.”47 Invoking a similar theme, petitioners ﬁ'om the
Surrey Anti-Slavery Society argued in 1826 that “British subjects, born within the King’s
allegiance, and innocent of all crime, cannot be deprived of their civil existence, and
reduced to a state of slavery.” In turn, they regarded, “the slavery of their fellow subjects
in the West Indies as an outrage upon all justice.”48 Whereas anti-slavery petitioners
frequently referenced enslaved black workers of the Empire as “fellow subjects”, this sort
of phraseology was likely meant to describe the potentialities of an imperial community
without slavery, and in most instances, probably functioned mostly as a discursive

strategy to mobilize anti-slavery sentiment in Britain, rather than a moniker to

 

’7 Proceedings of the Leicester Auxiliary Anti-Slavery Society, 17 December 1823, Goldsmith’s Library
Collection, Duke University Microforms, Durham, NC.

4’ “Surrey Antislavery Petition,” A nti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 19 (December, 1826): 287-288.

35

 

acknowledge a perceived set of shared interests between enslaved black colonials and the
metropolitan community. However, what is clear is that anti-slavery petitioners viewed
the slave status of enslaved black workers as the most salient marker preventing them
from accessing the privileges of citizenship and equal justice ideally shared by all
members of the imperial body politic.

Upon the establishment of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Society for the Promoting
the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1824, members unanimously adopted a resolution
supporting gradual emancipation conceding that “the negro slave is not now in a
condition to receive the blessing of liberty,” but that “improvement in his moral
character, by the communication of civil privileges and religious light. . .will enable him
in due time to take his just and equal rank, as a free man, among his fellow subjects of the
British crown.”49 Reiterating the connection between abolition and the acquisition of
rights for enslaved black workers as alluded to by the Newcastle Upon the Tyne
petitioners, in 1825, a committee of the Aberdeen Anti-Slavery Society urged supporters
to continue local efforts to petition Parliament to support amelioration policies which
might preclude abolition “in behalf of our enslaved fellow-subjects; praying that they
may be admitted to full participation in those civil rights and privileges, and to all those
moral and religious advantages, enjoyed by the rest of his Majesty’s subjects.”50

It is important to point out that throughout the late 18203 the anti-slavery

movement in Britain continued to embrace the gradualist tradition adapted during the

movement to abolish the slave trade which according to Thomas Clarkson viewed

 

’9 First Report of the Committee of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Society for Promoting the Gradual Abolition
of Slavery, 16 June 1824, Goldsmith’s Library Collection, Duke University Microforms, Durham, NC.

50 “Aberdeen Antislavery Society” Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 1 (June, 1825): 23-24.

36

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emancipation as “a work of time.”5 I As a result, anti-slavery factions focused the
majority of their attentions towards effecting amelioration policies and other reforms
which might lay the foundations for the eventual abolition of slavery. To be sure,
although the larger institutionalized anti-slavery movement had yet to fully embrace a
campaign urging Parliament to consider immediate abolition, as illustrated in the
petitions issued by anti-slavery supporters in Leicester, Surrey, Newcastle Upon the Tyne
and Aberdeen, what clearly resonates in the evolving language of anti-slavery is the
notion that slavery operated a as fundamental barrier to black enﬁanchisement.
Therefore, it is useful to note the ways in which the rhetoric of anti-slavery functioned as
a critical discursive space where the idea that the reform, and ultimate abolition of
slavery would entail a move towards the extension of black citizenship gained public
credence, even if abolitionists gave little serious consideration to the practicalities of full
citizenship for enslaved black workers as a condition of emancipation.52
In November of 1825, residents of the county of Norfolk formed a petition to be
presented to the House of Commons noting that slavery “degrades nearly eight hundred
thousand of our fellow men to the condition of chattels,” which petitioners viewed as
“utterly inconsistent with the unalienable natural rights of men--with the benevolent

provisions of our holy religion, and with the glorious principles of the British

constitution, which ought to secure to all his Majesty’s subjects, in whatever situation, a

 

5' Thomas Clarkson, “Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British
Colonies, With a View to Their Ultimate Emancipation,” in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation ed.
Debbie Lee, 85.

52 Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 422-423, 436. For a detailed discussion of the transition
from gradualism to irnmediatism in British anti-slavery thought see David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of
Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49, 2
(September, 1962): 209-230;

37

 

full participation in the beneﬁts of even-handed justice and equal laws.”53 By 1831,
when the anti-slavery movement had made a decisive transition from supporting gradual
reform policies to advocating immediate abolition, the manner in which abolitionists
framed the institution of slavery and its impact on enslaved workers in their petitions to
Parliament remained consistent with those issued during the 18203. Reminiscent of
Norfolk petitioners in 1825, in April of 1831, petitioners from the Society of Friends
submitted an appeal to the House of Commons on behalf of “their fellow-subjects of the
Aﬁican race” in which they described the continuation of slavery as “a direct violation of
the inalienable rights of every human being, conferred upon him by the Almighty Parent
of the Universe.” The petitioners explained that they regarded enslaved black workers as
“equal objects with ourselves,” and urged that “as British subjects alike” the enslaved
were “entitled to the protection of the law, in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property,
as secured to us by our excellent constitution.”54
James Walvin has noted that discourses relating to the “rights of man” displayed
in the 1825 Norfolk petition and the 1831 petition from the Society of Friends remained
key themes of British anti-slavery campaigns dating from the late eighteenth century.
Walvin found that it was not uncommon for anti-slavery supporters to speak of slaves as
‘black Englishmen’ entitled to the same rights and privileges extended to all British
subjects. He contended that this particular characteristic of anti-slavery rhetoric—

reﬂected to a large extent in anti-slavery petitions during the 18203 and 18303—wa3

rooted in and certainly entangled with a similar political vernacular steeped in working

 

53“Antislavery Meeting and Petition at Norwich,” Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 6 (November, 1825): 57-
58.

5" “Abolition of Slavery,” London Times 6 April 1831.

38

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class radicalism.55 In considering Walvin’s argument, it is important to note that while
the language of inalienable rights was indeed employed by working class movements
which would later crystallize during the nineteenth century under democratic reform
initiatives including Chartism and the Anti-Com League, middle and upper class elites
dominated the leadership and represented the more politically inﬂuential sects of the
institutionalized component of the British anti-slavery movement. Patricia Hollis, has
argued that although the anti-slavery movement might have aroused and collided with
radical working class interests, in its institutional form during the late 18203 and early
18303, it “attracted little working-class support, much working-class indifference, and
considerable working-class hostility.” 56 While Hollis presents a strong case supporting
the notion that working class radicals viewed abolition as an experiment of capitalist
elites which would further the economic exploitation of both black and white workers, it
is equally important to consider that anti-slavery and its accompanying language of rights
constituted a critical element of a broader reform impulse during the late 18203 and early

18303 that engaged a wide spectrum of the British public.57

 

55 James Walvin, “The Rise of British Popular Sentiment For Abolition, 1787-1832,” in Anti-Slavery,
Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey eds. Christine Bolt and Seymour Dresher (Kent,
England: William Dawson and Sons, 1980), 155. A similar argument regarding the relationship between
anti-slavery discourses of rights and working class activism has also been asserted in Seymour Drescher,
From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of A tlantic Slavery (New York: New
York University Press, 1999), 67.

56 Patricia Hollis, “Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform” in Anti-
Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger A nstey eds. Christine Bolt and Seymour
Dresher (Kent, England: William Dawson and Sons, 1980), 295, 302-311.

’7 The broader political and social reform culture in which the movement to abolish slavery developed in
England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is discussed at length in Turley, The
Culture of English Anti-Slavery, 1 780-1860.. See also Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery:
British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 96, 145-
146; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 443-450.

39

Seymour Drescher and Robin Blackburn have noted that while the middle classes
may have engineered the institutional component of anti-slavery, the movement to
abolish slavery had an appeal that traversed all classes and sectors of British society
during the early nineteenth century.58 Just as middle class reformers and political elites
co-opted discourses of rights manufactured and understood by the working class masses,
they situated anti-slavery within a broader national reform agenda culminating in the
passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which ultimately represented a move towards
the expansion of the political rights of citizenship, including the franchise and
Parliamentary representation. In the process, as Seymour Drescher has explained, anti-
slavery petitioning became a medium through which British abolitionists both affirmed
metropolitan intellectual traditions of civil liberty and actively participated in critiquing
the chasm between civic ideals and social realities as part of a larger domestic reform
moment.59

Alongside the petitions of anti-slavery supporters in Britain, Parliament also
received requests from free people of color in the colonies which underscored the ways
that citizenship was a central element characterizing the ways that they envisioned and
hoped to actualize the meaning of their freedom. In petitions presented to the British
Parliament in June of 1829 free people of color in Jamaica requested that they be

extended “the common rights and privileges of British subjects.”60 Historian Gad

 

5’ Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 443-444; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 144-145.

59 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 143-145. For more on the Great Reform Act of 1832 see
Eric J. Evans, The Great Reform Act of 1832 (London: Routledge Press, 1994) and John A. Phillips and
Charles Wetherell, “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England,” The
American Historical Review 100, 2 (April, 1995): 411-43.

6° “Civil Rights of the Free Blacks and Coloured Inhabitants of Our Colonies” Anti-Slavery Monthly
Reporter 49 (June, 1829): 15-16.

40

 

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Heuman has noted that after the Haitian Revolution—which in the eyes of many free
people of color in Jamaica served as an example of triumph for their St. Domingue
counterparts— free people of color in Jamaica consistently organized to pressure both
local assemblies and the imperial Government for the rights and privileges of British
citizenship granted to white colonials. Heuman has further contended that by the 18203
and early 18303, this oftentimes placed free people of color in a precarious position as
they attempted to negotiate improvements in their legal status with local whites who
remained wedded to preserving slavery while simultaneously recruiting the aid of British
reformers committed to the eventual abolition of slavery.61

In response to this growing concern among free people of color and their
increasing ability to gain a wider audience for their cause in British reform circles,
Parliament issued orders in the Crown colonies of St. Lucia and Trinidad in January and
March of 1829 respectively stating, “every law, ordinance, or proclamation in force
within that island, whereby His Majesty’s subjects of African birth or descent, being of
free condition, are subject to any disability, civil or military, to which His Majesty’s
subjects of European birth or descent are not subject shall be, and the same and each of
them are and is for ever repealed and annulled”. By November of 1830, the Jamaican
Assembly passed similar legislation in hopes that free people of color might solidify a

local proslavery coalition as the abolitionist movement in Britain gained strength and

 

6' Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1 792-1865
(Greenwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 24-35. See also Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial
Slavery, 425-426 and Mavis Christine Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A
Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloured of Jamaica (London: Associated University Press, 1976).

41

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shiﬁed towards a program of immediate abolition. 62 Just as anti-slavery reformers in
Britain articulated their ideas of abolition as a route to black citizenship, the British
Parliament’s concessions to free people of color began to outline the ideological
parameters of the rights of citizenship and effectively asserted the possibility that
ﬁeedom from slavery might entail a form of racial democracy where the rights,
obligations and privileges of citizenship applied equally across the boundaries of race.

Although the British Empire did not abolish slavery until 1834, among the
enslaved community, the idea of one’s right of freedom from slavery, as an imperial
mandate, existed well before Parliament’s vote on the Emancipation Act in 1833. While
the centrifuge of British anti-slavery activity ﬂourished in the metropole, the movement
and its ideological currents were shaped within and disseminated throughout a
transnational imperial community that included, the elite, middle, and working classes of
metropolitan society, colonial ofﬁcials, planters, and enslaved men and women. In
examining the transnational dialogues concerning abolition in the years preceding
emancipation, it is important to emphasize how the language of the anti-slavery
movement in Britain cultivated, appropriated and supplied enslaved communities with
universalizing discourses of imperial citizenship to frame arguments opposing slavery.
Subsequently, enslaved communities adapted and recreated these same discourses for
their own strategic purposes to not only resist slavery, but also to construct, articulate and
actualize their own visions of black freedom.

On Monday, August 18, 1823 some thirty thousand enslaved insurgents from over

ﬁfty estates rose in opposition to the plantocracy on the island of Demerara.

 

6‘ “Rights Granted to the Enﬁanchised in the Crown Colonies,” The A nti-Slavery Reporter 70 (November,
1830): 457-458; “Free Blacks and People of Colour” Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 50 (July, 1829): 31-
32; Heuman, Between Black and White, 41, 50.

42

Communicating their intentions to avoid violent confrontations, Demerara rebels
informed the colonial Governor that their cause was driven by a simple desire for “Our
rights.” They insisted that forthcoming reforms designed to ameliorate the conditions of
their enslavement “were of no comfort to them,” because “God has made them of the
same ﬂesh and blood as the whites, [and] that they were tired of being Slaves to them.”
They contented that their “good King had sent Orders that they should be free and they
would not work any more?”3 In July of 1823, Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary, had
issued the ﬁrst amelioration circulars which included provisions banning Sunday
markets, prohibiting the ﬂogging of enslaved females and outlawing the use of the whip
as a tool of punishment. In addition, the new policies appointed a Protector of Slaves
responsible for maintaining an ofﬁcial record of slave punishments and freed all female
children born after 1823. Although the amelioration policies signaled the imperial
govemment’s intentions to reform the institution of slavery, planters’ efforts to
circumvent these orders along with the measures’ failure to explicitly address abolition
left much to be desired for enslaved communities. 64
Two days into the insurrection, when confronted by the lead commander of the

local British militia, who unsuccessfully attempted to persuade a gathering of roughly

two thousand rebels at the Batchelor’s Adventure plantation to lay down their arms, the

 

(’3 Extract of Letter from Major General Murray to Earl Bathurst dated 24 August 1823 in Correspondence
with Governors of Colonies in West Indies Respecting Insurrections of Slaves, 1822-1824, House of
Commons Papers, Session 1824, Paper No. (333), Vol/Page XXIII. 465; Also quoted in Michael Craton,
Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1997), 314; Edwin
Angel Wallbridge, The Demerara Marytr: Memoirs of Rev. John Smith, Missionary to Demerara (New
York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; original, 1848), 89.

6’ Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean, 289, 314; Michael Craton, “Emancipation
From Below?: The Role of the British West Indian Slaves in the Emancipation Movement, 1816-1834, ” in
Out of Slavery: Abolition and After ed. Jack Hayward (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 1 15-116; Eric
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 197-198.

43

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insurgents insisted, “Massa treat us too bad; keep us at work on Sundays; no let us go to
chapel; no give us time to work in our garden; they beat us too much; and we hear for
true, that the great buckra (the King), at home, give us our freedom for true.65 As
Demerara insurgents justiﬁed their opposition to the conditions of their enslavement, they
did so in a language that invoked imperial authority to validate their claims to freedom.
To be sure, the King, as the consummate symbol of the Empire represented the progenitor
of their right to not only challenge the terms of their enslavement, but also to assert the
freedom to be recognized as members of the same imperial community of subjects as
white colonials.

It is clear from the rhetoric employed by Demerara insurgents that although
colonial planters and authorities oftentimes impeded the implementation of amelioration
policies, word of the British Govemment’s intentions to reform slavery in response to
growing pressure from anti-slavery factions generated a plethora of transatlantic
discussion concerning the fate of colonial slavery. According to English missionary John
Smith, a resident in Demerara, conversations among slaveholding colonists concerning
the activities of the Anti-Slavery Society and Parliament pervaded almost every corridor
of society—oftentimes provoking rousing debates even at dinner tables. Smith noted that
before long, the same enslaved domestics serving food and wine to their indignant
owners, came to hear of the “frequently exaggerated” rumor that “something had been
done at home for the beneﬁt of the people,” that quite possibly through some “ ‘New

Law’. . .the King and the Parliament of England had made them free?“5 In addition to

 

’5 The testimony of Reverend John Smith notes that the term “ ‘Buckra’ is the term in the negro dialect for
a whit person.” Wallbridge, The Demerara Martyr, 91.

6" Wallbridge, The Demerara Martyr, 72.

44

being privy to conversations between slaveholders, Julius Scott’s groundbreaking study
on transatlantic communication and black resistance in the eighteenth century
demonstrates that an intricate labyrinth of dialogues between enslaved communities,
sailors, maroons, soldiers and merchants disseminated a wealth of news regarding
political developments in European metropoles. Scott shows that these exchanges
oftentimes fueled rumors of emancipation and contributed to the development of a
“culture of expectation.” Scott argues that this “culture of expectation” played a critical
role in forming an undercurrent of opposition to the system of slavery and inherently
shaped black visions of freedom.67
Less than a decade after the Demerara revolt, Edward Hylton recalled listening to
the spell-binding oratory of rebel leader Samuel Sharpe rallying enslaved insurgents in
Jamaica to assert their claims to freedom. According to Hylton, Sharpe spoke of “what
he had read both in the English and colonial newspapers, showing that both the king and
the English people wished the negroes to be emancipated and expressed his belief that the
‘ free paper’ had already been sent out and that the only obstacles which they had to
Overcome, in order to secure their freedom, were the obstinacy and selﬁshness of the
planters.” Sharpe insisted, “the king had determined to put and end to slavery; and the

negroes had, therefore, nothing to fear from the opposition of British troops, if they

determined to take their freedom.”68

 

67 Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the
Haitian Revolution,” Ph.D . Dissertation, Duke University, 1986.

6’ Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery: A Narrative of F acts and Incidents Which Occurred in a
British Colony, During the Two Year Immediately Preceding Negro Emancipation, 3rd ed. (Coconut Grove,

FL: Dewar’s Limited Edition Publishers, 1972; original, 1853), 123.

45

On Christmas Day 1831 Samuel Sharpe and eventually some sixty thousand
enslaved insurrectionists participated in one of the largest slave uprisings in the British
colonies. What began as an organized campaign promoting passive resistance evolved
into armed rebellion resulting in over two hundred enslaved insurgent deaths, at least 340
executions, including rebel leader Samuel Sharpe, and the institution of martial law in
Jamaica until February of 1832. As in Demerara, enslaved insurgents in Jamaica cloaked
their claims to freedom in a revolutionary language of rights perceived to have been
conferred by imperial authority and yet ignored by local planters. 69 Throughout the late
1 8203, the Colonial Assembly in Jamaica consistently attempted to thwart the
intervention of British government reforms on matters concerning policies aimed at
aIneliorating the conditions of slavery, even deﬁantly approving legislation reducing the
number of days of respite granted to slaves after Christmas in the month preceding the
insurrection.7o In a report to the Colonial Assembly following the 1831 Jamaican
uprising, one observer alleged that metropolitan debates over slavery and “false and
Wicked reports” circulated by the Anti-Slavery Society as having calciﬁed a “delusive
CXpectation, produced among the whole of the slave population. . .that they were to be
free after Christmas; and, in the event of freedom being withheld from them, ‘they must
be prepared to ﬁght for it.”’7| Even though neither the King nor the British Parliament

had issued any such order providing for the emancipation of slaves in the colonies by the

 

69 Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom, 317; Gad Heuman “From Slavery to Freedom: Black in the
Nineteenth-Century British West Indies” in Black Experience and the Empire eds. Philip Morgan and Sean
Hawkins, The Black Experience and the Empire, 146-147; Abigail Bakan, Ideology and Class C onﬂict in
Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 57-58.

70 Richard Hart, Slaves Who A bolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion, vol.2 (Kingston: University of the
West Indies Press, 1985), 244-245; Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom, 316

71 Henry Bleby, Death of Struggles, 107.

46

time of the 1831 Jamaican revolt, it is clear that enslaved insurrectionists interpreted
political developments in both metropolitan Britain and the colonies within a widespread
climate of anticipation fueled by the circulation of anecdotal references and rumors
concerning British intentions regarding emancipation.72
This widening chasm between metropolitan politics—deﬁned by a growing cadre
of support for immediate emancipation—and colonial plantocracies’ efforts to preserve
slavery incited a whirl of speculation on both sides of the issue about the prospects of
emancipation as an imperial directive. To be sure, rumors that linked emancipation with
developments driven by British metropolitan interests served as vital conduits through
which black people enslaved by the institutions of the Empire could also envision that
same Empire as a means of claiming their rights to freedom and simultaneously crafting a
position for themselves within an imperial community of British subjects. In a study of
the circulation of rumors surrounding emancipation in the Confederate states of the
American South during the Civil War era, Stephen Hahn argues that among subaltem
communities, “rumours can be essential means of conducting cultural and political
affairs: of establishing identities, interpreting information and actions, and entering the
terrain of public discourse.”73 In both the Demerara and the Jamaican revolts of the early
nineteenth century, it is clear that British support for reform and rumors of emancipation

ﬁrnctioned as an important vehicle for the enslaved to interpret and articulate the meaning

of their position in the British Empire. In doing so, not only did they challenge planter

 

72 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 151-154; Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 14.; Abigail
Bakan, Ideology and Class Conﬂict in Jamaica, 58-60.

73 Stephen Hahn, “ ‘Extravagant Expectations’ of Freedom: Rumor, Political Struggle, and the Christmas
Insurrection Scare of 1865 in the American South,” Past and Present (November, 1997): 124.

47

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power and white supremacy by constructing an argument for their right to control the
terms of their labor but also, in the process, they expanded and transformed the
boundaries of British subjecthood. Appropriating a discourse of rights grounded in the
authority of the British imperial state as an instrument to facilitate emancipation from
below, enslaved abolitionists simultaneously made claims on a conception of British
subjechood that transcended race and place. Just as debates over the ﬁxture of slavery and
the prospects for emancipation among British intellectuals throughout the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century revealed that rethinking slavery entailed reenvisioning the
relationship of black people to the British state, and consequentially, the imperial
community of subjects, when emancipation arrived this too would remain an essential
question shaping black men and women’s post-emancipation struggles to deﬁne the
meaning of their freedom.74
Defining Freedom and Black Citizenship After Emancipation

In 1848, merely a decade after the Jamaican Assembly ended the apprenticeship
system as the ﬁnal transition into full ofﬁcial emancipation, Governor Charles Edward
Grey issued a widely circulated edict emphasizing the inextricable ties between freedom
and the rights, privileges and obligations of membership in a British community of
subjects. Writing in large part to undermine rumors of reenslavement and quell
rumblings of a planned rebellion among former slaves Grey contended:

The Freedom, which was given to the Negro People of Jamaica, was given

without recall or reserve, and the rights of the Labourers of that Race now

stands on the same foundations as those of the Planter or Proprietor, or

those of the People of England, and are a part of the Constitution of the

Empire. The Crown, to which the allegiance of all its Subjects is equally
due, will afford to all equally the protection of the Laws, and will secure to

 

7’ Christopher Brown, “From Slaves to Subjects,”l l l-l39.

48

all the enjoyment of their rights, and especially that ﬁrst and greatest and
most precious of all rights—their personal freedom.75

Not only did Grey, as the highest ranking local representative of the imperial
Government, outline a binding relationship between ideas of freedom and the promises of
British subjecthood, but perhaps more importantly for the black masses of formerly
enslaved communities, Grey showcased a language of possibilities legitimated by
imperial authority that might potentially collapse overlapping boundaries of race, place
and class under the banner of a shared allegiance to the British Crown. To be sure, just as
Grey invoked a democratic discourse of imperially recognized rights and entitlements, he
also clearly acknowledged and simultaneously attempted to subvert the radical potential
of this same ideology of universal male subj ecthood. He added:

Whilst this Warranty and Assurance of their Freedom, and their Rights, is

willingly given to the Negro People of Jamaica. . .That as good Subjects of

Her Majesty they will abhor and prevent the employment of Violence or

Threatening Language to others, and that in the enjoyment of the perpetual

and Constitutional Liberty which is gladly recognized as belonging to

them, they will abstain from all Riotous and Rude Behavior, which might

alarm the minds of Peaceable Persons; and will endeavor, by Sobemess

and Steadiness of Demeanor, and by Prudence of Conduct and of

Language, to shew that they are worthy to sustain the Character of

freemen, and to be the Fathers of Free Families.76

It is important to note the overarching ideological currents shaping the
presentation of Governor Grey’s provocative statements. Although the legalities of
emancipation in Jamaica had crystallized with the passage of legislation abolishing

slavery in the Empire in 1834 and the ending of the apprenticeship system in 1838, the

terms by which emancipation might gain substantive and material value from the

 

7’ Quoted ﬁ'om Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti
and Jamaica (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 178-179.

76 Ibid,, 178-179.

49

 

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perspective of the formerly enslaved themselves had yet to be fully negotiated. Thomas
Holt has persuasively argued that the liberal ideology espoused by British elites focused
largely on the ways that emancipation would provide for a nominally free wage labor
force that still operated within and sustained the interests of a white male elite
plantocracy. Holt emphasized that in the minds of British supporters of abolition,
emancipation authorized the masses of ex-slaves to exercise their freedom and marginal
social mobility to the extent to which they would maintain preexisting social, economic,

77 Governor Grey’s decree highlights this peculiar paradox of

and political hierarchies.
British elite liberalism and its conception of the position of black people in the Empire.
While his words clearly illustrate the enabling ideological characteristics of British elite
constructions of emancipation—access to universal rights based on a shared subjecthood
that transcended race, place, and class, equality before the law and a sense of individual
liberty—at the same time, they most certainly established concrete boundaries for the
exercise of black freedom. According to the description provided by Governor Grey,
black freedom could exist only as it remained conﬁned to a set of prescribed codes of
conduct that inherently attempted to contain the possibilities of revolutionary change to
the status quo. However, despite British liberals’ desires to construct a model of black
freedom and Empire which enabled formerly enslaved communities in so much as it
constrained their abilities to dismantle the social structure that sanctioned their
enslavement, freed men and women throughout the Caribbean colonies consistently

challenged the limits of British liberalism. In doing so, oftentimes ex-slaves employed

the same democratic language of Empire implored by British liberal ideology, just as they

 

77 Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 13-53.

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transformed, reappropriated, and remapped its boundaries, in their pursuits to actualize
their own visions of emancipation.

During the early post-emancipation period, one of the major controversies
encompassing the entire island waged between the imperial Government, the Jamaican
planter elite and freed people involved the uses of large tracts of uncultivated,
underdeveloped and oftentimes abandoned ‘backlands.’ William A. Green has noted that
between 1832 and 1847 some 465 coffee estates alone were abandoned amounting to
more than 300,000 acres of vacant land for redevelopment and new settlements.78
Whereas the black masses viewed access to land for provision grounds and greater
economic autonomy as a means of substantiating their freedom, Government authorities
and local planters recognized the possibilities that black claims to land might eventually
undermine not only the economic basis of white male elite authority, but perhaps just as
signiﬁcant, the social and political hierarchies overdetermined by race and class
structuring colonial society.

In addition to providing opportunities to generate earnings and subsistence in
lieu of the demands of the plantation economy, land also provided a means for greater
access to civic participation and political power. According to the provisions of the
Franchise Act of 1840, men had to either own land valued at least six pounds, pay or
receive rent on property valued at thirty pounds or pay three pounds in direct taxes to
become eligible to vote. Qualiﬁcations for candidates were even more restrictive.
Assemblyrnen had to demonstrate proof of a net annual income from estate property of

180 pounds, possess land valued at 1800 pounds or possess assets worth 3000 pounds.

 

78 William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, I 83 0-
1865 (Oxford: (Clarendon Press, 1976), 300.

51

Over time these restrictions became more stringent. Coupled with increasing poll taxes,
by 1863, only 1,457 males out of a total population of roughly 450,000 voted for the
overwhehningly white planter-controlled Colonial Assembly which abolished the
constitution in 1865. 79

Despite suggestions by the Colonial Governor that “Crown lands” remain solely
under imperial authority, in September of 1836, the Colonial Office granted control over
these estates to the Colonial Assembly. Supported by the Colonial Secretary, local policy
makers set minimum prices for the lands and sold parcels to the highest bidder. In
addition, the local Assembly instituted a number of policies including increased land
taxes and more expensive procedures for securing legal titles for purchased lands which,
in combination with escalating prices for land, formed successful barriers to black land
ownership. Behind these measures resided the underlying premise that access to land,
and in particular the rise of a signiﬁcant class of black landowners would surely
undermine the process by which a black laboring majority might become economically
independent from the demands of white-controlled plantations, and therefore remain a
subordinate player in Jamaican politics. 80

Although the conciliatory posture of the imperial Government in regards to the
implementation of these measures in the colony clearly indicated that the uses of these
lands securely fell within the regulatory prerogatives of local authorities, the idea that

these lands were “Crown lands” served as a basis for black resistance to the post-

emancipation plantocracy and shaped black visions of the promises of emancipation. Just

 

79 Don Robotham, “‘The Notorious Riot’: The Socio-Economic and Political Basis of Paul Bogle’s
Revolt,” Working Paper (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press for the Institute of Social and
Economic Research, 1981), 41-42; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 216-217.

8° Don Robotham “‘The Notorious Riot,’” 31-36; Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 73-74.

52

as imperial and local authorities recognized that access to land could potentially alter
their prescribed course of black freedom by creating greater economic opportunities that
might distance former slaves ﬁ'om the interests of a white—controlled plantation economy,
freed men and women also view land as a means of bolstering the quality and economic
value of their freedom. According to Thomas Holt, throughout the 18503 and 18603 the
Jamaican masses buttressed numerous petitions for economic justice by asserting their
rights of access to land. Holt noted that oftentimes laborers made “a direct connection
between popular notions of Crown land, public land, and the people’s land.” He argued
that “peasants grounded their right to the land in the logically consistent belief that
abandoned properties should revert to the queen, thereby returning it to the public
domain,” and in the minds of Jamaican masses clearly, “They were the public.”8| In this
sense, “Crown lands” became a symbol of public space and consequently claims to these
imperial lands represented vital instruments whereby the black working classes deﬁned
and clariﬁed, in their own terms, their relationship to and membership within a broader
imperial public; therefore, the right to land represented a crucial means of asserting one’s
position in the Empire.

Although a number of legal cases involving disputed lands emerged during the
18503 and 18603 challenging the notion that uncultivated or unused “Crown lands” could
be occupied and or claimed as public property by virtue of being a part of the imperial
domain, no single event dramatized issues related to land access by a black majority
colonial public than the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion orchestrated in large part through the
efforts of Paul Bogle and other local black leaders. In a letter sent to Governor Edward

Eyre on October 10, 1865 Paul Bogle and other representatives of the Jamaican laboring

 

8' Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 269

53

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masses petitioned the imperial govemment for protection against an “outrageous assault”
ordered by local magistrates culminating in a violent confrontation between local
protesters and police. According to the letter, the conﬂict had resulted in the dispatch of
warrants “against innocent persons” which dissenters were “compelled to resist.” In their
appeal to the Queen for protection against local authorities, Bogle and his associates
argued, “we are Her Majesty’s loyal subjects; which protection, if refused we will be
compelled to put our shoulders to the wheels, as we have been imposed upon for a period
of twenty-seven years, with due obeisance to the laws of our Queen and country, and we
can no longer endure the same.”82 One day later, Bogle and his compatriots—the
majority of whom were men and women of the black peasantry including plantation
workers and small freeholders—launched a mass insurgency organized around a matrix
proletarian issues that had become symptomatic of the early post-emancipation period
including depressed wages, unemployment, high taxes, unequal justice, and most
essential, access to land. 83

On 11 October 1865, Bogle, a small farmer and Baptist deacon from Stony Gut,
lead a parade of several hundred men and women to Morant Bay into a violent
confrontation with local police, military forces and other local authorities. Over the
course of the following days reports estimated that some ﬁfteen hundred to two thousand
local men and women including estate workers, small land owners, farmers, traders,

craftsmen, domestics, mothers, fathers, churchgoers, and a variety of other segments of

 

’2 House of Commons.“Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission, 1866, Part 1.” Parliamentary Papers 1866
Cmd. [3683], vol. 30, p. 14; Henry Bleby, The Reign of Terror: A Narrative of F acts Concerning Ex-
Governor Eyre, George William Gordon and the Jamaica Atrocities (London: William Nichols, 1866), 38;
Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, p.297, 459; Gad Heuman, The Killing Time, 6.

33 Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 297-300; Arvel B. Erikson, “Empire of Anarchy: The Jamaica

Rebellion of 1865,” Journal of Negro History 44 (April, 1959): 101-102; Don Robotham, “‘The Notorious
Riot,”’ 50-64; Henry Bleby, The Reign of Terror, 37-38

54

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the black peasantry participated in the insurgency. The outbreak ended as a result of a
violent suppression sanctioned by the Colonial Governor yielding some 439 deaths,
hundreds of ﬂoggings, and approximately 1,000 burned properties.84 Although the
centrality of a heterogeneous black peasantry suggests that the display of black resistance
associated with the Morant Bay campaign amalgamated an array of post-emancipation
concerns, according to the 1866 Jamaican Royal Commission report issued in the wake of
the outbreak, the most salient cause of the rebellion and most crucial common
denominator among Morant Bay insurgents—both lead organizers and rank and ﬁle
participants—involved access to land. The report noted, “Their [the insurgents] great
desire was to obtain land, free from the payment of rent, what are called backlands.”85
Given the complexity of the Jamaican peasantry, quite naturally all of the insurgents
might not necessarily have protested out of a desire for access to land without any
ﬁnancial obligation; however, given the economic, political and social value attached to
land, it is most certain that land was indeed an important common thread shaping the
frustrated expectations of rebels.

Just days before the outbreak Paul Bogle and a host of other observers sat at the
Morant Bay courthouse during the trial of Lewis Miller who had been charged with
trespassing on the property of James Williams. The Miller case attracted a great deal of
attention from the local black community, in part because the case indirectly hinged on

the right of the working class black masses to access and make claims upon uncultivated

lands. According to Williams, Lewis Miller had unlawﬁllly used his land to graze horses.

 

8" Gad Heuman, ‘The Killing Time’, 3-30; Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 297-302.
'5 House of Commons, “Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission, 1866. Part I,” Parliamentary Papers

1866 Cmd.[3683] vol. 30, p. 18; Don Robotham, “ ‘The Notorious Riot’, 27; Abigail Bakan, Ideology and
Class Conflict in Jamaica, 85-86.

55

Since Miller had not made any arrangements to rent the land, the local magistrate found
in favor of Williams and ﬁned Miller. Although James Williams brought the case
against Miller, in actuality, Wellwood Maxwell Anderson, a ‘coloured’ assemblyman,
owned the land in dispute, but had decided to lease the property to Williams in 1865. A3
a part of the lease agreement Williams assumed a number of subtenants and consequently
inherited a contentious relationship with a number of occupants, including Lewis Miller,
with no formal recognized claims to the land. In 1858 Anderson had won a similar case
of trespass against a group of inhabitants occupying the land with no ofﬁcial tenancy.
Foreshadowing the verdict of the 1865 case, the ﬁnal judgement favored Anderson’s
legal rights of ownership rather than the informal claims of the occupants. Although the
court ordered the settlers to vacate the land, many resisted basing their rights of
settlement on the premise that “the land was free, and the estate belonged to the
Queen.”86 From the perspective of the settlers their position in the imperial community as
subjects of the Queen entitled them to appeal to imperial authority to establish their rights
of access to certain areas of land.

Akin to the defense made by occupants on the Anderson estate in 1858, in
directing their petition for redress to the Queen for their grievances against abuses of
power sanctioned local authorities, Paul Bogle and his supporters continued in a broad
tradition of black protest strategies which included the invocation of imperial authority to
make claims upon certain rights and entitlements provided by their membership in an
imperial community of subjects. Just as enslaved rebels on plantations in Demerara and

Jamaica had translated their perceptions of their status as imperial subjects into a tangible

 

8" Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 295-296. Based on accounts taken from the Jamaican Royal
Commission; See also Gad Heuman, ‘The Killing Time’, 4-5.

56

reality of struggle for their right to freedom from enslavement, in the early post-
emancipation era, representations of the Empire persistently resonated as a part of freed
people’s repertoires of resistance and efforts to qualify the meaning of their freedom.

At a meeting organized in conjunction with the Baptist missionary society in
May of 1838 between three and four thousand “praedial” apprentices, or ﬁeldworkers,
gathered resolved:

Whenever it suits the wisdom and policy of our legal Rulers to grant us a

perfectly equal and just participation in the laws, we shall hail the day as

one of our brightest in human prosperity; and although we feel that we are

entitled to all the immunities of free subjects without distinction, yet we

are determined not to betrayed by the schemes of our adversaries into acts

of subordination;87
This type of expression of working class frustration was typical in the aftermath of
emancipation. Public protest meetings and mass demonstrations represented important
vehicles through which the black laboring masses organized to articulate concerns related
to a host of issues including working conditions, low or unpaid wages, access to land,
greater political representation, equal justice, extension of the franchise, high taxes and
the protection of civil rights such as the freedom of association and the right to education.

It is important to point out that just as the nature of black expectations of
emancipation was never static or monolithic, so too did the character of organized black
resistance mechanisms vacillate over time. Mimi Sheller has noted that white Baptist
missionary societies generally arranged the majority of mass public protest meetings held
between 1838 and 1844. Oftentimes this meant that white missionaries often took

responsibility for transcribing petitions which reﬂected a tendency to co-opt the voices of

the masses into a language deﬁned largely by a white writer. However, in the period

 

37Quoted ﬁ'om Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, 150.

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between 1858 and 1865 Sheller insisted that there was a critical shift in the working class
political culture marked by a gradual move towards the development of more
autonomous black public spheres of protest. She argues that these “independent black
publics” evolved “with their own leadership, genres of communication and political

”88 Through a careful analysis of black publics in post—emancipation Jamaica

ideologies.
in the years preceding the Morant Bay uprising, Sheller highlights the ways that mass
meetings and petitioning served as important tools of protest and claim-making.
Likewise, in the process of engaging these forums of black resistance and oppositional
culture, Sheller unearths not only range of concerns deﬁning black men and women
visions of the material value of their freedom, but just as signiﬁcant, her work also
reveals how black people imagined and projected self-inscribed political identities as
ﬁeed people.

Between 1858 and 1865, various sectors of the Jamaican peasant majority
organized and participated in numerous mass public meetings producing a variety of texts
which illuminate their own constructions of their post-emancipation identities.
Responding to the passage of a new electoral law in 1858 increasing voter registration
fees, working class petitioners from the parish of Saint David urged that the Queen
recognize that with the institution of the new policy, “a serious injury is done to the class
of your Majesty’s subjects, who were emancipated from slavery, and invested with the

rights of British Freemen.” Petitioners underscored the fact that the tenets of the

legislation would impede the masses from the most basic right of civic participation and

 

’8 Mimi Sheller, Democracy Aﬁer Slavery, 182-185. Swithin Wilmont’s work on grassroots electoral
politics in St. James parish between 1838 and 1865 makes a similar case regarding Baptist involvement in
political mobilization among the black masses. See Swithin Wilmont, “Politics at the ‘Grassroots’ in Free
Jamaica: St. James, 1838-1865” in Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives From the Caribbean,
Aﬁ-ica and the Aﬁican Diapsora ed. Verene A. Shepherd (New York: Palgrave, 2002): 451-452.

58

continued to concentrate political power “in the hands of an exceedingly small minority
of fellow Citizens,” whom the petitioners noted mostly “belong to that class who but too
recently owned our bodies and souls and who seem loth and backward to accord to us the
equality of political rights secured by the British Constitution, alike to all classes.”89
In another set of petitions addressed to the Queen in 1859 over one thousand
signatories representing ﬁve rural parishes near Kingston groups expressed concerns over
election laws, unpaid wages, harsh working conditions on estates, indentured
immigration from Asia, high taxes, and a corrupt justice system of laborers. Petitioners
insisted that overall the state of colonial policy reﬂected “retrograde steps to a reﬁned
state of slavery or something akin to it.” In formulating their grievances to imperial
authorities workers and small land holders represented by the memorials used a variety of
titles to describe themselves including “loyal and Devoted Subjects”, “Mechanics and
Peasantries,” “sable subjects of Jamaica, of African descent,” “Aﬁican descendents,”
“British subjects” and “black.”90 Taken together, these petitions elucidate a critical
dimension of the identity politics shaping the relationships engendered between Empire
and the Jamaican peasantry in the post-emancipation period. By addressing their appeals
to the Queen, the most potent symbol of Empire and guarantor of imperial rights and
privileges, petitioners automatically positioned themselves within an imperial community
of subjects. Juxtaposing their relationship to Empire with collective identities denoting
race, color, place and class gave even more substance and elasticity to their conceptions

of their own British subjecthood and the boundaries of the larger community of imperial

citizens. To be sure, not only do these labels illustrate the complexity and

 

89 Sheller, Democracy A ﬁer Slavery, 185-6

9° Ibid, 186-7

59

multipositionality of the Jamaican peasantry, but also they allude to a democratic
understanding of the possibilities of an all-encompassing British national identity that
could unite imperial communities under Crown authority across boundaries of race,
color, region and class.

The public petition movement in Jamaica reached a critical apogee during the
spring of 1865 in a series of mass gatherings known as the “Underhill meetings.” In
January of 1865 Edward Underhill, secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society wrote a
widely circulated letter to Edward Cardwell, the Colonial Secretary, in which he reported
on the dismal economic and social conditions facing the overwhelming majority of
Jamaican working classes. Underhill’s letter raised concerns over growing poverty,
starvation, crime, high taxes, unemployment, low wages and unjust tribunals.91
Throughout the early 18603 the island weathered several unanticipated upheavals that
proved devastating to wages, production, and local markets including two years of
drought and ﬂood, falling sugar and nun prices and an overall declining demand for local
exports.92 In response to growing discontent with the actual experience of dire economic
circumstances and deteriorating social conditions, throughout the spring of 1865 a
number of mass public meetings took place across the island, many of which adopted the
grievances listed in Underhill’s letter as a rhetorical platform for protest.

F oreshadowing many of the pressing issues that became characteristic of a

number of the memorials that would emerge out of the “Underhill meetings” in April of

 

9' Edward Bean Underhill, The Trageay of Morant Bay: A Narrative of the Disturbances in the Island of
Jamaica in 1865 (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971; original, 1895), xiii-xviii; Bakan,
Ideology and Class Conﬂict in Jamaica, 75-76.

92Robotham, “‘The Notorious Riot’”, 46-57; Green, British Slave Emancipation, 381-2; Heuman, The
Killing Time, 44; Hall, Free Jamaica, 204; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 263-266.

60

1865 the “Poor People of Jamaica and the parish of St. Ann” had appealed to the Queen
for assistance in renting Crown lands at reduced rates. Petitioners described their
frustrations with low wages, high export taxes on their personal produce, ﬁnding
employment, and securing basic subsistence for dependents. If the Queen agreed to aid
them in their quest to obtain land at reasonable prices petitioners insisted:

we will put our hearts and hands to work and cultivate cotton, coffee,

corn, canes, and tobacco, and other produce. We will form a company for

that purpose, if our Gracious Lady Victoria our Queen will also appoint an

agent to receive such produce as we may cultivate, and give us means of

subsistence while at work.93

Although grassroots political mobilization among the black working class
masses yielded a number of appeals to the Queen and other representatives of the
imperial Government in 1865, the St. Ann’s petition is most notable because of
the response that it garnered from the Colonial Ofﬁce. Writing on behalf of the
Queen in a widely circulated and oft-cited proclamation known as the “Queen’s
Advice” Henry Taylor, a senior clerk in the West India department of the Colonial
Ofﬁce, insisted, “The prosperity of the labouring classes, as well as of all other
classes, depends in Jamaica and in other Countries, upon their working for
Wages.” Taylor argued that by working within the conﬁnes of the plantation
economy as wage-earners laborers would “render the Plantations productive”
which “would enable the Planters to pay them higher Wages.” He concluded that
only through their own efforts of “availing themselves of the means of prospering

that are before them, and not from any such schemes as have been suggested to

them,” might the Jamaican working classes “look for an improvement in their

 

93 Underhill, The Tragedy of Morant Bay, 25-26; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 277; Heuman, The Killing
Time, 48-9; Green, British Slave Emancipation, 383-384; Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, 193; Bakan,
Ideology and Class Conﬂict in Jamaica, 84

61

condition.” Essentially, instead of supporting the Jamaican peasantry’s plight to
maximize their economic possibilities by obtaining land to secure the basic
survival needs of families and generate earning potential aside from, or in
addition to wages paid by estate owners, the attitude of the imperial Government
as reﬂected in the “Queen’s Advice” demonstrated an endorsement of the
perpetual proletarianization of the Jamaican peasantry. 94

The ideological tensions present between the petition issued by the St.
Ann’s parish laborers and the “Queen’s Advice” illuminates a reoccurring motif
in the history of the black experience and the British Empire. At the same time
that the politics of Empire offered black people the possibilities of inclusion in an
egalitarian community of subjects, it also oftentimes rejected their claims to the
rights and privileges of subjecthood based largely on presumptions rooted in
historic hierarchies of race. Emancipation had provided the black majority of
former slaves with an ofﬁcially acknowledged position in the Empire as members
of an imperial community of subjects; however, as noted by Christopher Brown,
“Winning the rights of the subject. . .did not free the liberated from the constraints
of race, or the taint of their former status.”95

What is most striking is that even in their acknowledgement of the
stigmas attached to their blackness and buttressed by their former status as slaves,

freed men and women continued to cultivate a sense of expectation in relation to

the meaning of their identities as British subjects. Membership in an imperial

 

9’ Quoted in Green, British Slave Emancipation, 384-385. See also Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, 193;
Heuman, The Killing Time, 54-5 5; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 277-278; Bakan, Ideology and Class
Conﬂict in Jamaica, 84.

9’ Christopher L Brown, “From Slaves to Subjects,” 139.

62

community of subjects gave them leverage to expect that their emancipation
might allow them to transcend the limits of their race, status and class. Their
images of themselves within the imperial community of subjects oftentimes
provided powerful underpinnings to the resistance strategies that they employed
to counter their marginalization and actualize their own interpretations of
freedom. The St. Ann’s petitioners had invoked their position within the Empire
as an imagined space of expectancy that might potentially collapse the critical
divide between their visions of economic freedom and their lived realities of high
rents, low wages and unemployment. In response, the “Queen’s Advice”
exhibited the very politics of Empire that essentially reinforced the conditions that
threatened and discounted freed people’s ideals of the emancipation that Empire
had legalized. Essentially, at its core, Britain as Empire held out the possibilities
of a trans-regional racial democracy, and yet paradoxically often displayed the
potent realities of social, political and economic exclusion founded upon ideas of
race.

Just as the St. Ann’s petitioners experienced the tensions between their
expectations of an Empire that might provide an ally in their quest to qualify their
freedom and that of an Empire that attempted to keep them resigned to the lowest
rungs of the socio-economic hierarchy, by the mid 19503, Lord Kitchener had also
witnessed striking discrepancies between his vision of imperial London as a space
of belonging and his own feelings of exile as a black migrant in London.
Celebrating the memories of his homeland in the last stanza of a tune titled,

“Sweet Jamaica” recorded in 1952, Lord Kitchener sang,

63

Many West Indians are sorry now,

They left their country and don’t know how,

Some left their jobs and their family,

And determined to come to London city,

Well they are crying, they now regret,

No kind of employment that they can get,

The city of London they have to roam,

They can’t get their passage to go back home.96
Whereas in 1948 Lord Kitchener had assuredly chanted “London is the place for
me,” as he exited the Empire Windrush upon his arrival in Britain, after just a few
years in Britain, his music conveyed his nostalgia for his Caribbean homeland and
a shattered sense of expectation about life in Britain. In “Sweet Jamaica” Lord
Kitchener alluded to many of the themes that would characterize the experiences
of a generation of black migrants in Britain during the postwar period including
the difﬁculties of ﬁnding employment and the problems associated with securing
decent, affordable housing. Perhaps the most disheartening of circumstances
shaping the experiences of black migrants including Lord Kitchener was the
absence of a widespread recognition that as members of the imperial body politic,
they too, like their white metropolitan counterparts possessed the right to belong
in the imperial space of London. Throughout the 19503 and 19603 many of the
struggles waged and endured by black migrant communities in Britain pivoted on
their intent to assert their right to belong by virtue of their membership in the
imperial community of citizens. Therefore, as one considers the myriad of ways
that migrants-—even through the very act of moving to Britain—negotiated the

meaning of their relationship to Empire in the postwar period, it is important to

note that they indeed participated in and reshaped a broader history of race and

 

96 Lord Kitchener, “Sweet Jamaica,” London is the Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, I95 0-
1956 (London: Honest Jon’s Records Ltd, 2002), compact disc recording.

64

Empire in which people of African descent made claims upon, fractured,

expanded and redeﬁned the meaning of British citizenship.

65

1'7. .1 it
ii 511.1
with?

1" ‘ 7f
“‘11“

.,

m

 

CHAPTER TWO
Migration, Race and the Reconstruction of “Civis Britannicus Sum”
In a world in which restrictions on personal movement and immigration have increased
we can still take pride in the fact that a man can say C ivis Britannicus Sum whatever his
colour my be, and we take pride in the fact that he wants and can come to the Mother
Country.
-Henry Hopkins, Colonial Secretary, 1954
No single set of economic, social or political factors can wholly account for the
unprecedented numbers of West Indians who chose Britain as a migration destination in
the early postwar period. For over a decade beginning in the late 19403 successive waves
of people of color migrated from various parts of the Commonwealth, the overwhelming
majority of whom were people of African descent arriving from the Caribbean, and more
speciﬁcally Jamaica. Estimates of the total number of people of color residing in Britain
before 1951 indicate that less than 15,000 resided in various regions, the majority
concentrated in major urban centers including London and Birmingham.98 By 1961 ,
when Parliament considered the ﬁrst in a succession of migration restrictions designed
speciﬁcally to limit the “inﬂux” of Commonwealth migrants, according to the census

reports for England and Wales some 171, 796 Caribbean-bom migrants alone had settled

in Britain. While Commonwealth migration trends would change by the end of the 19603

 

97“ Civis Britannicus Sum” is from the Latin and translated, “I am a British Citizen.” Quoted from Randall

Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act,” Twentieth Century
British History 10, l (1999): 70. This quote is taken from a Parliamentary debate in the House of
Cominons on 5 November 1954.

9‘ RUth Glass, Newcomers, 4.

66

with the expansion of South Asian migration, in 1961 West Indian migrants represented
the overwhelming majority of the total number of people of color in Britain.99

In 1955, Norman Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, commissioned a
govemment-sponsored survey of Jamaican migration to Britain. Manley intended to use
the study to develop services both in Jamaica and Britain that would assist prospective
migrants with preparing for their move and adjusting to life in Britain. In the preface of
the report, its authors explained:

The term ‘migration’ is used throughout the report with reference to the

movement of West Indians to the United Kingdom, rather than

immigration, because the latter term technically should be conﬁned to

movements across political boundaries which involve a possible change in

citizenship. The West Indian is a ‘citizen of the United Kingdom and

Colonies’ according to the British Nationality Act of 1948.100

These introductory remarks offer an important point of departure in situating
postwar black migration from the Caribbean to Britain within the context of the long
history of race and Empire. They articulate a distinct understanding of the nature of
Caribbean migration to Britain—one that entailed movement across spatial, as opposed to
political boundaries—and in the process, they invoke the claims to and conditions of
citizenship as a means of authenticating this particular conceptualization of West Indian
migration to Britain. As author Donald Hines has contended, “West Indian migrants in
Britain have, right from the start, based the case for being in the United Kingdom

squarely on the fact that they had a right to be in the ‘mother country.’ '0'

 

99 Ceri Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography (London: Oxford University Press,
1968), xv, l. Peach notes that this ﬁgure may be at least 20% too low and bases this assumption on the fact
that by the beginning of 1966, there were 330,000 Caribbean-bom persons in Britain.

'00 Clarence Senior and Douglas Manley, A Report on Jamaican Migration to Great Britain (Kingston:
The Government Printers, 1955), unnumbered pages included before forward.

'0' Donald Hinds, Journey To An Illusion: West Indian Migrants in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1966),
170.

67

According to the terms of the British Nationality Act of 1948, all British subjects
resident in metropolitan Britain, the colonies and Commonwealth countries became
formally united under the banner of a universal Commonwealth citizenship that ideally
transcended social divisions marked by race, region, class and gender. In addition, the
policy established a shared national sub-category of British citizenship between
metropolitan and colonial communities—“Citizen of the United Kingdom and
Colonies”——and ofﬁcially institutionalized the long held tradition of intra-imperial
migration to Britain as a legal provision of Commonwealth citizenship. Along with the
right of migration to Britain, colonials and other Commonwealth citizens assumed the
full privileges, entitlements and responsibilities of British citizenship enjoyed by their
metropolitan counterparts including the right to permanently settle and work in Britain.'02

The introductory statement included in the Jamaican govemment’s report on
migration to Britain provides an important insight into the myriad of ways that Caribbean
migrants constructed themselves in relation to the migratory process and framed their
expectations of life in Britain. The report clearly employs a language of citizenship to
deﬁne the meaning of Caribbean migration to Britain as a movement across imperial
spaces within the borders of a uniﬁed civic community and therefore draws attention the
ways that the citizenship status of Caribbean migrants structured the terms of their
movement and perhaps more importantly, their expectations of migration. To be sure,
while the Jamaican government report underscores how citizenship represents a critical

avenue through which one can examine the process of migration, it is also useful to

consider the ways that migrants themselves, through the act of migration, clariﬁed and

 

102 Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush, 74; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 10-24; Hansen,
Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain 3549; Spencer British Immigration Policy Since I 93 9, 53-
55.

68

readjusted the porous boundaries of the imperial body politic and subsequently expanded
and reconﬁgured the contours of British citizenship.

This chapter unfolds by exploring the dialogic and complex relationships between
migration and citizenship. As noted in the previous chapter, the history of race and
Empire has been shaped in large measure by countless examples of black men and
women’s relentless struggles to articulate and substantiate their claims to citizenship
within the British imperial community. One of the central premises buttressing this
discussion is how the act of migration represented a critical conduit through which black
migrants from the Caribbean projected an understanding of and authenticated the
meaning of their British citizenship on their own terms. Essentially, this chapter
highlights the ways that migration functioned as one of many channels through which
black migrants from the Caribbean activated their citizenship, and in the process,
negotiated their own sense of Britishness and simultaneously fractured and expanded
commonly held notions of British national identity. Acting on the provisions established
by the British Nationality Act of 1948, as Jamaicans and other Caribbean migrants settled
in Britain, not only did they make claims upon their rights as British citizens, but in doing
so, they also constructed a vision of Britishness in which the bonds that sustained Empire
became the very mechanisms used to assume and articulate a British national identity that
transcended the boundaries of race. As thousands of Caribbean migrants entered the
British Isles during the 19503 and early 19603, their act of migration demonstrated an

understanding that their position in the Empire and membership in the imperial

69

community established and guaranteed them the rights, privileges, protections and
ﬁ‘eedoms of British citizens.103
To situate this conversation, this chapter begins by juxtaposing the coincidental,
yet historically revealing timing of the Parliamentary debates surrounding the
consideration of the British Nationality Act of 1948 and the arrival of the S. S. Empire
Windrush. Taken together, these two events represent a critical moment when the
ideological possibilities of British citizenship collided with the practical limitations of
British citizenship. At the center of this conundrum rested the historical tension between
black expectations and imaginings of British citizenship and deeply engrained
assumptions about the racially exclusive boundaries of British national identity and the
superiority of metropolitan whiteness. To be sure, this tension was not speciﬁc to
postwar developments concerning questions of race, citizenship and migration, but rather
it characterized a broader history and culture of Empire in which people of Aﬁican
descent lived within and constantly negotiated social hierarchies of race which privileged
whiteness and devalued blackness. Therefore, as one examines postwar black migration
from the Caribbean to Britain, one must consider the ways that migrants participated in a
long history of race and Empire in which the Empire provided a language of possibilities
and opportunities for citizenship and racial egalitarianism, yet paradoxically, cultivated a

contrasting social reality in which the markers of blackness served as the rationale behind

race based exclusion, discrimination and second class citizenship.

 

'03 James Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging: Immigration and the Politics of Demographic
Governance in Postwar Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 16. Hampshire’s recent study on
citizenship and postwar migration supports this contention as he notes that Commonwealth migrants
“arrival on British shores was. . .a legitimate exercise of their citizenship rights.”

70

While the ﬁrst half of the chapter probes the relationship between migration and
citizenship within the context of the history of race and Empire, the second half of the
chapter more closely examines the character of postwar black migration and interrogates
the ways that the migration process—encompassing both actual movement and
settlement—produced and remade racial identities.104 In lieu of detailing the major
political and economic structural factors inﬂuencing migration patterns and the mediating
structures and social networks that facilitated the migration process, this section pays
particular attention to both the markers of blackness in British society, and the ways that
the social stigmas attached to blackness structured the everyday lives of migrants of
African descent from the Caribbean. '05
Race, Empire and British National Identity

In 1937, a British delegate to the United Nations declared, “It is the practice of the
United Kingdom not to make any distinction between different races in British colonies
as regards to civil and political rights, or the right of entry into and residence in the
United Kingdom.”106 With the passage of the British Nationality Act of 1943, the
informal practice and imperial precedent referred to by the United Nations delegate

received ofﬁcial recognition in the form of an institutionalized nationality policy that

 

'0‘ Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the
Modern World (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 19-29, 45-46.

'05 The use of concepts including “mediating structures” and “social networks” are applied as they are
associated with migration paradigms that advocate for a world systems approach that allows one to
understand the migration process as it is facilitated by political and economic structural determinants, social
networks, families, and the individual decisions of migrants themselves. James Jackson and Leslie Moch,
“Migration and the Social History of Modern Europe,” Historical Methods (Winter, 1989), 27-33; Monica
Boyd, “.Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New
Agendas,” International Migration Review 23, 3 (Autumn, 1989), 638-670. See also Dirk Hoerder and
Leslie Page Moch, eds. European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1996) and Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds. Migration, Migration History, History
(Berlin: Peter Lang, 1997).

’06 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939,54.

71

both legalized a shared citizenship status between metropolitan and colonial British
subjects and granted colonials the rights of entry and settlement in the British Isles.
Although the policy echoed the racially egalitarian ideals espoused in the statement
issued by the United Nations delegate, in much the same way that the delegate’s
proclamation was premised upon a racialized understanding of the British imperial
community, policy-makers considerations of the British Nationality Act of 1948 reveal
striking ideological differences between their perceptions of the boundaries of British
citizenship and the principles of universalism embossed in the democratic rhetoric of
British nationality policy.

The British Nationality Act of 1948 emerged as a Parliamentary response to the
passage of the Canadian Nationality Act of 1946. Under the terms of the Canadian
policy, British subjecthood became a derivative of, rather than a precursor to Canadian
citizenship. As such, the policy represented a decisive departure from the nationality
principles maintained under the provisions of the British Nationality and Status Aliens
Act of 1914. This act implemented uniformed naturalization procedures and provided for
a shared universal British subjecthood status throughout metropolitan Britain, the
dominions and the colonies. Although the common status was to serve as the primary
nationality of British subjects throughout the Empire and Commonwealth, dominions did
have the option of establishing local citizenships as sub-categories of British
subjecthood.107

Throughout the 19203 and 19303, the dominions persistently engaged various

means of distinguishing their individual national communities, including restrictive

 

107 Hansen “The Politics of Citizenship in 19403 Britain,”69, 71-77; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration
in Postwar Britain, 37-45; Paul Whitewashing Britain, 10-11.

72

 

immigration policies and selective enfranchisement, as part of a broader move to assert
and clarify their own sovereignty and constitutional authority aside from the realm of
metropolitan interests. However, in spite of these various measures designed to
differentiate the borders of the dominion communities, what remained intact was the
primacy of British subjecthood, and therefore, the superiority of the common status. The
institution of the Canadian Nationality Act of 1946 altered the principles buttressing the
common status because it inverted the relationship between local citizenship and the
historic imperial nationality. Canadian citizenship then became the gateway to British
subjecthood which meant that the imperial status became secondary to an individual’s
locally deﬁned national status.108 As a result this “break down” of the traditions that had
fortiﬁed the common status forced the British Parliament to not only look for avenues to
preserve the historic sense of imperial nationality, but more importantly, to reexamine the
metropolitan community’s own ideas about British citizenship and the parameters of
British national identity. ‘09

While Parliamentary debates over the British Nationality Act of 1948 raised a
number of issues including the prerogatives of Commonwealth dominions to establish
their own local citizenships, the ambiguities of British subjecthood for residents of
Northern Ireland who maintained political ties to the United Kingdom, and the
denaturalization of British women married to non-British subjects, the most critical point

of contention involved questions concerning the creation of an applicable local

 

'08 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 14; Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship in 19403 Britain,” 73; Kathleen
Paul“ ‘British Subjects’ and ‘British Stock’: Labour’s Postwar Imperialism,” The Journal of British
Studies 34, 2 (April, 1999), 240-241.

“’9 “Break down” was the term used by Home Secretary, Chuter Ede to characterize the impact of the
Canadian Nationality Act of 1946 on the common code system derived ﬁ'om the 1914 nationality policy.
Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 Vol. 453, col. 387.

73

citizenship status for both the metropolitan and colonial communities. If Parliament was
to acknowledge the right of the Canadian government to enact a unilateral citizenship
status that trumped British subjecthood, it would also have to anticipate that the Canadian
legislation might indeed represent a new paradigm of Commonwealth relations that
would be adopted by other Commonwealth nations.

In February of 1947, the British Government hosted a meeting of nationality
experts from throughout the Commonwealth to outline a proposal for legislating British
nationality in light of the new Canadian policy. As a result, the contours of the British
Nationality Policy of 1948 took shape. Taking a cue from Canada, at the heart of the
proposal was a plan to create a new category of local citizenship—“Citizenship of the
United Kingdom and Colonies”—which would then serve as the portal through which
individuals in the British Isles and the colonies would be considered British subjects.l '0
Explaining the need for such a policy, Home Secretary, Chuter Ede argued that the bill
was “a natural sequel” to the provisions established in the 1931 Statute of Westminster.1 '1
Under the terms of this agreement, Parliament formally acknowledged the limits of its
power in the dominions and ofﬁcially recognized the dominions of Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, South Aﬁ'ica and Eire as equal partners along with Britain in a
Commonwealth of Nations bound by an allegiance to the Crown for the principal

purposes of security, trade and economic development.1 '2 Ede, who had been

instrumental in lobbying the Cabinet to explore amendments to the British nationality

 

”0 Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship in 19403 Britain”, p.77
111 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 col. 386
“zPaul, Whitewashing Britain, 2; LJ. Butler, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World

(London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 5; George Boyce, Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775-1997
(London: MacMillan Press , 1999), 78, 98, 142

74

policy after the Canadian government expressed intentions to depart from the common
code system, was one of the leading proponents of the bill. He insisted that in accordance
with the Statute of Westminster, creating a local citizenship for the metropole and
colonies would serve as a necessary endeavor “so that our fellows in the Dominions can
understand and can realise that we are in fact recognising the equality of status with this
country of each of the Dominions.”I '3

In addition to noting the demise of the common system and the need to align the
United Kingdom with the shifting politics of the Commonwealth, Ede urged his
Parliamentary colleagues to consider the ways that a shared local citizenship between the
metropole and colonies could serve as “an essential party of the development of the
relationship between this Mother Country and the Colonies who are administered in
varying degrees of self government and tutelage by the Colonial Ofﬁce.” Anticipating
many of his critics, Ede recognized that many of his colleagues felt “that it would be a
bad thing to give the coloured races of the Empire the idea that, in some way or other,
they are the equals of the people in this country.” However, he conceded, “It is true that
we cannot admit all these backward peoples immediately into the full rights that British
subjects in this country enjoy,” but urged, “we must give these people a feeling that on
that homespun dignity of man we recognise them as fellow citizens.”1 '4 Even though
Ede supported the bill because of the ways that it reﬂected a move towards Britain’s

acceptance of the egalitarian principles of the Commonwealth ideal, his logic for

establishing a shared citizenship between residents of the United Kingdom and those of

 

”3 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 c013. 393, 398.

"4 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 col. 393,

75

the colonies was clearly tempered by racialized notions of both the colonial populations
and the meaning of the most authentic sense of British national identity.

Both Robert Miles and Kathleen Paul have noted that although the British
Nationality Bill of 1948 espoused the notions of egalitarianism and universalism
underlying the Commonwealth ideal, in constructing their arguments about the
boundaries of British national identity in consideration of the bill, policy-makers relied
upon a set of assumptions about the people of the colonial territories and the dorrrinions
framed by the racial hierarchies that historically validated and sustained British
imperialism.l '5 In response to Chuter Ede’s arguments in favor of the bill, M.P. David
Renton insisted that historically, “it has not been an easy matter to keep together so many
of the diverse and often primitive races of the world under the British ﬂag,” but that this
feat had been accomplished by giving these groups “an easy conception. . .of a great
Queen [reference to Queen Victoria] in a distant land, who would give them protection,
who would give them prosperity, who no doubt would expect them to work in return, but
whose subjects they were.”1 ‘6 Renton went on to deﬁne what he saw as three distinct
categories of British subjects existing outside of the metropolitan community. Relying
upon his own experience in Egypt he conjectured, “The ﬁrst are British in the full sense.
Mostly British born, they are racially British and are recongisable as such.” Included in
this group were mainly English-speaking “business people” who had worked in various
imperial outpost, but “come home to England when they retire.” He added, “They have

United Kingdom nationality.” In the second category Renton included “the descendents

 

"Robert Miles, “Nationality, Citizenship, and Migration to Britain, 1945-1951,” Journal of Law and
Society 16 (Winter, 1989): 426-442; Paul, “British Subjects” and “British Stock”: Labour’s Postwar
Imperialism” Journal of British Studies 34 (April., 1995): 237-240.

”6 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 col. 475.

76

of British pioneers” who remained in colonies but “maintained themselves racially pure
for several generations.” Renton’s third category consisted of individuals who were “of
British nationality only in a technical view of the law,” with “little or no British blood.”
He noted that these British subjects were less likely to speak English and added that “they
do not look English, or for that matter Scottish, Irish, or Welsh.”117 Renton’s racially and
cultural charged assumptions reveal much about the lenses through which policy-makers
and perhaps the majority of imperially conscious metropolitan society viewed the British
Empire/Commonwealth. His arguments demonstrate the existence of a particular vision
of race and racial communities in which national origins, color, class and cultural
perceptions operated as the most salient components of racial identities.

As Parliament members contemplated the merits of the British Nationality of Act
of 1948 they repeatedly made reference to these particular markers of racial difference to
describe the communities of the Empire/Commonwealth abroad and subsequently, their
visions of themselves and the metropolitan community. Speaking against the bill’s
attempt to create a shared citizenship between metropolitan Britain and the colonies, M.P.
David Maxwell Fyfe insisted the metropolitan community “had much to offer the people
of the Dominions, and more to people of the racially distinct and smaller countries of the
Commonwealth.” However, on the matter of the bill’s delineation of a shared citizenship
between metropole and colonies, he contended, “citizenship” was not “an appropriate
word for describing the relationship and geographical situation” between metropolitan

Britain and the colonies. “8

 

”7 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 cols. 476-477.

”8 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 7 July 1948 cols. 403, 410.

77

In subsequent debates, Fyfe explained, that “citizenship should be equated with an
area of sovereignty” and “must always be equated with some homogeneity and some true
community of interest and status.” He added, “The new category is only a verbal residue
to cover what is left when we have subtracted the citizens of each of the Dominions. It
has no justiﬁcation in logic or in any other relevant aspect, as it does not describe any
sense of community.119 Taken together, Fyfe’s remarks clearly reveal his conception of
Empire/Commonwealth as a hierarchical entity structured by race. At the top of this
social conglomerate he positioned the majority white metropolitan community which he
described in classic imperialistic terms as the supreme benefactor of civilized society. As
inheritors of metropolitan traditions he ﬁrst positions the people of the dominions—
which mostly likely was a reference limited to the Old dominions including Australia and
New Zealand whose societies were largely comprised of white descendents of the
metropolitan community—followed by the “racially distinct” or non-white majority
populations of the smaller imperial dependencies whom his statement presumes were
most deﬁcient, and therefore beneﬁted most from contact with metropolitan society and
culture.

In an earlier debate in the House of Lords, Lord Altrincham made a case similar
to Fyfe’s regarding the inaptness of citizenship as a means of describing the relationship
between Britain and the colonies. Altrincham noted that uniting the metropole and
colonies under a common citizenship “does not bind like to like” because the union

would attempt to bridge “what is geographically, socially and politically a most

 

"9 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 13 July 1948 col. 1027.

78

heterogeneous community at many different stages of development.”120 Altrincham
contended that a local British citizenship should only be established if applied solely to
the metropolitan community. He argued, “‘British’ is ours by every right of blood and
soil” and that it was “the right and proper name for the national citizenship. . .for the
people of this island [reference to the British Isles.]”m

Another point reiterated by opponents of the bill was the idea that establishing a
local citizenship for the United Kingdom which included the colonial populations, would
create a privileged class of British citizens which would favor the people of the colonial
Empire as opposed to residents of the dominion nations. Several Parliaments members
including David Maxwell Fyfe, Ivor Thomas, Ronald Chamberlain and John Foster of the
House of Commons along with Lord Altrincham and Viscount Simons of the House of
Lords asserted that because British subjects migrating to Britain from the dominions
would have to wait for a period of twelve months before they could exercise in full the
rights of British citizenship shared by those who were considered Citizens of the United
Kingdom and Colonies, including the right to vote and stand for Parliament, that the bill
unfath discriminated against them. To outline this problem with the bill’s provisions
members often invoked contrasting images of race to describe those who might reap the
most beneﬁts with those whom the bill could potentially marginalize.

On this issue M.P. David Maxwell Fyfe noted that “a Canadian would have to

wait 12 months to take up a job which was open to citizens of Britain and the

 

'20 Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords 11 May 1948 col. 784.

'2' Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords 11 May 1948 col. 786-787.

79

Colonies. . .someone from the West Indies—need not wait at all.”'22 Fyfe contended that
these favored ties between metropolitan Britain and the colonial communities ignored
more authentic racial and cultural bonds among the Commonwealth communities. He
explained, “what the ordinary citizen [of Britain] has not got is a feeling which gives him
a special unity with the inhabitants of a Colony and excludes from that special unity his
ﬁrst cousin in a Dominion, with whom he may have played in his grandfather’s
house.”I23 M.P. Ivor Thomas of Keighley concurred with Fyfe adding that “it is certainly
anomalous that one the West Indians. . .should be in a more favourable position in this
country than someone who comes here from Australia or New Zealand?”24 Reiterating
this point, M.P. Ronald Chamberlain of Norwood insisted that the bill created “a situation
that if someone comes from the West Indies or Nigeria he is a recognised citizen of this
country immediately, but if someone comes from Australia or Canada it is not so.”'25

When this issue arose in the House of Lords Viscount Simon noted that
under the bill’s provisions,

A man who comes from Jamaica or the Gold Coast, being a citizen

of the United Kingdom and Colonies from the beginning, enjoys

that prestige without any special action on his part...But before a

citizen of Canada or Australia can become a citizen of the United

Kingdom and Colonies, he has to live here for twelve months,

which the man ﬁ'om the Colonies need not do.126

While Sirnons’ illustration echoed the more dichotomous examples of racial imagery

used in House of Commons debates, contrasting regions with majority populations of

 

122 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 col. 408-409.

‘23 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 13 July 1948 cols. 1027-1028.
'2’ Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 col. 415-416.

'25 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 13 July 1948 col. 1053-1054

'26 Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords 11 May 1948 col. 766.

80

Aﬁican descent with those having majority European origins, his colleague, Lord
Altrincham used a more racially textured example to make his point on this subject.
Altrincham urged his colleagues in the House of Lords to carefully consider the effects of
differentiating between British subjects in the manner provided by the bill:

Take the position of a Canadian or Australian, or a citizen of

Pakistan or Ceylon. His status here will be inferior to that of

millions of member of entirely primitive societies, whose

contributions to the development of the Commonwealth is in no

way on par with his. Any of the King’s subjects in the Colonial

Empire, however primitive of mind, can come to this country and

exercise the full rights of citizenship the same day as he arrives,

while the Australians or the citizen of any other Dominion must,

but for special leave, wait twelve month before such status if

granted.‘2
Although Altrincham included the predominately non-white populations of Pakistan and
Ceylon as groups that the legislation would unjustly temporarily disfranchise in
comparison to their colonial counterparts upon their migration to Britain, what similarly
resonates among his argument on this point and those of his Parliamentary colleagues is
the hierarchical prism of race through which he viewed the imperial community. The
overwhelming majority of the colonial territories represented regions in Caribbean and
Aﬁica with majority populations consisting of people of Aﬁican descent. From
Altrincham’s perspective, it was these communities which were the “primitive societies”
that ranked at the bottom of the social hierarchy of Empire.

In spite of forceful opposition in both the House of Commons and the House of
Lords against the creation of a shared local British citizenship between Britain and the

colonies, the British Nationality Act of 1948 prevailed. To understand why this occurred,

it is important to look beyond the racially exclusive visions of British identity represented

 

127 Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 11 May 1948 col. 784.

81

in the Parliamentary debates on the question of citizenship and contextualize the bill’s
passage in relation to the larger political issues in play at the close of World War 11. Not
only did the Canadian govemment’s move to institute a new nationality policy represent
a break from the historic relations of Empire, but perhaps more importantly, the British
govemment’s willingness to reexamine questions of nationality and citizenship in the
wake of the new Canadian legislation illuminates a broader postwar trend deﬁning
Britain’s changing relationship to its imperial past.

Following World War II, the one of the central paradoxes shaping British politics
involved reconciling the desires to maintain the legacies of world dominance shaped by
the history of imperial relations, and adjusting to new realities presented by the declining
signiﬁcance of the British Empire as a geopolitical construct. As noted by historian L. J.
Butler in the period between World War I and World War 11, due to its extensive imperial
resources, Britain could have easily been regarded as the world’s sole “superpower?”28
However, the end of the war signaled a new phase in international politics marked by the
rise of American economic hegemony, the emergence of the Cold War, the streamlining
of imperial military and political commitments, heightened expressions of colonial
nationalisms all compounded by the need to facilitate the recovery and reconstruction of
Britain’s own domestic economy. According to Chris Walters all of these elements

contributed to a postwar a “crisis of national self-representation” that took even greater

shape during the late 19503 and 19603 and produced an “intense questioning about what

 

123 L. J. Butler, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002),
189.

82

it now meant to be British?”29 It is in this context that one can consider the ways that the
racially egalitarian premises buttressing the British Nationality Act of 1948 could be
adapted as ofﬁcial policy in light of policy makers’ hierarchical vision of the racial
communities encompassing Empire/Commonwealth and the exclusive parameters of
British identity. Essentially, the British Nationality Act of 1948 represented a means to
redress the fading image of Britain’s imperial legacy through the institutionalization of a
trans-racial, trans-regional citizenship category that bolstered the appearance of
Commonwealth uniformity. It was then British policy makers’ preoccupations with
maintaining “the appearance of concord and unity throughout the Commonwealth,”
rather than a pressing commitment to principles of racial democracy embedded in the
egalitarian rhetoric of the British Nationality Act of 1948 that lead to its adoption as
ofﬁcial policy.'30

Although policy makers’ considerations of the British Nationality Act of 1948
focused primarily on its intended role in redeﬁning British citizenship, upon its passage,
the bill provided the legal structures of both a citizenship and somewhat indirectly, a

migration policy. Not only did the act deﬁne the parameters for determining who would

 

'29 Waters, “‘Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963,” 208,
214-215; Frank Heinlein, British Government Policy and Decolonisation, [945-1963: Scrutinizing the
Oﬁicial Mind (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 88-89; Butler, Britain and Empire, 29—62; D. George Boyce,
Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1 775-1997 (London: MacMillan Press, 1999), 116-117.

'30 This is a reference used by MP. Osbert Peake of Leeds, North to describe the purpose of the provisions
of the British Nationality Act of 1948. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 7 July 1948 col.488.
See also Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, 17-18, 35-61, 66-7. Hansen’s study is
rather dismissive of the ways in which the primacy of maintaining the appearance of imperial uniformity
was directly linked to transforming the Commonwealth into a symbol of multiracialism in the postwar
period. Instead, Hansen focuses on the ways in which policy makers purposed the British Nationality Act
primarily formalize historic imperial relationships with the white dominions of the Old Commonwealth. In
an alternative reading of the significance of the British Nationality Act of 1948, Bob Carter, Clive Harris
and Shirley Joshi maintain that the Act’s relevance to imperial interests also entailed a desire to thwart the
rising tide of colonial nationalism. See Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, “The 1951-55
Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration” in Inside Babylon: The Caribbean
Diaspora in Britain eds. Winston James and Clive Harris (London: Verso Press, 1993), 57.

83

be included in the imperial community of British citizens, but as a derivative of that, it
also reinforced a long held tradition of entry for all of subjects of the British Empire and
citizens of Commonwealth countries. While the goal of preserving the appearance of
Commonwealth unity might have provided the ideological premises for the adoption of
the British Nationality Act of 1948, it would be the issue of migration—and more
speciﬁcally, black migration and the emergence of more visible black communities in
Britain——that would test the substantive value of the new policy and force the
metropolitan community to again clarify its own deﬁnitions of British identity.

Recent scholarship has noted that although the British Nationality Act of 1948
gave legal currency for postwar black Commonwealth migrations, policy makers did not
speculate on the ramiﬁcations of the bill as a migration policy or chapter in the evolution

of Britain as a multiracial society. 131

This argument is clearly supported in Parliamentary
debates, but should not completely obscure the relationship between citizenship, race and
postwar black migration. The racial undertones framing the Parliamentary debates on
British citizenship policy elucidate a critical social commentary on British policy makers’
perceptions of who had the most legitimate access to claims to British national identity.
What policy makers consistently agreed upon, whether they expressed support or
opposition to the provisions of the bill, was the idea that the Empire/Commonwealth
represented a hierarchical conglomerate of racial communities in which the of the
colonial territories—who were overwhelmingly comprised of populations of African

descent—ranked lowest in the social order. Both sides of Parliamentary debate on British

citizenship were infused with a racialized vision of Empire/Commonwealth that

 

'3 ' Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship in 19403 Britain,” 93-5. See also Hansen, Citizenship and
Immigration to Postwar Britain, esp. ch.2; Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I 939, 53-55.

84

positioned the majority white metropolitan community as supreme, followed by the
majority white dominions and independent Commonwealth nations. Being the most
politically, culturally, socially and abstracted from and inferior to metropolitan
community, the colonies occupied the bottom rung of the racialized imperial social
hierarchy. It is in this context that one must consider that although policy makers did not
envisage that the rights of migration secured through British citizenship might potentially
transplant the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of Empire to metropolitan Britain, when
this happened there were already preexisting frameworks grounded in the historic
relationships and perceptions of Empire through which metropolitan society received
black migrants from the Commonwealth. More importantly, even though policy makers
had limited visions of the meaning of British citizenship, black people of Empire
oftentimes constructed alternative and more inclusive boundaries to describe the British
community and their own sense of and claims to a British identity.
Migration and the Meaning of British Citizenship

The arrival of the S. S. Empire Windrush transporting 492 Caribbean migrants to
Britain in June of 1948 has come to represent an iconic reference point for interpreting
both the history of postwar black migration and the transformation of the politics of race

in metropolitan British society. ‘32

Many scholarly appraisals of the racial politics of
postwar black migration tend to privilege Kathleen Paul’s assertion that “the signiﬁcance
of the Empire Windrush” as the consummate symbol of the unprecedented arrivals of

Caribbean migrants to Britain following World War II, “lies not in the motivation of the

 

mMike Phillips and Trevor Phillips Windrush, 2. Most studies of black migration to postwar Britain use
the arrival of the Empire Windrush as the starting point, largely because of the ways that the arrival
prompted official discussions of black migration.

85

migrants but in the response of the British state.” ‘33 Studies including Paul’s have
oftentimes inserted this presumption to explore the extent to which the racial politics of
black migration prompted a critical policy shift symbolized through the move from the
racial liberalism embodied in the provisions of the British Nationality Act of 1948 to the
rise of racially motivated Commonwealth migration restrictions in the early 19603. If one
uncritically privileges the reactions of the British state to the dilemmas presented by
black migration, historical debate over questions of race, citizenship and postwar black
migration becomes narrowly focused on the extent to which policy makers relied upon
racist thinking to resolve issues arising from shifting racial dynamics. While that
narrative certainly informs the history of postwar black migration, this project departs
from and attempts to reevaluate the conclusions of previous studies and critically indulge
the motives, perspectives and voices of migrants in interpreting the relationship between
race and citizenship and the social transformations concerning race relations in postwar
Britain effected by black migration. In doing so, one gains a different perspective, even
of the signiﬁcance of the Empire Windrush; for it was not in the arrival of the steamer in
Britain, but its departure from Jamaica that marks the more critical moment in the history
of race, citizenship and black migration to postwar Britain.

On June 16, 1948 in a telegram to the Acting Governor of Jamaica, Creech Jones,
the Colonial Secretary, urged that it was “essential” that he “should know whether [the]

decision of Jamaicans to travel to by Empire Windrush to England was of their own

 

'33 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 112. Other studies that reinforce this argument by focusing largely on the
ways that policy-makers interpreted postwar migration from the Caribbean include Hansen, Citizenship and
Immigration in Postwar Britain and Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I 93 9.

86

w

motion.’”34 On that same day, Jones answered questions in the House of Commons about
the Colonial Ofﬁce’s preparedness concerning the housing, employment and general
welfare of the Empire Windrush’s passengers. In his statements to Parliament members
Jones noted that “The West Indians in question booked their passages privately,” and
explained that despite the fact that most had not made prior work arrangements and had
been warned of uncertain employment prospects in Britain before departing, it appeared
“that the men concerned are prepared to take their chances of ﬁnding employment.”
When asked if the Colonial Ofﬁce might institute measures to screen potential migrants
to judge “if they are likely to be suitable for employment” in Britain, Jones responded,
“We recognise the need for some vetting, but obviously we cannot interfere with the
movement of British subjects,” adding, “It is very unlikely that a similar event to this will
occur again in the West Indies.”I35
Jones’ telegram to the Governor of Jamaica and his comments to Parliament
members unmasks a critical, yet underprivileged, perspective shaping the signiﬁcance of
the Empire Windrush passengers. The passengers of the Empire Windrush along with the
thousands of other black migrants from the Caribbean who journeyed to Britain during
the 19503 and early 19603 did so on their own accord—meaning outside of the conﬁnes

of government mandates or regulations. ‘36 If one is to speak of a “Windrush

generation,” what most clearly deﬁnes this reference of black postwar movement

 

I34PRO CO 876/88 Telegram to the Acting Govemor of Jamaica ﬁom the Colonial Secretary dated 16 June
1948; Quoted from Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush, 69.

'35 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons 16 June 1948 col. 421-422.
'36 Kathleen Paul notes that unlike seamen and military personnel who traveled to Britain from the
Caribbean during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century postwar migrants came to Britain as “independent

British subjects” who “were thus beyond the public control of the Colonial Ofﬁce.” Paul, Whitewashing
Britain, 114.

87

 

between the Caribbean to Britain is that it was a massive movement of choice by self-
selected individuals. While certainly the terms and conditions of individual migrations
were shaped by a broad spectrum of social forces, mediating structures and informal
networks and associations, the fundamental, yet all too often overlooked element of the
signiﬁcance of the sailing of the Empire Windrush is that migrants made a choice.
Migrants chose to leave behind the familiarities of their homelands. Migrants made
conscious decisions to part ways with spouses, children and other relatives—even if only
temporarily. Most importantly, migrants elected to face the uncertainties of life in
Britain—a place where most Caribbeans had knowledge of, but relatively few had
journeyed. As one examines the choices that black migrants made to travel to Britain one
must consider the range of aggregate social and ideological elements that prompted
Caribbean migrants to chose Britain as a destination during the 19503 and 19603. In
doing so, this investigation must begin by exploring black migrants’ conceptions of
Britain, their expectations of life in Britain and perhaps most importantly their own ideas
about their relationship to and within British society.

In the companion volume to the BBC television series commemorating the ﬁftieth
anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush to Britain, journalists Mike Phillips
and Trevor Phillips poignantly remarked, “the people on the Windrush. . .regarded their
‘Britishness’ as non-negotiable.”137 These authors’ conclusions draw attention to the
ways that migrants might have conceived of themselves in relation to British society even
before their actual arrival in Britain. According to Arthur Curling, a passenger on the
Empire Windrush who had served in the RAF during World War II, it was experiences in

his homeland of Jamaica that cultivated his sense of his own Britishness:

 

'37 Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips Windrush, 5.

88

 

 

We were always British. In Jamaica 1 can remember, when it was the

Queen’s birthday or the King’s birthday or the Coronation, everything was

done way Britain wanted us to. We hadn’t our own identity. . .England

was ‘the mother country’, as they used to say, and anything the English

did or the British did was always right, you know.138
Curling’s statements illuminate the ways in which British cultural imperialism operated
in the colonial context and inﬂuenced the ways in which black colonials saw themselves
in relation to the British community. Using Jamaica as a case study, Brian L. Moore and
Michele Anderson have shown that throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century British imperialists actively promoted a “cult of monarchy and empire” that
infused colonial culture in the Caribbean with royal celebrations, pageantry and imperial
imagery as a means of molding Caribbean communities into “civilized” and loyal British
subjects. Moore and Anderson are careﬁrl to note that while the “cult of monarchy and
empire” was a potent social force designed to secure and fortify the cultural hegemony of
British imperialism— predicated on a social hierarchy of race that privileged upper and
middle class notions of metropolitan whiteness and devalued the black colonial working
class masses—the black masses’ identiﬁcation with and acceptance of this mechanism of
social engineering did not completely overshadow their ability to exercise their own
“cultural power.” Their study demonstrates that while black colonials oftentimes
subscribed to the ideologies and cultural agendas proposed by British imperialism, they
also appropriated those discourses for strategic purposes including access to routes of

social mobility.139

 

'38 Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush, 12.

139Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led Nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural
Imperialism in Jamaica, 1805-1920 (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 271-325.

89

Moore and Anderson’s arguments have much to offer in terms of understanding
the ways that Caribbean migrants’ perceptions of their relationship to Britain inﬂuenced
their choice to migrate and the ways in which their decisions to migrate might be
interpreted in that same context. The decision to migrate inherently involved a migrant
interpreting that their relationship to Britain allowed for the possibilities that without any
form of government intervention, they would be able to successfully negotiate
geographical borders, settle in Britain, search for opportunities to secure employment and
potentially access new avenues of social mobility unavailable in the home society. In
essence, as migrants made choices about their movement to Britain, they also made
claims upon, used to their advantage and afﬁrmed their membership in the imperial body
politic. As Walter Lothen, a Jamaican carpenter who made the trek to Britain in 1954
explained,

People did think England was the mother country. When I came here

[London] I didn’t have a status as a Jamaican. I was British and going to

the mother country was like goiﬁg from one parish to another. You had no

conception of it being different.

While it is clear that Lothen identiﬁes with the “cult of monarchy and empire”
that Moore and Anderson reference, his statements suggest that his own sense of
Britishness allowed him to evaluate the possibilities of migration as one of the privileges
or perhaps more appropriately, an entitlement of his membership in the imperial
community of British subjects. Even more striking about Lothen’s remarks is the ways in
which he positions himself as both “British” and a Jamaican in Britain. His comments

illuminate a keen awareness of the limits of his Jamaican national and colonial identity in

Britain and juxtapose this reality with the possibilities garnered via his claims to

 

”0 “Walter Lothen” Forty Winters 0n: Memories of Britain ’s Post War Caribbean Immigrants (London:
South London Press, 1988), 23.

90

Britishness. In this sense, Walter Lothen draws attention to the ways that one cannot
easily classify black migrants’ claims to Britishness or British citizenship as simply a
conditioned hegemonic response to the pervasiveness of the culture of British
imperialism in the Caribbean colonies. To be sure, these claims also functioned as a
strategic undertaking that allowed migrants to not only access opportunities for
migration, but to also consider Britain as route for economic advancement and other
avenues of upward social mobility. As Walter Lothen illustrates, his claim to Britishness
or a British citizenship did not obscure his own sense of his J amaicaness and perhaps
quite possibly a host of other identities including his blackness, his masculinity and his
working class status. Rather, his Britishness served as a self-constructed metalanguage
that, when appropriated, allowed him to actualize the privileges and entitlements of
British citizenship in lieu of the prescribed social limitations of race, gender, class or
status.

As one considers migration as one of the may ways that Caribbean migrants made
claims to Britishness and attempted to substantiate the meaning of their own British
citizenship, one must recognize that their claim-making involved a mobilization of
imperial discourses of identity and citizenship for strategic purposes; however in the
process of asserting these claims to Britishness, it is also important to note how black
migrants remapped the boundaries of these same discourses both ideologically and in a
tangible, measurable physical sense by being the embodiment of the intersections of
empire, race and nation—Britishness, blackness, Caribbeaness. To be sure, the British
Empire had long been imagined as a multi-racial, multinational enterprise that

accommodated, and even promoted the notion of a British community that included the

91

black populations of the Caribbean. However, the migration of large numbers of black
colonials and the growing presence of unprecedented numbers of black people in Britain
during the postwar period brought the historic realities of racial difference presence
throughout the Empire directly to the metropole.

Examining the ways that migrants perceived of their own relationships to Britain
and membership in the imperial body politic represents a crucial starting point for
understanding the myriad of social forces at work inﬂuencing the decision to migrate. As
the previous chapter illustrates, ideas of a black people’s claims to Britishness and
membership in the imperial citizenry as well as their attempts to substantiate those claims
has been a deﬁning point of the history race and Empire even before the abolition of
slavery. In locating the various elements contributing to the choices that migrants made
and the motivations behind those decisions, one must consider a host of structural and
subjective factors. It is clear that socio-economic conditions in both the Caribbean and
Britain coalesced with the international politics of migration at a particular moment
creating a ripe climate for nearly a quarter of a million Caribbeans to choose Britain as a
migration destination in the early postwar period. In addition to these structural
determinants, quite often, less quantiﬁable factors including emotional attachments to
family and ﬁiends or a migrant’s own personal perceptions of potential opportunities in
Britain in comparison to that in the home country played the most signiﬁcant roles in
inﬂuencing an individual’s decision to migrate at a particular moment.

Factors Influencing Postwar Caribbean Migration to Britain
Pointing to the importance of migration as a pertinent theme in understanding the

history of Caribbean societies in the twentieth century author Mike Phillips, whose

92

family migrated to Britain from Guyana in 1956, noted, “By tradition, men from our
region looked for work and advancement abroad.” Phillips recalled,
My uncles had worked, on and off, in the Trinidad oilﬁelds, in Panama, in Costa
Rica and in Florida. My father had traveled the eastern Caribbean looking for a
foothold, before trying to England. On leaving school my older sister, my brother
and their classmates had scattered some to the University of the West Indies in
Jamaica, some to Brazil and Venezuela, others to colleges in the USA or Britain.
For anyone with almost any ambition, spending a period of time in another
country was inevitable.”141
Since the early post-emancipation period, migration has been a recurring motif
enderrric to Caribbean societies. As noted by Thomas Holt, newly freed black men and
women in Jamaica and other former slave societies tested and clariﬁed the meaning of
their freedom with physical movement. Holt suggested that migration served as an
important tool by which freed people exercised greater autonomy over their labor and
families and broadened their access to certain economic opportunities outside of the
purview of the plantation.142 Faced with a declining local sugar industry, decreased
employment opportunities, the consolidation of Crown lands, declining wages, and
natural disasters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century thousands of Jamaicans
and workers from other British Caribbean islands moved throughout the Caribbean and
Latin America to such places including Panama, Costa Rica, and Cuba to work on

railroad construction projects, banana and sugar plantations, and multinational investment

ventures including the construction of the Panama Canal. '43 In the 18505, some 5,000

 

m Mike Phillips, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (London: Continuum, 2001 ), 11-12.

"2 Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 160.

143 Senior and Manley, A Report on Jamaican Migration to Great Britain, 4.; G.W. Roberts and DD. Mills,
Study of External Migration Aﬂecting Jamaica: 1953-1955 (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic

Research, 1958), 1; Margaret Byron, ed., Post- War Caribbean Migration to Britain: The Unﬁnished Cycle
(Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), 32-37.; Peter Fraser, “N ineteenth-Century West Indian Migration to Britain,”

93

Jamaicans worked on the construction of the Panama Railroad. Thirty years later when
the French initiated work on the Panama Canal an estimated 78,000 Jamaicans migrated
to Panama during the 18803. By 1915, after the French had abandoned the project, which
was later completed under the auspices of the American-controlled Isthmian Canal
Commission in 1914, approximately 91,000 migrants had departed for Panama.144 In the
meantime, the expansion of American interests in the fruit trade and the growth of Cuban
sugar industry lured large numbers of Jamaican migrants to Cuba and Costa Rica. As
early as 1887, Jamaica experienced an estimated net outward movement to Costa Rica of
1,736, while labor movement to Cuba peaked at the close of World War I with annual
migration ﬁgures of some 21, 573 in 1919. By the 1930s there were some 60,000
Jamaicans who had settled in Cuba.'45
Although substantial numbers of British Caribbean migrants settled throughout
Latin America during the early twentieth century, until the passage of more stringent
immigration restrictions in 1952, the United States was oﬁen a prime migratory
destination. During the decade between 1911 and 1921 alone, no less than 30,000
Jamaicans entered the United States. Overall, during the 1920s, this pattern somewhat
shifted in part because of the introduction of new immigration restrictions in 1924

sprinkled with nativist undertones, designed speciﬁcally to curtail migration from

southern and eastern Europe and regions with majority populations of color. This policy

 

in In Search of A Better Life ed. Ransford Palmer (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), 19-37; Dilip
Hiro, Black British, thite British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (London: Graﬁon Books,
1991), I4.

144 Winston James, Holding Aloﬁ the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth
Century America (London: Verso Press, 1998), 26.

"5 Senior and Manley, A Report on Jamaican Migration to Great Britain, 4; G.W. Roberts and DO. Mills,
Study of External Migration A ﬂecting Jamaica; 1953-55, l-2; Nancy F oner, Jamaica Farewell, 9

94

instituted quotas for countries in relation to the proportion of American citizens who
traced their origins to a particular country and reduced the total number of immigrants
admitted per year to 150,000. '46 Because the populations of the British Caribbean were
included in the generous 65,721 annual quota reserved for citizens of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland, the prospects associated with actual border crossings between the
Caribbean and United States did not change dramatically until the passage of the
McCarran Walters Act of 1952. What did ﬂuctuate in terms of migrant settlement
opportunities were the economic conditions and the labor climates greeting migrants
upon their arrival in the United States.

With the onset of the Great Depression in the late 19208 and early 19308, job
competition at all levels of the working classes reached dire proportions. As a result,
foreign-bom workers along with black Americans and other people of color were
oftentimes marginalized, or in some instances, completely shut out from accessing
positions in certain spheres in the labor market. This situation changed somewhat with
the onset of World War 11. Between 1943 and 1946 the United States actively recruited
some 100,000 industrial and agricultural workers from the Caribbean for temporary
assignments to supplement the loss of domestic manpower during the war and to meet

labor demands in wartime industries.”7

 

“6 Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the
Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, 1 (June, 1999): 67, 69-70. For a more detailed
discussion of the broader context of the nativist undertones represented in US. immigration policy after
WWI, see John Higham Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, I 860-] 925( New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

"7 S.K. Ruck, ed. The West Indian comes to England: A Report Prepared for the Trustees of the London
Parochial Charities by the Family Welfare Association (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1960), 7;
Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 53. See also Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black
Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. chapter I.

95

Despite a veto by President Harry Truman, the passage of the McCarran-Walters
Act on June 27, 1952 represented a decisive political turning point inﬂuencing the
direction of migrations from the Caribbean after World War II. Essentially, the new
policy expanded many of the provisions outlined under the national origins quota system
implemented under the 1924 Immigration Act. In regards to the British Caribbean, the
most signiﬁcant policy shift surrounded the extraction of the colonial territories from the
generous quota allotted to immigrants from Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Proposed
at the height of McCarthyism and the resurgence of nativist rhetoric in the face of Cold
War ideological tensions, the McCarran-Walters Act granted each Caribbean territory an
annual allotment of 100 border crossings. At the time that the legislation received
approval, it was estimated that an average of 2600 immigrants moved from the Caribbean
to the United States annually.148

In response, West Indian delegations and representatives in both the United
States and the Caribbean issued a number of statements protesting the restrictions
imposed by the Bill and highlighting its potential effects on Caribbean territories. On 6
February 1952 the British Embassy received a West Indian delegation organized out of a
planning meeting held in Harlem, New York a few days earlier which had decided to
send a lobby to secure the support of the British Embassy in protesting the new
legislation. Delegates pointed out that that the current level of immigration from the

Caribbean “could not in any way be described as excessive” and emphasized that West

Indian workers offered the United States a steady supply of “skilled labor.” In addition,

 

”8 PRO CO 936/ 189 Letter from B.A.B. Burrows of the British Embassy in Washington, D. C. to the Under
Secretary of State for the Colonies dated 18 February 1952.

96

the delegation noted that the remittances sent back to dependents in the home country
provided much-needed relief for many struggling Caribbean econorrries.I49

Writing to the Colonial Secretary, Hugh Foot, the Governor of Jamaica, noted that
throughout the island, “Public concern has been growing. . .as a result of reports regarding
renewed efforts to pass legislation in the US. House of Representatives restricting
Jamaican immigration.” Alluding to the ways in which emigration to the United States
served as a source of economic relief for the Jamaican economy he continued, “It would,
of course, be a most serious matter for Jamaica at this time of steeply rising cost of living
and continued unemployment, if Jamaican immigration to the US. were cut down, and in
particular, if employment of Jamaican workers in the US. were restricted.”150 Foot’s
telegram to the Colonial Secretary also included a separate memo issued by Norman
Manley and the People’s National Party Parliamentary Group urging for intervention by
the British Government on behalf of the interests of the Caribbean territories, adding that
it “would be [a] terrible blow to Jamaica if [the] bill is passed.”151

Less than one week after the Jamaican Governor appealed to the British
Government for intervention on behalf of the Caribbean territories, the Governor of
Barbados reported to the Colonial Secretary that the House of Assembly had passed a
resolution protesting the new quotas assigned by the Bill. Although average emigration

from Barbados to the United States had totaled little more than 200 annually between

1949 and 1951, the Governor noted that, “Considerable local feeling has been aroused

 

"9 PRO CO 936/189 Letter from B.A.B Burrows of the British Embassy in Washington, DC to the Under
Secretary of State for the Colonies 18 February 1952.

'50 PRO CO 936/189 Telegram from Sir Hugh Foot to the Colonial Secretary, 26 February 1952.

'5' PRO CO 936/189 Telegram from Sir Hugh Foot to the Colonial Secretary, 26 February, 1952.

97

 

and [the] psychological effect of [the] passing of [the] bill will be considerable.” At a
moment of escalating nationalistic fervor in the colonies, the Governor added, “This
feeling is likely to react unfavourably on the United Kingdom unless some overt action is
taken adequately to represent interest of the British West Indies.” 152 The Govemor’s
statement alluded to the possibility that a perception of ineffective arbitration by the
British Government on behalf of the interests of the colonial territories on the issue of
immigration to the United States might amplify the already intensifying support for more
direct colonial representation in international politics and calls for self-govemment.
Similar to the representations made by official in the Jamaican Government, the
Barbadian Govemor’s statement clearly illustrated the importance attached to
international labor migration in the Caribbean. Not only did migration expand available
employment opportunities and earning potential for workers, but also, it contributed to
economic recovery for Caribbean territories in the wake of high unemployment and
increasing rates of population growth.

Recalling the reasons behind his decision to move to Britain in 1956, Claude
Ramsey, active member of the Barbados Labour Party and Trade Union movement
during the 19308 and soldier in the British army during World War II, Ramsey noted, “As
the War ended I found myself back in Barbados with its poverty and lack of
opportunities. . .My reasons for leaving were simple—the Barbadian economic
depression, and the greater employment prospects in Britain.”153 During the ﬁrst half of

the twentieth century socio-economic conditions in the Caribbean territories spurred a

 

'52 PRO CO 936/189 Telegram,“Emigration to the USA.” from Sir A. Savage, Governor of Barbados to
the Colonial Secretary, 3 March 1952.; PRO CO 936/189 Unsigned letter to R. Cecil dated 6 March 1952.

'53 “Claude Ramsey,” Forty Winters 0n: Memories of Britain '8 Post War Caribbean Immigrants (London:
South London Press and London Council), 37.

98

steady stream of international emigration. Worldwide economic depression during the
19308, which contributed to a series of labor protest throughout the archipelago only
heightened preexisting economic problems including declining wages and
unemployment.

In the wake of increasing unemployment during World War II, the colonial
government in Jamaica, the largest of the Caribbean colonies and the region where most
Caribbean migrants entering Britain hailed during the late 19408 through the early 19608,
established a social welfare system which provided beneﬁts and employment
opportunities for workers in the most destitute areas of the island. By 1943, estimates
indicated that the Jamaican government provided over 11,000 workers with some form of
relief per month. In that same year, according to census reports, the overall rate of
unemployment was likely as high as 29 per cent; in the construction industry rates in
some areas rose as high as 40 per cent. After the war and throughout the 19508 overall
unemployment rates slowly declined, although the economy still failed to generate an
adequate supply of labor opportunities for signiﬁcant portions of the Jamaican populace.
A 1957 survey estimated that unemployment had fallen to 18.5 per cent, while the 1960
census reported a ﬁgure of 12.7 percent154 Coupled with the economic strains induced
by widespread unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation also contributed to
greater job competition, escalating poverty rates, and an increasing surplus population

that postwar economic conditions could not adequately sustain. During the ﬁrst half of

 

154

Roberts and Mills, Study of External Migration Aﬂecting Jamaica, 1 953-5 5, 2-4. This report also
alludes to unspeciﬁed “inherent weaknesses” in the census data used to mark this ﬁgure. However, the
authors are clear that “despite the known limitations of these census data” the ﬁgures “clearly emphasize

the gravity of the unemployment situation.” See also Ceri Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain, 24.

99

the twentieth century the total population in Jamaica had doubled with no visible
indicators of declining birth rates. '55
In striking contrast to postwar employment conditions in Caribbean territories
such as Jamaica, after the war ended, a number of industrialized western European
countries including France, Germany, and Britain experienced labor shortages in certain
industries and actively sought foreign workers to meet postwar labor demands and to
facilitate economic reconstruction. In 1946, the British Government issued an economic
survey that projected labor shortages between 600,000 and 1.3 million and an overall
decline in the working age population. A later survey taken in January of 1947 identiﬁed
widespread overall labor shortages and a maldistribution of available labor as critical
issues facing the British postwar economy. Many of the industries hit hardest by the
shortage of workers were essential to postwar economic recovery and reconstruction

including coal mining, textiles agriculture, steel and construction.156

In response, a
committee of seven Cabinet members including the Lord Privy Seal, the Home Secretary,
the Minister of Labor, the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Minister of Fuel and
Power and the Secretary of State for Scotland formed the Foreign Labor Committee in
February of 1946 with an initial mandate to explore temporary initiatives to address labor

shortages in British industries.157

In May of 1946, the committee announced the
establishment of the Polish Resettlement Corps, a program designed to recruit Polish

veterans for civilian employment through the Ministry of Labour. With the passage of

 

'55 John Darragh, Colour and Conscience: A Stuafy of Race Relations and Colour Prejudice in Birmingham
(Leicester: Leicester Printers, 1957), I3.

'56 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 4-5, 69; Paul, “‘British Subjects’ and ‘British Stock,”’ 254; Spencer, British
Immigration Policy Since 193 9, 38.

157

Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 67.

100

the Polish Resettlement Act in February of 1947, the government outlined a system of
pensions and welfare beneﬁts for immigrating veterans and their dependents. By 1950,
no less than 120,000 Polish veterans and their families had migrated to Britain with plans
for permanent settlement. ' 58

Although the recruitment of Polish veterans represented one of the largest
government-sponsored migration programs instituted in the early postwar years, the
British Government initiated a number of smaller scale recruitment schemes designed to
attract foreign workers from continental Europe. Under the “Westward Ho” initiative the
Ministry of Labour facilitated the recruitment of over 78,000 displaced persons lodged in
camps throughout Austria and Germany for temporary employment between 1946 and
1951. Eventually, the Ministry of Labour negotiated permanent settlement for these
workers, who became known as European Volunteer Workers. Although many of the
recruitment programs targeted male workers to meet labor deﬁciencies in industries
including construction and coal-mining, shortages in domestic service, health care and
textiles opened more gender-speciﬁc opportunities for women workers. In March of
1946, the Foreign Labour Committee agreed to recruit 1,000 women from eastern
European countries including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to work to work in hospitals,
sanitoriums and other health care facilities. During the summer of 1948, three programs,
the “Blue Danube”, the “North Sea” and the “Official Italian Scheme” facilitated the
immigration of roughly 13,600 women from Austria, Germany and Italy respectively to

work in the textiles, domestic services and nursing.159

 

153 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 68; Miles, “Nationality, Citizenship, and Migration to Britain, 1945-1951,”
430; Patterson, Dark Strangers, 64; Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 8.

'59 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 71-75; Miles, “Nationality, Citizenship and Immigration to Britain, 431.

101

At the same time that the British Government actively supported and sponsored
the immigration of foreign labor from continental Europe, ofﬁcials expressed serious
reservations about the prospects of recruiting colonial workers—who were legally bona
ﬁde British citizens—to address deﬁciencies in the postwar domestic labor market. In
September of 1948, just months after the arrival of the Empire Windrush, the Colonial
Ofﬁce distributed a memo throughout the Cabinet detailing “the difﬁculties that arose
from the presence of coloured workers in Great Britain.” A8 a result, by February of
1949, the Colonial Ofﬁce spearheaded the formation of a Working Party on the
“Employment in the UK. of Surplus Colonial Labour” to explore the potential
consequences of recruiting colonial labor to address employment deﬁciencies in Britain.
In one of the ﬁrst reports issued by the Working Party, the committee noted that although
there were some 367,000 employment vacancies that had been reported to the
Employment Exchanges in major industries including coal mining and textiles, “there are
several obstacles to the use of Colonial labour for the purpose of relieving labour
shortages over here.” In addition to noting the fact that colonial workers, as British
citizens, could not be subjected to labor regulations imposed on foreign workers, such as
those which conﬁned foreign workers to certain industries for speciﬁc periods of time,
the report also suggested that “it has to be realised—that while there is no formal ‘colour
bar’ in this country. . .neither the employers nor the workers, in industry would look with
favour on the introduction of coloured workers in factories and workshops where up to
now they have not previously been employed.” The report added, “many employers—

even the most broadminded among their number—tend to look with disfavour on the idea

102

of using coloured labour to relieve even the most obstinate and persistent labour
shortages.”160
Although the report concluded that overall massive recruitment of colonial
workers would not be a viable source for addressing postwar labor market demands, the
Working Party did note that more gender-speciﬁc arrangements might be more conducive
to ﬁlling vacancies in certain areas. Their report also suggested that while “no case could
be made out in present circumstances for the importation of male colonials for any
industry. . .In the case of industries employing women. . .we are impressed with the fact
that both in the textile industries in the ﬁeld of hospital domestic employment there are

” '6' An earlier memo from an official in

large unsatisﬁed demands for female labour.
the Ministry of Labour poignantly captures at least some of the gendered opposition to
the inﬂux of Caribbean male migrants. The memo explained:
there is relatively little objection to the importation of women, for
example, for domestic employment where there living conditions would
be controlled, since the worst troubles concern men who settle in
unsatisfactory districts and get into street ﬁghts owing to quarrels about
coloured men associating with white women, etc.'62
These statements help to illuminate the ways that gender played an active role in shaping
white Britons’ perceptions of and policy makers’ reactions to Caribbean migration.
Marcus Collins has persuasively argued that mythical tropes of West Indian men,

including their propensity to engage in sexual relationships with white women, served as

powerful narratives buttressing the social politics of race in postwar Britain. Collins

 

16° PRO LAB 8/ 1571 Draft Report of Working Party on the Employment in the UK. of Surplus Colonial
Labour, March, 1949.

'6’ PRO LAB 8/1571 Draﬁ Report of Working Party on the Employment in the U.l(. of Surplus Colonial
Labour, March, 1949.

"2 PRO LAB 8/1571 Memo from DJ. Stewart to Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Hariman, dated 12 March 1949

103

insists that negative stereotypes of black masculinity were oftentimes used as a foil to
images of respectable, middle-class, white masculinity and then packaged as a means to
justify racial discrimination and violence.163 Collins’ argument is instructive in that it
draws attention to the stigmatization of black men, but more importantly, because it is
suggestive of the gendered constructions of race. For British policy-makers one of the
most problematic features of Caribbean migration centered speciﬁcally on the inﬂux of
black male workers. In the process of crafting political responses to the issue of
Caribbean migration policy makers constructed images of and racialized Caribbean
migrants through gendered prism of ideas about black men. In turn, these ideas where
then appropriated as the consummate symbols of the consequences of Caribbean
migration and then used as a means to rationalize and institutionalize race-based social
policies that sought to exclude both Caribbean men and women from exercising their
right of migration and entitlement to full citizenship in British society.

In addition to the macro economic and political elements that facilitated
Caribbean migration to Britain, including high rates of unemployment in the colonies, the
tightening of borders in the United States, the open door migration policy in Britain, and
the promise of economic opportunities in the postwar British labor market, an array of
mediating structures and subjective forces ﬁrnctioned to shape the terms of migration
from the Caribbean to Britain. Throughout the 19508 and early 19608 it is clear that
Caribbean migrants tapped into a wide range of formal and informal networks including

government-sponsored initiatives, local travel agencies, advertisements and exchanges

 

'63 Marcus Collins, “Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain,” The
Journal of British Studies 40, 3 (July, 2001): 391-418.

104

between friends and family which encouraged migration and shaped migrants’
expectations of life in Britain.

The British Caribbean Welfare Service which eventually became known as the
Migrant Services Division of the West Indies Commission after the formation of the
West Indies Federation, was one of the most important govemment-sponsored agencies
facilitating Caribbean migration during the late 19508 and early 19608. Established in
June of 1956 the organization began as a joint venture backed by the Colonial Ofﬁce and
funded by the local Caribbean governments as mechanism designed to offer support to
Caribbean migrants upon their arrival in Britain. Before this agency took shape, only the
governments of Jamaica and Barbados had attempted to make arrangements for
settlement assistance for migrants. During its lifespan, which coincided with the collapse
of the West Indies Federation in 1962, Migrant Services maintained two primary
departments—Welfare and Reception and Community Development. The
responsibilities of the Welfare and Reception department included receiving migrants at
various ports upon arrival, locating family and friends, informing migrants of prospective
employment opportunities, negotiating housing contracts, arranging travel to areas
outside of the landing port, and providing information on health care and legal services.
The Community Development department offered vocational training and education for
workers, served as a liaison and advocate on behalf of migrants with Labour Exchanges,
employers and trade union through an Industrial Relations component and arranged
social clubs and other activities for migrants to incorporate themselves into the fabric of

British society. '64

 

'6’ PRO CO 1031/2945 Memo, “Migrant Services Division of the Commission for the West Indies, British
Guiana, and British Honduras,” document undated, ﬁle dates 1957-1959; PRO CO 1031/3942 Colonial

105

While the chief focus of the Migrant Services Division centered on aiding migrant
communities in Britain, the agency also prepared a pamphlet for distribution in the
Caribbean territories to orientate prospective migrants to conditions in Britain. The
pamphlet entitled, Before You Go To Britain instructed migrants to take into account a
range of issues before migrating. The leaﬂet suggested that migrants:

Consider the problem of arranging for accommodation for yourself in

Britain, the problem of ﬁnding employment, the difﬁculty of living and

working in a cold and wet climate which is different as it could possibly

be from the one to which you are accustomed, the long separation from

family with little hope of raising enough money to either send for them or

return, [and] the great risks of making a success of the venture.165
In addition to pointing out some of the factors that informed adj ustrnent and settlement in
Britain the pamphlet also provided migrants with details of some of the ﬁnancial
particulars associated with migration to Britain. The pamphlet gave estimates of prices
for train tickets to London, a range of average wages for manual laborers, reasonable
prices for accommodations and a sample budget of typical living expenses. Likewise,
migrants were encouraged to bring ample funds to cover incidentals and expenses
associated with securing housing, to be able to provide “satisfactory evidence” of labor
skills including records of previous employment, trade union members, character
references and tool kits and to anticipate delays in ﬁnding suitable employment. The
pamphlet warned, “DO NOT BELIEVE that high wages are being paid in Britain from

laboring wor ” and further cautioned migrants that there was signiﬁcant job competition

between them and “long standing residents of Britain” for vacancies in skilled labor

 

Ofﬁce Memo “Commonwealth Immigrants’ Advisory Council” undated, ﬁle dates 1960-1962; S.K. Ruck,
The West Indian Comes to England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 54.

"5 PRO co 1023/34 Pamphlet, Before You Go to Britain, undated, ﬁle dates 1954-1956.

106

positions. ’66 It is clear from the tone of the pamphlet that although the government
agency had a mandate to assist migrants in their settlement to life in Britain, Migrant
Services did not necessarily serve as a proponent of migration. In many ways, in
collusion with broader interdepartmental initiatives involving the Colonial Ofﬁce, the
Home Ofﬁce and various Cabinet officials, the Migrant Services Division attempted to
suppress increasing migration to Britain, just as it ﬁinctioned as a critical intermediary of
adjustment for migrants arriving in Britain during the 19508 and 19608.

Despite the circulation of publications such as the pamphlet prepared by Migrant
Services presenting a somewhat dire picture of life in Britain, prospective migrants
tapped into an array of information that portrayed the prospects of ﬁnding amenable
economic opportunities in Britain in a more favorable light.“57 In the early 19508, the
local government in Barbados entered into partnerships with the Ministry of Health, the
Ministry of Labor and the Colonial Ofﬁce to advertise and recruit laborers in Barbados to
work for hospitals, domestic service industries, the London Transport Executive and the
British Transport Commission. Overall, during this period, migration functioned as an
important avenue of economic relief in Barbados in the midst of growing unemployment
and declining Gross Domestic Products per capita. A8 a result, workers overwhelmingly

look to Britain as a destination with alternative economic opportunities.168 Under these

 

"’6 PRO co 1028/34 Pamphlet, Before You Go to Britain, undated, ﬁle dates 1954-1956.

’67 Even before signiﬁcant numbers of Caribbean migrants moved to Britain during the 19508, there were
publications circulating discouraging employment prospects in Britain. As early as 1948 in a telegram sent
to the Colonial Secretary warning of the impending arrival of Jamaican migrants on the Empire Windrush,
the Jamaican Governor noted, “Public announcements of the difﬁculty of obtaining work have not
discouraged these bookings [referencing the booking of travel to Britain by Jamaicans aboard the Empire
Windrushl.” PRO HO 213/714 Telegram ﬁom Governor of Jamaica to Colonial Secretary dated 11 May
1948. See also Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I 93 9, 32.

"’8 Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain, 31-36.

107

 

programs, the Barbadian government provided loans to cover the cost of passage and
incidentals, conducted background checks and medical screenings, and offered training
courses to equip prospective migrants with the necessary skills to adjust to employment

’69 In the case of Barbadian women recruited as domestics

in various British industries.
and nurses, often the local government established a temporary migration program with a
three-year contract during which time workers made weekly contributions to the
government to cover the costs associated with repatriation.I70 Though the British
Government did not pursue labor recruitment in Barbados or any of the Caribbean
territories on the same scale as it did in continental Europe after World War II, programs
such as those facilitated through the Barbados government most certainly created a
greater awareness of labor shortages and employment opportunities available in Britain
during a period of economic turmoil throughout the Caribbean.

In addition to government-sponsored initiatives inducing and facilitating postwar
migration to Britain, an array of private and more informal agencies and networks played
pivotal roles in motivating Caribbean migrants to seek out different opportunities in
Britain. By the mid 19508 several new travel agencies in Jamaica had been established in
both rural and urban areas to address the growing demand for passage to Britain. These
agencies often courted prospective migrants with advertising campaigns that promised
competitive rates for mass consumption, advisory services related to arrival and

settlement in Britain and credit programs for those unable to make full cash payments at

the time of purchase. Travel agencies ﬂourished and offered ﬂexible packages and

 

'69 PRO co 1031/3942 Colonial Ofﬁce Memo, “Commonwealth Immigrants Advisory Council,” undated,
ﬁle dates, 1960-1962. The bulk of these initiatives took place between 1952 and 1955.

'70 PRO CO 1028/20 Copy of Blank Bond Agreement for Barbadian Domestics Recruited for Service in
Britain, dated 1952; See also Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 193 9, 42.

108

services in large part due to a corresponding growth in the transportation industries.
Throughout the early 19508 there were more ships available providing passenger
accommodations for travel from Jamaica to Britain coupled with an increase in the
number of aircrafts departing the island. '7’

In lieu of the structural forces and formal networks established motivating
Caribbean migrants to depart for Britain, for many migrants’ ties to and exchanges with
family members and or acquaintances that were planning or had already journeyed to
Britain were some of the most important factors inﬂuencing their decision to migrate. In
a series of interviews conducted with Jamaican workers who had settled in London
during the 19508 and 19608, Harry Goulboume found that oftentimes the encouragement
and resources of family and friends gave potential migrants more incentive to migrate.
One worker explained:

Well I had a brother at the time over here, and a sister, and
they want me to come—1956. I reﬁised—they even sent
me the fare; 1956 my sister sent me the fare and I didn’t
come. 1958, sent me the fare again, I didn’t come until
1960. Well, most of my friends was leaving—coming to
England—all friends and cousins...so I was coming from
work one Friday and I saw them going to the Travel Serve
place—I went in with them. . .Well, I booked my assage at
the same time because I did have money with me. 72

The motives behind this worker’s decision to migrate were not unusual. One

govemment—sponsored study of Jamaican migration to Britain during the 19508 noted

 

”' Roberts and Mills, Study ofExternal Migration Aﬂecting Jamaica, 1953—1955, 5-8; PRO co 1034/20
“Report of Bureau of Statistics on Jamaican Migration to U.K.,” sent by Governor of Jamaica to Colonial
Secretary, February, 1955.

'72 PJ. Leese, B. Piatek and I. Curyllo-Klag, ed. The British Migrant Experience, 1700-2000 (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 131. Interview conducted by Harry Goulboume, 1975.

109

that the “element of what can be called a ‘multiplier process’ had a pervasive inﬂuence
on migratory ﬂows between the Caribbean and Britain. The reported explained:

One person goes to the U.K. and induces, directly or indirectly,

one or more friends or relatives to come over. In some cases the

migrant sends remittances home and these might well be used to

ﬁnance other another migrant. In other cases the passage is paid

for in the U.K. on behalf of a person in Jamaica.173
The ﬁndings of this study illuminates how an individual migrant’s decision to migrate
was often facilitated by the economic opportunities for movement made available
through the monetary assistance of family members, acquaintances and other networks of
social relations maintained with those already in Britain.
The Character of Postwar Caribbean Migration to Britain

The Population Census of 1951 recorded that in that year there were
approximately 15,000 people residing in England and Wales whose “birthplace or

nationality” was listed as the West Indies.174

While this ﬁgure is representative of the
presence of several generations of black people descended from the Caribbean, many of
these individuals initially came to Britain in the twentieth century to provide wartime
services during both World War I and World and 11. During World War I, the British
Government actively recruited and accepted several thousand West Indians and other
colonial subjects to work in various wartime industries including munitions factories,

chemical factories, military labor battalions and naval services. During World War II,

upwards of 10,000 Caribbeans served in the Royal Air Force. In addition, through a joint

 

'73 PRO CO 1034/20 “Report of Bureau of Statistics on Jamaican Migration to U.K.,” sent by Governor of
Jamaica to Colonial Secretary, February, 1955.

174 Glass, Newcomers, 4; Patterson, Dark Strangers, 41. Patterson notes that although the 1951 census did
not include references to race, it would be reasonable to assume that the majority of those listed as “West
Indian born” were people of color. This study presumes that since the overwhelming majority of people of
color in the Caribbean were people of African descent, it is highly likely that this f1 gure is mostly
representative of a black West Indian population.

110

venture between the Ministry of Labour and the Colonial Ofﬁce the British Government
sponsored the employment of eleven separate contingents of Caribbean workers hailing
from Jamaica, British Honduras, the Bahamas, Barbados, British Guiana, the Leeward
Islands and the Windward Islands. As a part of this program, several thousand migrant
workers were offered temporary employment, provided with transportation to England
and guaranteed free return to their homeland at the end of the war.175
Although wartime recruitment programs including the Auxiliary Territorial
Service and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force employed women workers from the
Caribbean in various capacities during World War II, the overwhelming majority of
wartime migrations from the Caribbean brought male workers into the British labor
market. In the early postwar years, this trend of majority male migration continued until
1958, the ﬁrst year when female migration surpassed male migration from the Caribbean

territories. ' 76

Throughout the 19508 and into the early 19608 the greatest numbers of
Caribbean migrants hailed from Jamaica, the largest of the British Caribbean colonies.

According to the records maintained by the Jamaican government, between 1953
and 1955, there was a noticeable shift in the occupational characteristics of male migrant
workers departing for Britain. Reﬂective of early years of Caribbean migration in 1953
roughly 65% of male migrants were classiﬁed at the time of their departure as “skilled”
or “semi-skilled” workers. These workers typically occupied positions as carpenters,

mechanics, painters, and shoemakers. In that same year, “unskilled” workers, whose

numbers included a large proportion of agricultural laborers represented approximately

 

”5 James, “Black Experience in Twentieth Century Britain,” 366; Ramdin, The Making of the Black
Working Class, 71, 86-87; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 112-113.

’76 Patterson, Dark Strangers, 417; Glass, Newcomers, 5.

111

20 percent of male departures. By 1955, however, the total number of “unskilled” males
migrating to Britain from Jamaica had risen fourteenfold in comparison to a sevenfold
increase of skilled labor migration. At that time agricultural workers had become the
largest occupational class of male migrants. Whereas the majority of male migrants
identiﬁed themselves as workers, an examination of female migration indicates that
substantial numbers of female migrants from Jamaica did not claim a position in the
public labor market at the time of their departures. Of the female migrants who did
declare occupations in Jamaica between 1953 and 1955 nearly half fell into the category
of seamstress while roughly 16 percent were classiﬁed as domestic workers. 177

By 1955, the Migrant Services Division of the West Indies Commission, a joint
venture maintained by all the governments of all the British Caribbean colonial
governments began compiling statistics documenting Caribbean rrrigration to Britain.
While these statistics represent an important source maintained in Britain for analyzing
the scale of Caribbean postwar migrations to Britain, they likely underestimate arrivals
because they only account for migrants who had made arrangements or had some form of
contact with Migrant Services upon their arrival in Britain.178 Relying heavily on
information gathered through Migrant Services sociologist Ruth Glass formulated some
of the earliest proﬁles of black Caribbean migrant populations in postwar Britain. Glass
based her conclusions on a range of data collected from Caribbean migrants in London
who utilized the services of the Migrant Services Division throughout the 19508.

In London, where the highest proportion of Caribbean migrants settled in Britain,

Glass indicated that migrants tended to concentrate in West London, in such areas

 

177 Roberts and Mills, Study of External Migration Affecting Jamaica; 1953-55, 48-52.

'78 Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain, 10-11.

112

including Paddington, North Kensington, Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush and
Hammersmith and in South West London in such places including Brixton, Stockwell
and South Lambeth.179 According to her ﬁndings, Glass estimated that most male and
female migrants were between the ages of 20 and 30 when they arrived in Britain. Less
than 15% were over 44 years of age. In terms of occupational status, Glass found that
46% of men and 27% of women were classiﬁed as “skilled” laborers in their home labor
markets. Overall, the study noted that male workers tended to have worked as manual
laborers in their homelands, while women workers tended to be evenly split between non-
manual and manual occupations.I80
In her study of Jamaican migrants in postwar Britain Nancy Foner has suggested
that one must take note of the myriad of social transformations that informed the
experiences of Caribbean migrants in Britain. Throughout her study Foner traces several
of these “status changes” or reconﬁgured identities and relationships resulting from the
process of migration from Jamaica to Britain including the social value of certain
categories of labor, gender relations in the home and family economy, and the meaning of
racial identitiesm In addition, Foner pays close attention to the ways that men and
women experienced and participated in the process of migration oftentimes from very

different trajectories. As it relates to occupational status, Ruth Glass argued that

although most Caribbean male workers came to Britain in search of better employment

 

”‘9 Glass, Newcomers, 29-3 7.

"’0 Ibid., 20-23. According to Glass, non-manual occupations would include professionals, shopkeepers,
salespersons, clerks and typists while manual workers would include craftsmen, mechanics, carpenters,
domestics and seamstresses.

m Nancy Foner, Jamaica Farewell: Jamaican Migrants in London (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1978). Foner understands “status” as one’s position in a social system based on differentiation, p. I-
2.

113

opportunities in general they were employed in occupations that were classiﬁed at a
lower rank on the occupational scale in Britain than that of their previous employment in
their homeland. In her sample population, almost 40 percent of male workers classiﬁed
as skilled manual laborers in the Caribbean worked in unskilled jobs in London. The
study indicated that only 5 percent of male migrants found jobs in a higher occupational
category upon their arrival in Britain.

Cautious of Glass’s conclusions emphasizing that migrants overall were
downwardly mobile in terms of occupational status, Foner noted the importance of
understanding that through the eyes of migrants, higher wages and better living standards
even in lower ranking positions in the British labor market might have allowed migrants
to view their employment as upwardly mobile. Foner also pointed out that even in
instances where male laborers might have felt that their skills and training were not
comparable to their employment prospects in Britain, for many women who had not
participated in wage-eaming labor in the homeland, rrrigration offered greater
opportunities to earn wages, increase ﬁnancial independence, and gain more inﬂuence
over the economic resources of families. Foner argued that while many women initially
migrated to join spouses or other family members in Britain, they were not merely
“dependent” or “passive” migrants, but rather that they became active participants
shaping the process of migration. According to Foner, women’s migration proved vital
to the settlement and maintenance of household and families. In addition, for those who

welcomed the ﬁnancial opportunities offered through wage labor, meeting the demands

114

of work responsibilities outside of the home oftentimes required reconﬁguring more
traditional gendered boundaries of labor in the household.’82
The Social Dilemmas of Blackness

In addition to understanding the gender dynamics of migration and the shifting
social value and meaning of certain types of labor in the home versus the host society,
Caribbean migration to Britain offers an interesting point of departure for analyzing the
transformation of racial identities. Nancy Foner notes that one of the most important
markers of “status” or social identity for Jamaican migrants in postwar Britain was their
blackness. According to one fair-skinned Jamaican woman,

providing you are black at all...they [white Britons] feel there is nothing good in

black people. No black people are clean and decent. We is not human being, we

is something else. It gives me at times to know that because of the color of your

skin they class you in that condition, beneath them in every way.”’83

These statements are striking in that they capture the inherent tensions between
the construction and articulation of blackness and black identities as experienced in
Jamaica and that which migrants encountered in Britain. In Jamaica, the overlapping
legacies of slavery and colonialism produced an intricate hierarchy of race that intimately
connected color, class and social status. Evolving out of the social relations that
buttressed Jamaican slave society, whites, who were fair skinned people of European

descent were at the top of the social pyramid and generally had the greatest access to

land, wealth, education and political power. Beneath this group were “coloureds” or

 

"’2 Foner, Jamaica Farewell, 63, 67, 74-75, 87, 90. For a more recent discussion of the role of gender in
postwar labor migration to the Caribbean see Margaret Byron, “Migration, Work and Gender: The Case of
Post-War Labour Migration From the Caribbean to Britain” in Caribbean Migration: Globalised Identities
ed. Mary Chamberlain (London: Routledge, 1998).

"’3Foner, Jamaica Farewell, 42.

115

“browns” who were typically people of mixed racial heritage who often did acquire
middle class respectability through formal education, skilled or professional occupations,
wealth and limited political power. At the bottom of the social hierarchy were the black
working class masses who generally had less education, the least amount of political
power and typically were darker complexioned people of African descent.184 To be sure,
none of these categories of social classiﬁcation were absolute. Although gradations of
skin pigmentation contributed to the stigmatization of people of African descent, the
blemish of blackness assumed by one’s skin color could be negotiated and in some cases
even transcended by social markers including education, occupation, wealth, and one’s
affinity towards the adaptation of European physical attributes, cultural norms and
sensibilities. As a result, although skin color functioned as a salient characteristic of
blackness, it was in no way a deﬁnitive marker of social inferiority and thus did not
preclude people of Aﬁican descent from accessing many of the privileges associated with
whiteness. '85
In Britain, there existed more rigid boundaries of race that, despite education,
wealth or skill, did not automatically erase the social stigmas associated blackness. In a
song entitled, “If You’re Not White, You’re Black” written during his tenure in Britain
during the 19508 Calypsonian Lord Kitchener poignantly addressed the presence of a

black/white dichotomy of race in British society during the postwar era that differed from

the color/class pigmentocracies found in Caribbean societies. Chastising those

 

'84 James, Holding Aloﬂ the Banner of Ethiopia, 108-109; James, “Migration, Racism and Identity”, 237-
239; Ula Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2002): 8-11.

"’5 Nancy Foner, “Race and Color: Jamaica Migrants in London and New York,” International Migration
Review 19, 4 (Winter, 1985): 712-713

116

individuals who could not lay full claim to a European lineage because of their mixed
race parentage, yet attempted to distance themselves from darker complexioned people of
African descent and deﬁne themselves as racially superior, Lord Kitchener’s lyrics
explained,

Your father is an African

Your mother may be Norwegian

Your pass me, you wouldn’t say goodnight

Feeling you were really white

Your skin may be a little pink

And that’s the reason why you think

That the complexion of your face

Can hide you from the Negro race

No you can never get away from the fact

If you’re not white, you’re considered black. '86
Kitchener’s lyrics draw attention to the ways in which the experience of blackness in
Britain was less negotiable when compared the Caribbean. Where stratiﬁcations related
to skin color—particularly because of their relationship to the material and ideological
elements of social class— may have been more ﬂuid and diverse in Caribbean society as
it applied to deﬁning the parameters of blackness, in Britain, these social ﬁssures were
more rigid and less calibrated.187

Ironically, just as the markers of blackness became more concrete explicitly as

they related to skin color and national origin in Britain, for many Caribbean migrants,

their encounters with the social hierarchies of class in a within European society

 

"’6 Lord Kitchener, “If You’re Not White, You’re Black,” London is the Place For Me: Trinidadian
Calypso in London, 1950-1956 (London: Honest Jon’s Records Ltd, 2002), compact disc recording. In
addition to treating darker complexioned people of African descent as socially inferior, in subsequent
verses of this song Kitchener alludes to the ways in which those attempting to avoid identifying themselves
with blackness would also try to assume traits associated with whiteness by transforming their physical
appearance (skin bleaching, hair straightening), changing speech patterns, afﬁliating with people of
European descent, and condemning “the name of Aﬁica.”

"’7 James, “Migration, Racism and Identity Formation,” 239.

117

destabilized and complicated notions of whiteness. A Jamaican migrant who moved to
Britain in 1955 recalled,
I would look from my window and see a white man sweeping the streets, and fear
that, in the shop nearest where I should live, a white girl would sell me cigarettes.
Now I was seeing my colonial society in a terrible light. I had never hoped to
challenge the whites in Jamaica for a job. I realized in the confusion of the
crowded station that I was starting on a desperate phase of life. If the white man
was sweeping the streets, then any job I asked for would mean a challenge to him.
I was not one of the ‘mother country’s children. I was one of her black children.
That was to be my ﬁrst lesson on arriving in Britain.”188
This migrant’s narrative of encountering working class whites in British society
illuminates the contrasts between the image of whiteness and the experience of blackness
in the Caribbean as compared with Britain. While interwoven hierarchies of color and
class in Jamaica privileged whiteness in such as way that qualiﬁed it as a social category
representing an amorphous sector of elites, in Britain, the saliency of class created social
divisions which fragmented representations of whiteness for Caribbean migrants, just as
they calciﬁed the experience of blackness. Winston James has argued that at the same
time that British society provided a context structured by racial ideologies and practices
that (re)produced collective black identities that collapsed distinctions including skin
color, class, occupation and education among Caribbean migrants of Aﬁican descent, the
presence of a white working class debunked “the mystique of whiteness” cultivated in
the colonial setting as Caribbean migrants encountered white people occupying positions
at even the lowest rungs of the social ladder, performing menial labor, living in squalid
accommodations and experiencing poverty. To be sure, there were working class, and

poor whites in Caribbean societies; however, J ames’s point suggests the ways in which

the migration experience transformed commonly held ideas of the social meaning

 

"’3 Hinds, Journey To An Illusion, 50-51.

118

attached to whiteness as Caribbean migrants witnessed greater proportions of white
people in more diverse non-elite positions within the socio-economic hierarchy. 189
For Caribbean migrants of African descent in postwar Britain, their blackness was
most distinctly marked by their skin color and their national origin. Two of the areas
where one’s blackness presented particular obstacles for Caribbean migrants included
housing and employment. As a part of a sociological study of West Indian settlement in
Britain, Ruth Glass found that between November of 1958 and January of 1959 the
Kensington Post, a weekly newspaper serving London contained over 300 housing ads
that barred persons from tenancy on the basis of race and or national origin. Some of the
ads speciﬁcally excluded persons of color while others read “Europeans only” or
“English only” which implied a reference to both color and national origin.190 Noting the
widespread appearance of housing advertisements barring black tenants, May Cambridge,
who migrated during the 19508 to attend a training course for nursing, noted “The ‘no
Irish, Blacks or Dogs’ signs are no myth—sometimes you would knock on the door with
a vacant sign on the window, some would say the room had just gone, others would slam
the door in your face while the less forthright wouldn’t bother opening the door but you
could see the curtains twitching.”’9'
Prior to Glass’s study a Manchester Guardian editorial acknowledged that, “anyone
who has searched for accommodation in London will testify to the large number of

advertisements which specify ‘No Coloured Applicants’ or ‘White Tenants Only’; any

Coloured person in London will conﬁrm that an impossibly high percentage of the

 

 

'89 James, “Migration, Racism and Identity,” 239-243.
19° Glass, Newcomers, 58-59.

'9' “May Cambridge,” Forty Winters On, 32.

119

remaining accommodation has ‘already been let’ when the landlord sees the colour of the

applicant.”192

The article’s conclusions paralleled the exact experience of Baron Baker,
who had come to Britain as part of the Royal Air Force during World War 11. Baker
noted that for him the practice of racism became most apparent during his search for
housing. He insisted that “Usually, once you told people you were coloured, they would
say their place has been let.”'93 These racially discriminatory practices had a two-fold
outcome. By placing restrictions on the areas where black migrants could reside,
discriminatory housing practices also concentrated black workers in certain areas
including Brixton and Notting Hill.

Following World War II, massive housing shortages plagued a number of British
cities. Throughout Britain, residential property loss and destruction was a major wartime
casualty that became a central concern of postwar reconstruction and recovery efforts. In
a White Paper issued in September of 1944, Parliament estimated that roughly 202,000
homes had been completely destroyed during the war and approximately 255,000 more
Were no longer inhabitable. In lieu of these ﬁgures, Parliament records indicated that
While they remained in livable condition, over four million homes had suffered wartime
dalnage and needed repairs.194 In addition to wartime destruction, the failure to fulﬁll
Prewar construction agendas initiated in response to housing losses resulting from World
War I, the virtual cessation of new home building and the deterioration of existing homes

due to inadequate maintenance during the war also exacerbated housing problems.

COlrrpounding this, in areas such as London, with higher birthrates and greater numbers

‘92 Noel B. W. Thompson, “Roots of Racial Prejudice,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, 18 September 1958.

‘93 “Baron Baker,” Forty Winters On, 19.

m MJ. Elsas, Housing Before the War and After (London: Staples Press, Ltd., 1946), 67

120

of returning demobilized military personnel and evacuees, the demand for housing
proved even more staggering. According to a report issued by the Commission on
Housing in Greater London in 1951, the city had an excess of 500,000 more households
than available homes.I95 Thus, as the British government confronted the realities of
postwar social conditions, the deﬁciencies in residential property, overcrowding and
rising prices for accommodations transformed housing into a major postwar political
issue.

The scarcity of housing, particularly in urban areas with larger population densities
such as London, served as a major point of social competition, and in some cases conﬂict
in many communities. '96 In addition to an overall lack of suitable accommodations,
overcrowding and the ability of private landlords to impose higher rents and unfair lease
agreements because of increased demand, further aggravated social tensions related to

living space. While the issue of housing was a source of contention among indigenous
residents—particularly in many working class communities— for black migrants, the
competition over living space was compounded by their position as social outsiders due
to their migrant status and the stigmas attached to their racial identities. In the London
borough of Lambeth, which included the Brixton community, an area with some of the
largest proportions of black migrant settlement, before local authorities would even
consider a resident for public housing, a person had to document local residency for a
period of at least three years. As a result, many new migrants were virtually shut out of

wait lists for local council housing programs during the 19508 because of residency

 

'95 Richard Sabatino, Housing in Great Britain, I 945-1949, 3; Edward Pilkington, Beyond the Mother
Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots (London: LB. Tauris, 1988), 53.

’96 Patterson, Dark Strangers, 173.

121

requirements receiving little or no assistance from local authorities. '97 One local MP. for
the Brixton area, during the 19508 maintained,
Emigrants from the West Indies stand no chance of being rehoused by
local authorities. . .Emigrants have to make their own arrangements,
frequently buying dilapidated property with only a few years to run on the
lease. There is much overcrowding which local authorities have to
overlook because they have no alternative accommodation to offer if an
overcrowding notice were to be served.198
As the statements of the MP. explain, although the overall housing shortage
generated a host of problems for all residents eager to secure adequate homes at
affordable prices, for black migrants, this problem was oftentimes compounded by their
inability to access local initiatives available to indigenous residents or those with long-
standing ties to the local community. In a study of race and residential housing patterns,
Susan J. Smith found that throughout the 19508 de facto exclusionary practices such as
local residency requirements effectively prevented most black migrants from accessing
public sector housing and therefore limited the majority of black migrants to private
sector housing opportunities. Her study found that as of 1961, 74% of West Indian
households lived in accommodations secured through the private sector, and only 6% had
secured public housing. ’99
Not only did black migrants face discrimination in their pursuit of housing, but

oftentimes even when they did secure housing they were subject to indecent living

conditions, the constant gaze of suspicious landlords and exorbitant rental fees.200 Walter

 

’97 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 37.
’9’ Quoted from Racial Unity Bulletin, July 1956; Found in Patterson, Dark Strangers, I76.
’99 Susan J. Smith, T he Politics of ‘Race and Residence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 51-52.

200 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 37-3 8.

122

Lothen, who journeyed to Britain from Jamaica in 1954 recalled “Accommodation was
appalling. A lot of landlords didn’t want to know you. Half the houses had no bath. You
had one toilet for ﬁve or six houses and had to go to the public baths.”201 Although May
Cambridge, who also hailed from Jamaica, had seemed housing in Britain through her
nursing program, she vividly remembered the frustrations of friends and relatives who
were forced to rent rooms “at the princely sum of L2.04sh with six or seven people
sharing the facilities.” Cambridge also explained the rigidity of life under strict landlords.
She noted, “Tenants were subjected to rules and regulations for army recruits,” adding
that “One of [her] landladies charged 1d for toilet tissue, and if the lights were left on
you’d get a knock on the door. You also had to be in at a certain time and all clothing
was washed and dried in bedroom.”202 When Claude Ramsey arrived in 1956 from
Barbados, he remembered having to rent a room which he shared with some thirty people
“with only one bath and toilet.” Ramsey insisted, “The conditions were appalling, and it
cost me L3 a week in rent,” a sizeable sum when the average manual laborer netted little
more than L5. per week during the 19508.203
One of the most notorious landlords well-known for capitalizing off of the racial
politics of housing was a Polish immigrant named Peter Rachman. At the peak of
Rachman’s real estate career during the 19508, he maintained interests in over 23 separate
companies controlling over 144 properties in the North Kensington and Paddington

districts, where large proportions of black migrants had settled in London. Although

many of the properties owned by Rachman were dilapidated and oftentimes in unsanitary

 

201 “Walter Lothen,” Forty Winters On, 23.
202 “May Cambridge,” Forty Winters On, 32, 34

20’ “Claude Ramsey” Forty Winters On, 37; PRO CO 1028/34 Pamphlet “Before You Go To Britain”.

123

conditions, for black migrants, they provided some of the few places where they could
easily secure lease agreements. Feeding off of the overall housing shortage and a
looming reluctance by many whites to rent to black tenants, Rachman and other local
landlords easily exploited black migrants demand for the most basic of socio-economic
necessities by charging higher than average rental rates for less than adequate
accomodations.204
During the late 19508 local ofﬁcials began to take note of increasing housing rates in
these areas and began to persuade more black tenants to make appeals to local rent
tribunals to seek out lower and more equitable leases. In 1959, one newspaper reported
that after reviewing the reports of social workers in the area, local revenue investigators
had been dispatched to North Kensington with a speciﬁc mandate to gather information
on “the earnings of some slum landlords who are amassing quick fortunes by exploiting
homeless immigrants.” The paper also noted that in most cases the efforts of these
investigators had proven futile because many West Indian tenants lived in fear of
retaliation by “strong-arm men” employed by landlords who had warned one prospective
plaintiff, “Talk and you will be cut up.”205 Another West Indian man recalled that after

applying to the tribunal for a decrease in rent, he was told by landlord agents that his

family might be met “with an accident” if he continued to pursue his petition. 206

 

20’ PRO HO 325/161 Note of Meeting between George Rogers, MP. for North Kensington, Mrs. O.
Wilson, Mr. Donald Chesworth, Mr. Richard Hauser and Mr. Renton of the Home Ofﬁce, dated 20 January
1960; PRO HO 325/161 Metropolitan Police Report, Metropolitan and City Police Fraud Department dated
27 July 1959.

20’ “Victims of Rents Racket are Terrorised in Riots Area,” News Chronicle and Daily Dispatch 25 May
1959.

2“ 1bid.

124

According to Metropolitan Police records, a number of West Indians reported similar
incidents of threats after bringing cases before the local rent tribunal.

Michael de Frietas, who had worked closely with a Donald Chesworth, a local
councilor for North Kensington to encourage West Indians in the area to bring relevant
issues concerning housing before the local rent tribunal reported that on the day before
his own tribunal hearing Peter Rachman attempted to persuade him to withdraw his
application. Rachman, whose properties routinely were the subject of tribunal matters,
warned de Frietas that if he continued to pursue “tribunal business. . .Someone is going to
get hurt and it’s not going to be me.” In addition to reporting instances of overt threats or
use of intimidation tactics by landlords, local authorities also noticed that some residents
withdrew their petitions to rent tribunals under questionable circumstances. In other
instances, as in the case of Edmund Jarvis, it was only after the tribunal reduced his rent
that his landlord retaliated by disconnecting his electricity.207

Not only did housing discrimination and exclusionary housing policies reﬂect a social
hierarchy of race which denied black migrants equitable living conditions, but also
employment represented an arena where race Operated as an instrument marginalizing
black workers’ access to opportunities. In a study of West Indian workers in
Birmingham, Lydia Lindsey characterized the marginalization of West Indian and other
immigrants of color in the postwar era as a “split-labor phenomenon” which stratiﬁed

workers within the same market on the basis of race. According to Lindsey, “Although

they were full citizens, the West Indian immigrants could not become racially integrated.

 

207 PRO HO 325/161 Metropolitan Police Report, Metropolitan City Fraud Department dated 27 July 1959.
This document is s summary of reports concerning alleged threats or intimidation towards individuals
applying to rent tribunals residing in the Notting Hill and North Kensington district of London between
April and June of 1959.

125

Their skin color and backgrounds in addition to discriminatory policies prevented their
movement in higher-paying jobs. Color determined social class and work status. White
skin ranked higher than black skin in the social hierarchy.” 20" Complicating Lindsey’s
argument, Clive Harris notes that even before migrants arrived in Britain, the British
economy had only manufactured “shortages” in certain lower paying, less desirable jobs
deemed as “unskilled” labor, and these were the positions reserved for all migrant
workers as indigenous white labor took advantages of new opportunities in higher paying
industries. Reminiscent of Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack’s work on migrant labor
and class structure, Harris’s argument is important to understanding the multiple
economic and social processes that resulted in labor market segmentation and the
concentration of black workers within the British labor market into lower paid
“occupational ghettoes.”209 As migrants, black workers’ encountered a British labor
market structured to incorporate them in a speciﬁc, and to be sure, subordinate positions
in the labor economy; racism and racial discrimination only compounded their experience
as economic outsiders and therefore exacerbated their already marginal status in the
British labor market.

In sociological study of British employers’ impressions, attitudes, policies and
practices as they applied to West Indian workers conducted between 1956 and 1957,
Sheila Patterson identiﬁed a range of factors contributing to the marginalization of black

workers in the labor market and lack of economic mobility. Surveying a number of

 

20’ Lydia Lindsey, “The Split-Labor Phenomenon: Its Impact on West Indian Workers as a Marginal
Working Class in Birmingham, England, 1948-1962,” Journal of Aﬁican American History 87 (Winter,
2002): 126.

209 Clive Harris, “Post-War Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army” in Inside Babylon ed. Winston
James and Clive Harris, 18; Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure
(London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 57-115. See also Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration,
44-45.

126

public and private establishments in industries with the highest concentrations of labor
shortages, her study noted that in addition to a traditional hostility towards ‘foreign’
labor, British employers often characterized black workers as lazy, slow, and
irresponsible as compared to their white counterparts and suggested that these stereotypes
were often used to justify unofﬁcial quotas in hiring black workers and or overlooking
them for supervisory positions.210
Patterson also found that while local govemment-sponsored employment agencies
were supposed to exercise non-discrimination on the grounds of race in the consideration
of worker for various employment opportunities, oftentimes, informal practices placed
black workers at a disadvantage as local employment ofﬁcials typecast black workers as
“unskilled” and or less suited to certain types of higher paying industrial and professional

positions.2 ’ 1

After conducting interviews with eight local employment agencies in
Brixton, where some of the highest concentrations of black migrants in London resided,
Patterson noted that a combination of employers’ perceptions of black workers and
agency workers’ own interactions with and attitudes towards black workers had produced
a number of negative stereotypes about black workers, both male and female. According
to Patterson, the prototypical male West Indian worker was “at best semi-skilled”, more
suited to “rough labouring jobs” that involved more repetition than intellect, required
more supervision that their white counterparts and were “sometimes said to be childish

and irresponsible?”2

 

2’0 Patterson, Dark Strangers, 84-130.
2“1bid., 131-142.

2" 1bid., 134-135.

127

Similar unfavorable images of West Indian women workers also existed. Patterson
noted that ofﬁcials at labor exchanges often viewed black women unable to adapt labor
skills acquired in the colonies, to meet the demands of the British labor market. Local
labor ofﬁcials noted that black women were oftentimes ill-suited to industrial labor,
generally unwilling to accept domestic labor positions which they regarded as
demeaning, making them difﬁcult to employ. Overall, Patterson found that many
ofﬁcials regarded the employment of black women as the greater “labour problem” as
compared to men for a number of reasons. Local labor ofﬁcials maintained,

Employers ﬁnd them [black women] slow, touchy, unadaptable, choosy,
hypochondriac, and lacking in stamina. . .They [employers] say they need more
supervision than white workers. Many employers prefer the lighter-coloured ones
and ask for them in preference to ‘black-mammy types’ and ‘dark ones.’ Some
employers ﬁnd them not worth training because of their habit of ‘making a baby’
every year or so. Employers also claim that their white women employees object
to working side by side with them for personal hygienic reasons.
Patterson’s ﬁnding elucidate the ways in which the racialization, stigmatization and
marginalization of West Indian workers occurred on gendered terms. While black
migrants entered a British economy structured to relegate them to the lowest positions
within the labor market, gendered constructions of race operating in British society
charmeled them into lower paying, less desirable jobs and in some instances virtually shut
them out certain industries and employment opportunities. Although Patterson’s study
does not account all of the ways that black migrant workers were marginalized in the
British labor economy, her study is indicative of the impact of race in determining
opportunities for and conditions of employment for black workers.

For many black migrants, experiences of housing segregation and labor market

segmentation represented a clear contradiction to the ideology of racial egalitarianism

 

2'3 1bid., 135-136.

128

inherent in the Commonwealth ideal as legally prescribed by the provisions of a
tranregional, transracial British citizenship, guaranteed by the British Nationality Act of
1948. While the promises of a multiracial British citizenship had allowed black migrants
to fashion themselves as members of the British imperial body politic and substantiate the
meaning of that sense of belonging through the act of migration, the experience of racism
and discrimination in Britain created a penetrating schism between the possibilities of
British citizenship and the realities of race-based exclusion. Moments of racial violence
dramatized the fractures between ideal and reality and caused both black migrants and
indigenous white residents to closely examine their own deﬁnitions of what it meant to be

British and to become full members of British society.

129

CHAPTER THREE
Images of Violence and Shifting Narratives of Race

On August 25, 1958 the lead story in Jarnaica’s largest newspaper, The Daily
Gleaner announced that hatches, knives and razors had been drawn in a “bloody battle”
involving over a thousand “Britons” and West Indians described as “one of the ugliest
race riots ever known in the United Kingdom?”4 Over the course of following few
weeks, The Daily Gleaner joined both British and other international media outlets in
reporting on a string of “racial outbursts” beginning on August 23, 1958 involving
“coloured residents” and “white teddy boys” in Nottingham, and eventually spreading to
Notting Hill, London.215 On the evening of August 23, Samuel Roberts, who had been
drinking at the Chase Tavern, one of the few local bars in the St. Ann’s district of
Nottingham serving black customers remembered overhearing a group of white patrons
remark, “Let’s go hunt the niggers” after a ﬁght ensued which later spewed into the street
when a Jamaican man made overtures towards a white woman seated in the pub.”6
Returning home for the evening with her husband, Mary Lowndes, a young white
woman, recalled that without any provocation “a black man hit me. . .Then my husband

was punched from one side of the road to the other by a crowd of coloured men.”2'7

 

2" “Britons, West Indians Riot: 1,000 Wage Bloody Battle in Nottingham Streets,” The Daily Gleaner 25
August 1958.

2” “Racial Outburst in An English City,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 28 August 1959; “Planned Attacks
Reported,” The Daily Gleaner 28 August 195 8.

2'6 Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 106-107. Based on Edward Pilkington’s interview with Samuel
Roberts on 28 January 1988.

2'7 “Dozens Hurt in Racial Clash,” London Times 25 August 1958.; “Race War in Britain,” Trinidad
Guardian 25 August 1958.

130

According to Nottingham’s Assistant Chief Constable, Fred Porter, “the riot was
started by a group of about 20 West Indians who set out on Saturday night to avenge an
attack on a fellow West Indian by a gang of teddy boys.” However, Porter noted that
while West Indians might have initiated the brawl, “The West Indians who started the riot
quickly disappeared” as they were swarmed by a group of white locals who “decided to
take the law into their own hands and attack every coloured man they came across.”218
While it is unclear what factions initiated the violence, which was eventually quelled with
the aid of police dogs and the ﬁre brigades, by the end of the evening, dozens of people
had suffered injures ranging from minor cuts and bruises to serious stab wounds.

The next evening, nine young white men armed with makeshift weapons
including iron bars and table legs, viciously assaulted Joseph Welsh and severely
wounded two other black men. Described as a ‘beating-up’ spree in which the young
white men randomly “beat up coloured people walking about” at Shepherd’s Bush Green
near Notting Hill, London, the activities of the young men served only as a mere prelude
to more interracial violence in the area.219 On the following week, for four consecutive
nights beginning on 31August 1958, numerous reports circulated detailing violent clashes
between “gangs of white and coloured youths” throughout Notting Hill and greater North
Kensington as hostile white aggressors were heard shouting threatening racial epithets

including “We’ll kill the black bastardsl”, “Deport all Niggers” and “Let’s lynch the

triggers!” amidst cries to “Keep Britain White!220

 

2'“ “Several Quizzed By Police,” The Daily Gleaner, 26 August 1958.

2'9 “Old Bailey Trial For Nine English Youths,” The Daily Gleaner 28 August 1958; “Accused of Beating
Coloured Men: Nine Youths Sent For Trial,” London Times 1 September 1958.

22° “New Race Riots in UK: Mostly Whites Held,” The Daily Gleaner 1 September 1958; Pilkington
Beyond the Mother Country, 114; “Further Racial Incidents,” London Times 3 September 1958.; “Renewed

131

On the afternoon of 1 September 195 8, Seymour Manning, described as “a young
West African student” dashed into a local grocery store in Notting Hill after escaping an
attack by “a gang of young toughs” which incited “a crowd of two hundred white
people,” some of whom called out “lynch him!” When questioned by a reporter about the
reasons for the attack on Manning, one person replied, “Just tell your readers that Little
Rock learned us a lesson.” Another stated, “tell them we’ve got a bad enough housing
shortage around here without them moving in. Keep Britain white.”22'

Michael Leach, a local constable recalled assisting another “coloured man”
caught in a similar predicament. He noted in his report that on that same evening, he had
come to the assistance of “a coloured man” who had been chased and attacked by “a
group of youths” all while “several hundred people, all white” watched and shouted
“obscene remarks” such as ‘We’ll get the black bastards.” Leach’s report also explained

that not only did the crowd display hostility towards black people in the area, but the

angry mob also attacked him and another officer as they attempted to intervene in the

 

Racial Disturbances in London,” London Times 2 September 1958; “London Racial Outburst Due to Many
Factors,” London Times 3 September 1958;“ ‘Lynch Him!’ Heard in London,” Manchester Guardian
Weekly 4 September 195 8.

22' “ ‘Lynch Him!’ Heard in London,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 4 September 1958. This is a reference
to the Little, AK desegregation debacle in the United States. In accordance federal mandates issued in
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) calling for desegregation in American schools “with all deliberate
speed,” the NAACP registered nine black students to begin the process of integration at Little Rock Central
High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On September 4 1957, when the infamous “Little Rock nine”
attempted to enter the school, they were blocked by the Arkansas National Guard who had been deployed
at the behest of Governor Orval Faubus who had allied with segregationist interests intending to derail
integration. Between 1957 and 1959 the Little Rock debacle made international headlines and became a
prominently displayed image of the shortcomings of American democracy, the pervasiveness of racism and
ideas of white supremacy in American society, and the struggles waged by black Americans to secure
social justice and civil rights. See Cary Fraser, “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower
Administration and the Dilemma of Race for US. Foreign Policy” Diplomatic History 24, 2 (2002): 233-
264; Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay Co., 1962);
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of A merican Democracy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 4.

132

assault and disburse the crowd.222 Referencing events on the evening of 31 August
Constable Geoffrey Golding’s encounter with what he described as a “large crowd of
white people in an extremely hostile mood,” mirrored Leach’s experience. Golding
described having to dodge from bottles as the crowd roared “Why are you helping the
black bastards?” and referred to police ofﬁcers on the scene as “nigger lovers.”223
During the third night of violence in the streets of London, one white resident
observed “a crowd of youths” rampaging through Oxford Gardens “smashing windows in
houses where coloured people live.” In another incident, a mob chased a white woman
and her black male companion while throwing saucers, cups and bottles. By midnight,
some thirty people ﬁlled the Notting Hill police station charged with such offences
including weapons possession, displaying insulting behavior and causing grievous bodily
harm.224 Earlier that day, George Rogers, M.P. for the North Kensington district had
circled the area with a loudspeaker calling for a halt to the violence. Rogers implored, “I
appeal to you for common sense, decency, and tolerance in this matter of race relations. I
ask you to all remain calm, to stay indoors in your homes to-night, and to obey the
police.”225 As the violence continued for yet another evening, a local West London

magistrate asked for a voluntary curfew suggesting “now is the time for people of good

will in that area to stay indoors in the evening for a day or two to let the police restore

 

”2 PRO MEPO 2/9838 Statement of Michael Leach 1 September 1958.
223 PRO MEPO 2/9838 Statement of Geoffrey Golding referencing events of Aug. 31, 1958

22" “Renewed Racial Disturbances in London,” London Times 2 September 195 8; PRO MEPO 2/9838
Metropolitan Police Report 8 September 1958. According to Metropolitan Police records 25 individuals
were formally charged on this evening and appeared before the magistrate of 3 September 1958. Of those
arrested eleven were identiﬁed by the report as “coloured” while the remaining were identiﬁed as “white.”

22’ “Renewed Racial Disturbances in London: M.P.’s Appeal London Times 2 September 1958.

133

order.”226 By the time that the major ﬁghting between black and white Londoners
reached an armistice police had made 108 arrests, the overwhelming majority being
young white working class men.227 As racial tensions in Notting Hill and surrounding
areas transitioned from a violent boil back to a more passive simmer, the images,
perceptions and realities of race in Britain continued to undergo shifting interpretations as
local communities and the wider British public began to decipher the meaning of racial
violence in Britain amid an assortment of international spectators and commentators.

As news of “race riots” traveled throughout Britain and the world, the tone of the
responses to the violence ranged from a certain naive surprise at the explosion of
seemingly nascent racial tension, to anxiety over the plight and presence of growing non-
white communities.228 Moreover, in some cases, commentary evoked subtle tones of
vindication that Britain was not immune to the dilemmas of race plaguing nations such as
the United States and South Africa. What is clear from both domestic and international
reactions to reports of interracial violence in Nottingham and London is that preexisting
ideas of race and race relations in Britain underwent signiﬁcant change and adaptation.

This chapter begins by examining the range of international commentary
surrounding the news of “race riots” in Britain. International responses to the new of
“race riots” reveal critical discourses about perceptions of race and race relations in

Britain and elucidate the ways in which international audiences interpreted the

 

22" “Magistrate Asks for Voluntary Curfew,” London Times 3 September 1958.

227PRO MEPO 2/9838 Memo to Assistant Chief Constable ﬁ'om Divisional Detective Superintendent,
September, 1958. According to Metropolitan Police records 72 of the perpetrators were white and 26 were
“coloured.” See also DO 35/7992 Telegram from Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce to Commonwealth
Governments 4 September 1958; Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 128

223 References to ‘race riots’ are used in quotes to denote the fact that this was a discursive device used to
publicly discuss racial conﬂict between black and white residents.

134

implications of racial conﬂict in Britain. Perhaps, more importantly, the reactions of
international commentators provide a window to gauge preexisting narratives of race and
race relations in Britain that informed representations of British national identity on a
world stage. What becomes clear from views from abroad is that images of “race riots”
sharply contrasted with widely held perceptions of British attitudes concerning race and
the social meaning of race in British society.

As one examines international conjecture in the aftermath of the violence in
Nottingham and Notting Hill three dominant narratives concerning the representation of
race and race relations emerge. The ﬁrst of these narratives highlights Britain’s image as
a racially liberal society. In their analysis of the impact of new of the violence in France,
British observers were careful to note that unless the conﬂicts continued to repeat
themselves, “they will have done little damage to England’s reputation in France as a

9 A second racial narrative looks

stronghold both of liberal practice and law and order.22
at the ways that Britain was envisioned as the ‘Mother Country’ or ﬂagship symbol of a
multiracial Commonwealth of Nations. The third racial narrative addresses Britain’s
image in the arena of race relations as a foil to those represented by the Jim Crow South
of the United States and the apartheid regime of South Aﬁica. To be sure, these
narratives of race in Britain did not exist in isolation from one another, nor were they
absolute or uncontested; rather, they ﬁrnctioned as converging images informing a
broader portrait of race and race relations in postwar Britain that indeed fractured during
the summer of 1958.

In addition to highlighting the ways in which international responses to the news

of “race riots” unearthed the existence of certain perceptions of race and race relations in

 

229 PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram From Paris to Foreign Ofﬁce dated 25 September 1958.

135

Britain, this chapter will also attempt to engage the broader historical context in which
these narratives evolved and were appropriated for strategic purposes as discursive
ﬂames of representing British national identity. In doing so, this chapter traces how these
racial narratives manufactured what I refer to as the “mystique of British anti-racism”
which in turn informed and sustained certain national myths that white Britons used to
envision their own sense of British national identity. The “mystique of anti-racism”
provides a means to discuss the ways that, historically, notions of British national identity
have evolved in relation to ideas of racial tolerance and Britain’s perceived image as a
beacon of racial progress and international advocate for anti-racist causes. Because news
of “race riots” certainly obstructed the survival of the “mystique of British anti-racism,” it
is important to note the ways in which British reactions to the violence served as an
attempt to preserve a shattered sense of British national identity and to reconcile national
myths concerning British anti-racism with the realities of racial conﬂict. The ﬁnal
section of the chapter probes this issue and suggests how British commentators described
and translated the meaning of the violence and its wider implications in such a way that
produced new myths about race and race relations in Britain which stigmatized black
migration and the working class communities where many black migrants resided. In the
process, akin to the preexisting narratives which congealed the “mystique of British anti-
racism” before the violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill, the racial narratives that
British observers constructed to explain and interpret the violence did much to silence the
historic existence of quotidian, structural and institutional racism present in British

society.

136

International Reaction to News of “Race Riots” in Britain

As the intensity of the interracial clashes in Nottingham and Notting Hill London
began to reach an impasse, a chorus of international Spectators rendered opinions about
how news of “race riots” affected public opinion regarding race and race relations in
Britain. According to the Daily Herald of Ghana “A great roar of protest against Britains
[sic] race war exploded across the world,” as news of racial violence circulated

internationally.230

While newspapers throughout the world served as the most important
channels through which international audiences received news of and publicly reacted to
incidents of racial violence in Britain, the British government also took special interest in
monitoring international responses to the reports of racial conﬂict in Nottingham and
Notting Hill. British diplomatic representatives resident in various European nations, the
United States and the Commonwealth served as key agents responsible for measuring the
pulse of international opinion concerning reports of racial violence in Britain and
subsequently keeping government officials abreast of the shifting views of race and race
relations in Britain from abroad. From the outset, several British overseas observers
reported that much of the commentary surrounding the news of “race riots” centered on
the seemingly uncharacteristic nature of images of racial violence in Britain given the
nation’s international reputation for racial liberalism, tolerance, and egalitarianism.
According to reports from New Zealand, most of the major newspapers printed
editorials concerning the episodes of racial violence in Britain, all of which expressed

sentiments of “surprise and shock.” One article appearing in the Wellington Dominion,

noted that reports of racial violence in Britain proved “more shocking because such

 

23° PRo DO 35/7992 Memo, “Ghana and the Racial Riots” from A. Snelling to Sir H. Lintott dated 4
September 195 8.

137

disorders [seemed] so out of character with Britain [sic] whole reputation for
tolerance.”23 1 Reporting on the view from France, British observers contended, “The
British are renowned in France for their tolerance and liberal outlook and it has come as a
shock to many that racialism can rear its ugly head in the country of Wilberforce.”232 In a
survey of early editorial remarks concerning the violence appearing in the New York
Times, British ofﬁcials noted that the paper reported that there was “something especially
shocking about the race riots in England,” but surely considering America’s own
prominently displayed racial history, the editor maintained that “one may be sure that the
British themselves are more shocked and chagrined than anyone in foreign lands.” The
editor added that it would “be interesting to see how the British reassert their normal
tolerance and good sense,” given that “no people in the world had achieved a more
urbane since of tolerance than the British.”233
The issue of a shattered model of British racial tolerance, liberalism and anti-
racism also permeated the statements of Aﬁican and West Indian political leaders who
appealed to British government officials on behalf of the interests of their fellow
nationals resident in Britain in the days immediately following the violence. Aware that
most of the violence against black residents had entailed attacks upon West Indians, as
the violence spread from Nottingham to Notting Hill, West Indies government ofﬁcials

made a joint decision to dispatch a federal representative as a show of concern for the

plight of West Indians in Britain. Initially, the West Indies Federal government had

 

23 ' PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Wellington, New Zealand to Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce 8
September 1958.

232 PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Paris France to the Foreign Ofﬁce 6 September 1958. William
Wilberforce was an iconic ﬁgure in the British anti-slavery movement.

2’3 PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Washington to Foreign Ofﬁce 4 September 1958.

138

designated Deputy Prime Minister Carl LaCorbiniere as the ofﬁcial representative
delegated to “afford some assurance to West Indians” residing in Britain in light of the
violence; however Norman Manley, Chief Minister of Jamaica, the homeland of the
majority of West Indian migrants, accompanied LaCorbiniere and ultimately became the
most prominent government spokesperson for the West Indian community in Britain.
Referencing the racial clashes upon his arrival in Britain, Manley maintained, “That this
thing should happen in Britain which as always lead the world in tolerance and decency
is a tragedy.”234 Arriving in London just days before Manley, Ghanaian Finance Minister,
K.A. Ghademah contended that Ghanaians were “distressed that racial disturbances
Should be happening in Britain of all places.”235

Although West Indians represented the overwhelming majority of black residents
and targets of racially motivated attacks in Nottingham and Notting Hill, the phenotypical
dimensions of the construction of racial identity and blackness in Britain oftentimes
trumped any distinctions between people of African descent, or in some instances any
person of color from another based on nationality. One Pakistani paper explained, while
“the main targets for the time being appear to be negroes. . .there is no knowing when the
teddy boys will direct their wrath at the large population of Pakistanis that are in the
United Kingdom.”236 Having received reports of unprovoked attacks on Ghanaian

students and well aware that in the eyes of most white agitators involved in violence

against black people, “West Africans are most certainly to be classed with West Indians

 

23‘ “Manley Sees w1 Leaders,” Trinidad Guardian 6 September 1958
23’ “Nigerian Ofﬁcial Blames Inﬂux of West Indians,” Trinidad Guardian 5 September 1958 p.2
23” PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Pakistan to Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce dated 4 September 1958;

Reported from the Karachi Times

139

as the major menace,” the Ghanaian government urged that the British Government
openly condemn the violence and offer stronger protection for people of color.237

Following a Similar logic, government ofﬁcials in both Nigeria and Kenya also
expressed concern and petitioned British ofﬁcials on behalf of their nationals resident in
Britain. Kenyan leader Tom Mboya appealed to the Home Secretary to explain what
measures the British government had taken to ensure the safety of the largely student
population of “Kenyan Aﬁican[s]” in Britain.238 Although the Nigerian Minister of
Health insisted that the roots of racial violence could be traced “to the inﬂux of West
Indians,” he noted that the Nigerians government was “very concerned” because many
Nigerians alongside West Indians had “suffered maltreatment.”239 In a separate memo to
the Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, Commissioners for the Nigerian
Federation maintained that “feelings of anxiety and apprehension” existed among many
Nigerians in Britain due to the racial violence and volunteered to counsel their nationals
to “exercise all possible discretion and restraint” to help ease racial tensions.

Not only did international responses to the news of “race riots” emphasize how
images of racial conﬂict tarnished Britain’s perceived exemplary record on issues
concerning race and race relations on a world stage, but also they alluded to the ways in

which the images undermined Britain’s leadership role within a Commonwealth

 

2’7 PRO DO 35/7992 Memo, “Ghana and the Racial Riots” from A. Snelling to Sir H. Lintott dated 4
September 1958; “Nigerian Ofﬁcial Blames Inﬂux of West Indians,” Trinidad Guardian 5 September 1958
p.2; In another memo concerning racial violence towards people of color in Britain, Quaison-Backey of the
Ghanaian High Commission criticized the British press for aggregating “different kinds of ‘coloured
people.’ Quaison-Backey maintained that “There was all the difference in the world between Indians and
Pakistanis on one hand, West Aﬁicans on another, and West Indians in the third place.” See PRO DO
35/7992 Memo, “Racial Riots in the U.K.” to Mr. Chadwick from ME. Allen dated 1 September 1958.

2” PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram to the Colonial Secretary from E. Baring of Kenya dated 31 October 1958

‘39 “Nigerian Ofﬁcial Blames Inﬂux of West Indians,” Trinidad Guardian 5 September 1958 p.2.

140

community bound by the principles of multiracial egalitarianism and universalism.
According to Norman Manley, “The whole future of the British Commonwealth of
Nations—much of which is people by non-white races—depended on Britain’s conduct
in the face of racial incidents.”240 Just as the British Nationality Act of 1948
institutionalized the notion of a British Commonwealth community of citizens whose ties
transcended the boundaries of race and nation, the Commonwealth itself, at least in
theory, represented somewhat of a ‘raceless’ political entity comprised of equal
nationalities, where markers of race had no pertinent social value. With the passage of
the British Nationality Act of 1948, Britain reinvented its historic leadership position
within the Commonwealth by ofﬁcially transforming the legal meaning of British
citizenship into a universalizing discourse of civic membership and belonging that
extended to and united all Commonwealth communities regardless of race, ethnicity, or
national origin. In doing so, Britain reaffirmed its premier status in the Commonwealth
community as both a symbol and the embodiment of the theme of multiracial
egalitarianism resting at the heart of the Commonwealth ideal. News of “race riots”
exposed a glaring inconsistency between the ideas of multiracialism inherent in the
concept of Commonwealth and the social realities of race and race relations in Britain,
where the Commonwealth model was to be upheld to its highest degree.

Referencing the impact of reports of racial violence on Commonwealth relations,
an article appearing in the Pakistani daily, Times of Karachi suggested the actions of
white instigators of racial violence in Britain jeopardized, “the good work done in our
multi-racial [Commonwealth] association.” A8 punishment, the article suggested that

“the teddy boys or for that matter all of those guilty of provoking race riots should be

 

24° Reuters report, “British Entertainers Attack Race Violence,” Washington Post 11 September 1958.

141

ﬂogged to within an inch of their lives.”24' Expressly opposed to any form of migration
restrictions, Hugh Cummins, Premier of Barbados maintained that if the violence
persisted, it would “do a lot of harm to the Commonwealth.”24ZSimilarly, British
diplomats noted that Ghana’s Evening News printed a number of “bitter articles”
highlighting the “implicit threat to Commonwealth solidarity” posed by the incidents of
racial conﬂict in Britain.243

One of the key issues framing dialogue concerning the how racial violence
threatened Commonwealth relations surrounded rumblings that the British government
might use the “race riots” as an excuse to impose restrictions on Commonwealth
migration to Britain. Although a review of Commonwealth migration policy had been
the subject of Parliamentary debate in prior months, according to public statements issued
by Home Ofﬁce Under-Secretary Pat Homsby-Smith, while the British Government was
“anxiously watching” the situation concerning Commonwealth migration, it was
“reluctant” to consider any policy which would depart ﬁ'om Britain’s “traditional
readiness to receive all citizens who have the status of a British subject.”244 However, for
some government ofﬁcials, reports of racial conﬂict generated cause to reconsider
changes to the current Commonwealth migration policy.

Just two days after news of racial violence in Nottingham began to surface, two

Parliament members for the city made suggestions that the violence should be read as a

 

2“ PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Pakistan to Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce dated 4 September 1958.
2’2 “WI Leaders Opposed to Restricted Immigration,” Trinidad Guardian 8 September 1958.

243 PRO DO 35/7992 Extract ﬁ'om Ghanaian Fortnightly Summary dated 12 September 1958.

2“ “Nottingham MP8 Seek Curb on Immigration,” Daily Gleaner 28 August 1958. In fact, migration

restrictions designed to limit black Commonwealth migration had been the subject of ofﬁcial debate for
over a decade preceding the riots. This will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.

142

sign that Britain’s open door migration policy was no longer tenable. James Harrison,
Labour M.P for Nottingham North suggested, “This policy of allowing people to come
freely into our country was practicable in the nineteenth century. It is completely
impossible under modern conditions.” Harrison’s Conservative colleague, J .K.
Cordeaux, agreed. He explained,
I have believed for some time that the there ought to be something in the
nature of a quota or deﬁnite restrictions on people coming into this
country from oversea. . .I have wondered about this matter for some times
because I feared that something serious like this might occur. What
happened emphasizes the seriousness of the position and urgency of the
245

matter.

Even before the British Nationality Act of 1948 formally established migration as a right
of British citizenship which extended to all Commonwealth nationalities, Britain had long
exercised an open door migration policy for individuals moving from various part of the
Commonwealth to Britain. As a result, the privilege of migration to Britain was an
important historic precursor to formal British citizenship that cemented the bonds
between Britain and other Commonwealth communities.

Addressing a largely West Indian audience in London Norman Manley, Chief
Minister of Jamaica, acknowledged Britain’s prerogative to exercise migration controls.
However, he contended that it would be “tragic” if Britain restricted its borders to
Commonwealth migrants in response to the violence. He noted that Britain’s open door
migration policy was “a principle which has helped to build the very foundations on

which the Commonwealth rests.”246 Also stressing the importance of migration as an

essential element deﬁning Commonwealth relations, one Nigerian official expressed

 

2’5 “Nottingham M.P.s Urge Curb on Entry of Immigrants, ” London Times 27 August 1958; Article also

appeared in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner under same heading on 28 August 1958.

2’6 “Manley Addresses London Meeting,” Daily Gleaner 8 September 1958 p. 1,9.

143

concerns Similar to Manley’s, warning that if Britain decided to restrict migration from
Commonwealth nationals it would “do irreparable damage to Commonwealth unity and
mutual understanding.”247

Since people of color, and more speciﬁcally, people of African descent from the
West Indies, represented the overwhelming majority of migrants from the
Commonwealth in Britain during the 19508, inherently, the issue of migration, and in
particular, the question of migration restrictions came embedded with racial undertones.
How could British ofﬁcials consider migration restrictions in lieu of racial conﬂict
involving black Commonwealth migrants without Signaling that controls were indeed a
de facto race policy designed to limit the entry of black British citizens? South Africa’s
Johannesburg Star addressed this controversial question in an editorial suggesting,

No doubt Britain would be reluctant to depart from the principle of

the open door or to give any appearance of racial bias. But when

she is faced with an immediate practical problem, the obvious

thing is to check the inﬂow of people whose coming at this

moment could only aggravate the troubles of the authorities as well

as the non-whites already in the country.”248

In an editorial appearing in Cape Town’s Die Burger after reports of racial

violence in Nottingham began to surface, one South African observer attributed the
“racial explosion” directly to Britain’s reluctance to implement migration controls which
would appear to discriminate against the entry of people of color “in the interest of good

relations with the multi-racial empire and Commonwealth.” The editorial suggested that

“Such intolerance towards people who are coloured is completely in opposition to the

 

2’7 “MacMillan Discusses Race Riots,” Trinidad Guardian 6 September 1958 p.1
243 PRO DO 35/7992 Letter from J.O. Wright, South African High Commissioner’s Ofﬁce to W. Preston,

Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce dated 18 September 1958. This article ran in the Johannesburg Star on 4
September 1958.

144

picture of a liberal, colour-blind Britain which is Shown to the world.” 249 To be sure,
British observers noted that in general, articles related to incidents of racial violence in
Britain reported in the South African press tended to highlight what was regarded as, “the
very real conﬂict between the principle of the open door in a multi-racial Commonwealth
and the practical problem of controlling the inﬂux of those who are difficult to

”250 South African opinion clearly articulated how the news of “race riots” in

assimilate.
Britain—the premier Commonwealth state—clearly exposed the ways that the principles
governing the Commonwealth ideal formed inextricable ties between race and migration.

As racial conﬂict and its international implications prompted British officials to
more carefully reevaluate the relationship between race and migration within the context
of notions of ‘Commonwealth’, two scenarios emerged. Either migration could continue
to function as one of the chief mechanisms through which the ideal of a multiracial
egalitarian Commonwealth civic community acquired substantive value, or in striking
contrast, it could serve as a medium of remapping the racial hierarchies which had
deﬁned Empire onto the citizenship rights afforded to Commonwealth nationalities. By
even contemplating the latter, particularly in response to racial violence, Britain could not
avoid international conjecture speculating that when it came to freely opening its borders
to the Commonwealth community, race did indeed matter.

Not only did South African public opinion emphasize how the violence unearthed

tensions between a British migration policy reﬂecting the ideas of a multiracial

Commonwealth and the practicalities associated with forging a multiracial society, but

 

2"”Die Burger was the leading nationalist, pro-govemment paper in Cape Town. PRO DO 35/7992
Telegram from South Africa to Commbnwealth Relations Ofﬁce dated 1 September 1958.

25° PRO DO 35/7992 Letter ﬁ'om J .0. Wright, South African High Commissioner’s Ofﬁce to W. Preston,
Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce dated 18 September 1958.

145

more importantly, news of “race riots” in Britain offered South African observers an
opportunity to attempt to vindicate their own abhorred racial practices and appeal for
greater understanding from British critics. J .0. Wright, a representative for the South
African High Commission monitoring public opinion in South Africa noted that after the
violence spread from Nottingham to Notting Hill, South Aﬁican commentators had “a
real ﬁeld day” reporting on the riots.251 As reports of violence in Nottingham emerged,
the London Times reported that South African papers referenced the events as “a case of
the biter bit.” Under the heading “No more the cry ‘Holier than thou’” the Johannesburg
Star reprinted a cartoon appearing in Britain’s Daily Express portraying British Prime
Minister Harold MacMillan dodging a scufﬂe between a “Nottingham ‘teddy boy’ and a
coloured man” as Governor Faubus of Arkansas and a “vaguely resembling Mr. Swart”
labeled ‘South Aﬁica’ watched.252 A British correspondent reporting from Johannesburg
explained,

The incidents at Nottingham have roused considerable interest

here...Many South Aﬁicans feel that as their own racial troubles develop

the British, like the United States, are likely to be more sympathetic to the

Union’s [South Africa’s] difficulties, and this gives them a feeling of

relief.”253

Editorial commentary appearing in Die Burger, the organ of Afrikaan Nationalists

evoked a similar tone. One writer contended that Britain was “ill-equipped to deal with

 

25' PRO DO 35/7992 Letter from 1.0. Wright, South Aﬁican High Commissioner’s Ofﬁce to W. Preston,
Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce dated 18 September 1958.

2’2 “Britain’s Racial Problems: S. Africans Now Expect Greater Sympathy,” London Times 29 August
1958. Governor Faubus was the segregationist governor of Arkansas who dispatched the army reserves to
stall the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in accordance with the mandate of Brown vs.
Board of Education. Charles Robbert Swart was the Minister of Justice in South Aﬁican and came into
power with the Nationalist Party which institutionalized apartheid in 1948. In 1959, he became the Union
of South Africa’s last Govemor-General before the government left the British Commonwealth and became
the ﬁrst President of the Republic of South Africa, a position which he held until 1967.

253 “Britain’s Racial Problems: S. Aﬁ'icans Now Expect Greater Sympathy,” London Times 29 August
1958 p.7.

146

the problems of a multi-racial community.” The editorialist insisted that because British
perspectives of “colour problems” derived chieﬂy from its role as a colonial power,
Britain’s answers to issues of race had been resolved through what the commentator
labeled as “total apartheid” rather than through any serious consideration of “multiracial
existences.” Clearly, the commentator was attuned to the ways that historically, Britain’s
experience with issues of race had been Shaped primarily within the context of an
imperial structure in which the majority white metropolitan community was responsible
for governing from abroad rather than accommodating a sizeable population of color on
its own shores. For this reason, the article maintained that British perspectives “on the
problems of colour are often stupid and intolerable,” and suggested that Britain was
unqualiﬁed to critique South Africa’s use of apartheid policies to regulate race relations
within its borders. The editorialist concluded,

Perhaps the trivial race problem created by non-Whites in Britain

will help towards the furtherance of humility, a requirement for all

true knowledge, among the British public and leaders. A large part

of African can do well with less advice, but no without greater

understanding, from Britain.”254

Just as South African opinion conveyed a hope that the racial violence displayed
in Nottingham and Notting Hill might cause British critics of apartheid to reexamine their
self-righteous posture on issues pertaining to race, observers in Germany, France, and
Australia also expressed a degree of vindication for racial practices and policies
scrutinized by the British public. In their surveys of German reaction to news of “race

riots” in Britain, British officials reporting from Germany described what was detected as

“an undertone of German satisfaction” that Britain had proven itself “not immune to anti-

 

25’ PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from South Africa to Commonwealth Relations Office dated 1 September
1958.

147

racial feeling” despite pompous denouncements of Nazi anti-Semitic sentiment in
Germany.255 Similarly, British officials in Paris noticed that a certain degree of
schadenﬁ'eude characterized French reactions to the violence, particularly among “right-
wing Frenchmen” who recognized Britain’s “tendency to preach to others” on the subject

256 The reactions

of race as exempliﬁed in British criticisms of French policy in Algeria.
of German, French and Australian audiences to news of “race riots” illuminates the extent
to which various sectors of British society had become invested in the shattered
narratives of British racialism, tolerance and anti-racism exploded by news of “race
riots.” To be sure these narratives had historically allowed various sectors of British
society to assert a sense of moral authority and to denounce the racist policies and
practices of other nations.
Preserving the Mystique of British Anti-Racism

The manner in which domestic audiences responded to and interpreted racial
conﬂict provides a vehicle to examine the extent to which contested notions British racial
liberalism, permeated British observers’ own perceptions of British national identity. To
be sure, images of racial conﬂict challenged the legitimacy of preexisting racial
narratives buttressing the “mystique of British anti-racism” and subsequently undermined
widely held national myths regarding British racial attitudes and race relations in British
society. Therefore, it is useful to think about the ways in which news of “race riots”

presented a virtual crisis of British national identity that British commentators carefully

considered in formulating their responses to the violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill.

 

2” PR0 DO 35/7992 Telegram from Bonn, Germany to the Foreign Ofﬁce dated 25 September 1958.

2’6 PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Paris, France to the Foreign Ofﬁce dated 6 September 1958.
Schadenﬁ‘eude is a German term referring to one’s satisfaction in the misfortune of others.

148

In the days following the violence in Notting Hill, Foreign Ofﬁce ofﬁcials
dispatched a conﬁdential telegram to all Government representatives in Commonwealth
territories and those serving in such places including Italy, Japan, the United States and
Russia. This memo explained:

We naturally wish to dampen down public interest in these events which have in

any case been given exaggerated importance in the United Kingdom press. You

should seek, where necessary, to put them into proper perspective, drawing upon
material in my immediately following telegram and particularly emphasizing the
following points:--
(a) The scale of the incidents has been greatly exaggerated. By foreign
standards they would not be described as ‘riots’ at all;
(b) They have been condemned throughout the country. Those
responsible are being dealt with under the law without regard to race or
colour;
(c) In the recent disturbances, the racial aspect seems to have been the
pretext for disturbance, rather than the cause of it;
(d) Organized racial discrimination has never been part of the pattern of

British life, nor of the laws of the country;
(e) All British subjects, white or coloured enjoy absolute equality

before the law;257

In a separate telegram sent to the same addressees on the same date, Foreign
Ofﬁce officials issued a more detailed statement seeking to clarify media reports related
to the “so-called ‘race riots.’” Ofﬁcials noted that while there had been over a hundred
arrests, there were relatively few people injured. Insisting that “There is very little racial
prejudice,” ofﬁcials contended that when incidents of racial conﬂict surfaced between
“coloured immigrants” and local white residents, “they have almost invariably arisen
from under-currents of jealousy over extraneous things, eg., accommodation,
employment or women.” The telegram explained that it had only been since the close of

World War II that British cities had witnessed a “considerable inﬂux of coloured

 

2” PR0 DO 35/9506 Telegram from Foreign Ofﬁce to HMG Representatives dated 3 September 1958.

149

immigrants”——the majority of whom were “unskilled” West Indian workers—and only
recently had this pattern of “immigration” begun to reach “disconcerting proportions” as
postwar labor Shortages began to level. Foreign Office ofﬁcials reasoned that because
black migrants were “easily recognizable ‘foreigners’—and in the particular case of West
Indians—were “sometimes more ﬂamboyant in their behavior,” they made for “easy
targets for hooliganism.” The memo concluded that although “the presence of the city’s
coloured population had been used as an excuse to create a violent disturbance,” these
incidents did not reﬂect widespread racial attitudes among the British public and
therefore represented “a blot on the conscience of Britain.”258
The telegrams issued by the Foreign Ofﬁce in the wake of the violence elucidate
at least three key points concerning how one might consider British responses to the
violence. First, British audiences were sensitive to the impressions that news of “race
riots” made among international observers. Although identifying and addressing the
sources of racial tensions as well as reprimanding the perpetrators of violence and
devising preventive approaches to subdue future outbreaks all fell within the purview of
the domestic community, one cannot ignore the broader transnational context of British
responses and interpretations of the meaning of racial violence. In the postwar world in
particular, issues of race could never quite simply be conﬁned to a nation’s domestic
sphere, but rather, they represented contested transnational terrain that deﬁned a nation’s
image in world politics and tested its legitimacy on racially charged international
concerns. Intensifying civil rights campaigns in the United States, the inherent racial

undertones of the disengagement of European colonial powers in Africa and the

Caribbean and United Nations’ debates concerning South Aﬁica’s apartheid regime all

 

25’ PRO DO 35/9506 Telegram from Foreign Ofﬁce to HMG Representatives dated 3 September 1958.

150

kept the issue of race ﬁrmly ensconced in an international political landscape deﬁned by
Shifting and competing Cold War diplomatic alliances. In this climate, questions of race
mattered, and Britons certainly knew that when news of “race riots” captured headlines,
the world would be watching.

Secondly, British audiences were concerned about inﬂuencing international
perceptions of race and race relations in the wake of the violence. In much the same way
that incidents including the Little Rock debacle served as powerful symbols of race in
America that provided fodder for international critics to besmirch what Mary Dudziak
has referenced as the “image of American democracy,” news of “race riots” potentially
threatened to dismantle widely held perceptions of British anti-racism. As a corrective,
Dudziak contends that during the 19508 US. Government officials actively sought to
deﬂect the diplomatic impact of racial narratives emerging from Jim Crow America by
reframing the story of race in America for overseas audiences as one of redemptive
democracy.259 Just as the real and imagined impact of racial narratives emerging from
Jim Crow America induced US. Government ofﬁcials to repackage tarnished national
myths pertaining to the image of American democracy, one might also argue that British
reactions to news of “race riots” also were mediated by a desire to preserve certain
contested notions of the “mystique of British anti-racism.” The images of interracial
violence projected throughout the world embodied the realities of racial conﬂict that
severely crippled the “mystique of British anti-racism.” Not only did images of “race
riots” run counter to the underlying claim that racial differences had no social value in
British society, but more importantly, they provided alternative narratives of race and

race relations unveiling the existence of racial hostilities, prejudice, and discrimination.

 

25" Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, chapters 1 and 2 esp.

151

But how could the “mystique of British anti-racism” persist amid reports of “nigger-

39 £6

hunting, race war” and vigilante campaigns taking place on the streets of Nottingham
and Notting Hill to “Keep Britain White!”260

A third theme highlighted in the Foreign Ofﬁce telegrams is that the racial
alternatives exposed for international consumption during the summer of 1958
represented a critical moment compelling various sectors of British society to take an
introspective gaze at the social dilemmas of race in Britain more commonly described as
the “colour problem.” Reconﬁguring shattered perceptions of race and race relations
required that British audiences construct narratives to rationalize the violence to
circumvent a broad indictment of British values and ideals regarding the subject of race.
A8 episodes of racial violence spread from Nottingham to London, newspapers
consistently carried headlines including “Reasons for Racial Tension”, “Our Colour
Problem” “Who is To Blame?” “Why Racial Clash Occurred,” “London Racial Outburst
Due To Many Factors,” all of which represented an acknowledgement of race as a social
dilemma, but more importantly provided a means to explain and reframe the nature of
racial violence in Britain and its broader social and political implications domestically

261 FOI’

and perhaps more importantly for the consumption of international audiences.
many British observers, one of the very tenets of British national identity was at stake in

the aftermath of the Nottingham and Notting Hill incidents; reconciling the violence

 

26° “Four-Year Terms for Nine ‘Nigger-Hunting’ Youths,” London Times 16 September 1958; “Race War
in Britain,” Trinidad Guardian 25 August 1958; “ ‘Keep Britain White’ Call in Notting Hill Area,” London
Times 10 September 1958.

261Headline part of larger article entitled “Race Riots Meeting At Chequers,” London Observer 7
September 1958, p. 1; “ ‘Our Colour Problem,”’ London Observer 7 September 1958, p.3; Headline part of
larger article entitled “Man’s Inhumanity to Man. . .England,” London Observer 7 September 1958, p.5;
“Why Racial Clash Occurred,” London Times 27 August 1958 p.4; “London Racial Outburst Due to Many
Factors,” London Times 3 September 1958 p.7;

152

became a means of safeguarding the “mystique of British anti-racism” and essentially
perpetuating the very national myths that silenced historic existence of race-based social
conﬂict, discrimination, exclusion and structures of inequality.262

In the weeks immediately following the disturbances in Nottingham and Notting
Hill British observers began to construct an intricate web of social commentary to
analyze what was described as the “colour problem” and explain the factors contributing
to racial conﬂict. In the process, two overlapping and somewhat complimentary
explanations—the problems associated with recent “coloured immigration” and the social
deviance of the white perpetrators of racial violence— emerged as British ofﬁcials,
media outlets, organizations, and private citizens debated and attempted to account for
the sources of racial tensions that lead to the outbreak of violence. The ﬁrst of these
themes focused on the ways in which racial conﬂict could be directly linked to the
“immigration” of large numbers of people of color from Commonwealth communities—
the overwhelming majority being West Indians of African descent. British observers
used this argument to draw attention to the ways that the origins of racial conﬂict could
be understood as an unfavorable outgrowth of the problems associated with
“immigration” and the shifting social dynamics prompted by the growing presence of
black migrant communities. Issues of interracial sex, living Space, and work dominated
this line of discussion. British observers highlighted how sexual relations between black
men and white women, housing shortages and employment competition created hostile

social relations between black newcomers and indigenous white residents.

 

262 Although his study focuses solely on policy makers, Randall Hansen has noted that the Nottingham and
Notting Hill violenced “forced British elites to question assumptions about oft-invoked (but rarely
substantiated) English tolerance.” See Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, 81.

153

A secondary, and indeed corollary theme emerging out of British considerations
of the causes of racial conﬂict emphasized the ways in which the violence could be
explained as a circumscribed event conﬁned to a deviant sector of society. To frame this
argument, British observers oftentimes conceded that the violence was, on the whole, the
result of racially motivated attacks on black residents; however these racist overtures
were largely attributed to the reckless actions of “irresponsible youths” commonly known
as Teddy boys and were in no way representative of the broader white indigenous
society’s attitudes towards black people. Not only did this explanation rely upon images
of Teddy boys who were young, white, primarily working class men as the primary
agents of violent racist behavior, but it also situated the emergence of Teddy boy violence '.
as part of a broader condition of socially deviant conditions speciﬁc to the working class
communities of Nottingham and Notting Hill. In the process, these two themes—one of
which attributed racial tensions to the problems of adapting to a new “immigrant”
population and another which conﬁned those resulting tensions to a deviant sector of
society—became instrumental means of accounting for the existence of racism and racial
conﬂict and translating its implications for both domestic and international audiences. To
be sure, these explanations of racial conﬂict provided an essential means of
circumventing the realities of endemic raced-based inequalities buttressed by
exclusionary, discriminatory and prejudice social policies and practices. More
importantly, these arguments became a way of reconstructing and safeguarding the racial
narratives that sustained the “mystique of British anti-racism.”

In an article appearing in the Manchester Guardian Weekly just days after reports

of interracial violence in Nottingham surfaced, a special correspondent for the newspaper

154

posed the question, “What produced the tension in this community?” At ﬁrst glance, the
reporter argued that the “real causes” of the violence involved, “the whole complex of
prejudice, envy, and mutual irritation inadequately known as the ‘colour problem.’ In an
attempt to ﬁrrther explain the essential features of the ‘colour problem’ the reporter
explained:

Many people put the verdict credibly into one word—‘women’. You
might add as one equal factor general anxiety about the presence of
coloured men, or ‘prejudice’—including white residents’ dislike of mixed
marriages. Some distance behind these causes comes a complex of
irritations: coloured people’s manners. and mannerisms; rivalry for
employment in a time of slight recession in the area; and envy of coloured
men who have been able to buy houses and ‘ﬂash’ cars.263

The report added,
The ‘women problem’ seems to mean no more than that some West
Indians and other coloured men have acquired white girl friends. This is
resented by some white male residents—vaguely known as ‘teddy boys’
though their age range seems to run from over 20 to at least over 30—who
do their best to humiliate coloured men in general.264

In an editorial appearing in the following week’s edition of the paper, Myrtle Shaw, a
resident of Nottingham, responded to the special correspondent’s arguments concerning
the ‘colour problem’ and suggested that while the article could be commended for its
objectivity, “the question ‘What went wrong in Nottingham?’ is not easily answered.”
Shaw contended:
To lay the blame on ‘teddy boys’ or ‘irresponsible’ coloured men, or to
concluded that it is due to jealousy over women, is really to beg the issue.
These are surface causes, and in any case have not given rise to serious

trouble until now. Unemployment and housing problems are undoubtedly
a factor in the situation and it is social problems such as these which

 

26” “Racial Outburst in an English City,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 28 August 1958.

2“ 1bid.

155

Should be investigated rather than hastily concluding that the affair was

the handiwork of youth.”265
Echoing many of the sentiments expressed in Myrtle Shaw’s editorial, London Observer
reporter George Clay insisted that based on his own investigations of the violence
conducted in a number of local pubs in Nottingham, he had unearthed “evidence of
prejudice, compounded of suspicion, fear, sexual jealousy and economic uncertainty”
concerning issues pertaining to relationships between white women and black men,
housing shortages and heightened employment competition. While local observers
including the Nottingham Consultative Committee for the Welfare of Coloured People
generally viewed the violence as “a limited” and or “spontaneous outbreak of
hooliganism” as opposed to a “large-scale communal conﬂict,” Clay concluded that the
“pattern of race prejudice” that eventually cuhninated in violent interracial clashes in “a
squalid district” of Nottingham was “as yet neither Sharply deﬁned nor widespread,” but
was often discemable in similar industrial areas which had become home to an “inﬂux of
coloured immigrants in recent years.” 266

Just as observers of the Nottingham violence emphasized sexual liaisons between
black men and white women, the difficulties associated with housing and economic
competition, and the deviant actions of youth and other “irresponsible” persons, as some
of the key underlying causes intrinsic to understanding the clashes between black and
white residents, in the aftermath of the Notting Hill disturbances some of these same

issues resonated as contributing elements. In an article written one week after the

violence subsided in Notting Hill, a London staff reporter noted that in the process of

 

26’ “Letters to the Editor: Race Prejudice in Britain,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 4 September 1958.

2“ “Menace Behind the Brawl,” London Observer 31 August 1953 p.11.

156

conducting numerous interviews with residents of Notting Hill, “the question about
causes of tension produced the same two answers time and time again: the housing

Shortage and white girls going to live with coloured men.”267

An earlier article appearing
in the London Times noted that although “The trouble has been written up as race rioting;
and it has been written off as mere hooliganism of gangs of excided Teddy boys,” the
violence could be linked to three main sources of resentment by white residents against
“coloured inhabitants.” According to the article, white residents alleged that their black
counterparts “do no work and. . .collect a rich sum from the Assistance Board. They
[black residents] are said to be able to ﬁnd housing when white residents cannot. And
they are charged with all kinds of misbehavior, especially sexual.” In addition, the article
took care to note the larger social setting of the London violence. It explained that
Notting Hill was “a poor district and it has always been rough.” In characterizing the
residents of the community the article contended:

Many of the long-established residents are of gypsy stock...They are, as

they say themselves, tough, clannish people. Many of them are self-

employed in the used-car trade, which has its lawless fringe. They have

no love for the police...Many of the newer arrivals are Irish labourers—

who work for good money on the building sites, and then may take a week

off to drink their earnings—and coloured immigrants. There are a good

many of these—2,000 or 3,000 perhaps...and there is also a number of

coloured men who do not work but live off the earnings of prostitutes,

some of them white. 268

The explanations and contextual information furnished by British observers to
translate the causes of racial conﬂict appropriated intersecting discourses race, class,

gender and sexuality to denounce the violence and to create stigmatized images of the

targets and perpetrators of violence in the Nottingham and Notting Hill. In their analysis

 

267 “ ‘Brown Town’ Speaks for Itself,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 11 September 1958.

26’ “London Racial Outburst Due to Many Factors,” London Times 3 September 1958 p.7.

157

of the situation, the looming social issues related to the incorporation of an increasing
black rrrigrant population were reduced to a problem of criminal and/or unemployed
black men involved in illicit sexual relationships with white women whose growing
presence diminished economic and sexual opportunities for local white men. A Reuters
report circulated in the Jamaican press poignantly captured this perspective. Noting that
‘Teddy Boys’ gangs are intent on creating racial incidents in scattered districts of London
which have coloured inhabitants,” the report also insisted, “Ofﬁcials believe that the
‘black-man-white girl’ incidents were the root of the original trouble [and] that it has
been stimulated by mounting unemployment which has made white workmen fearful of
coloured competition for jobs.”269 Framing the problem of black migration using a
similar gendered language, George Roger, a local M.P representing the Notting Hill
district, more directly implicated the presence of black men as a cause of interracial strife
in the area. From Rogers’s perspective while the violence could be attributed to both
“coloured and white,” he maintained, “West Indians around here caused the violence.”
Rogers insisted that among all of the West Indian communities in Britain Notting Hill
had “some of the worst types—dmg trafﬁckers, prostitutes, and their pimps and violent
men of all sorts.”270

This sort of rationale relied upon widely circulated stereotypes of black
masculinity that, as Marcus Collins has argued, depicted black masculinity as the anti-
thesis of the white bourgeois gentleman and black male sexuality a predatory

pathological condition infatuated with conquering white women. Collins noted that these

stigmatized constructions of black masculinity and sexuality were framed in relation to

 

2‘9 “Butler In Talks Today,” Daily Gleaner 3 September 1958.

27° “Labour M.P. Blames the West Indians,” Trinidad Guardian 2 September 1958.

158

white metropolitan society’s perceptions of black men in the colonial context as triﬂing
workers, dysfunctional family men and hypersexual beings. In the postwar period, when
black migration occurred en masse—consisting primarily of black men—Collins
maintained these same stereotypes informed the terms of black migrants’ encounters in
metropolitan society.271

For instance, while unemployment ﬁgures for black migrants demonstrated that
only a small percentage were unemployed in 195 8, the image of the industrious laborer
did not ﬁrmly resonate in mainstream opinions of black workers.272 In an editorial
appearing in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner Charles Archibald of London explained that
although “There may be one West Indian only in a street living off the immoral earnings
of an English girl,. . . that one example of West Indian depravity can be multiplied over
and over again in the popular imagination.”273 Archibald’s editorial highlights the extent
to which certain disreputable images of black life became representative of the whole
even when they only fairly applied to an inﬁnitesimal portion of the black population.
Collins’s work helps to elucidate the ways in which, historically, the intersections of race,
gender, class and sexuality informed these negative typecasts of black men—and
essentially black migrant communities in postwar Britain. More importantly, Collins’s
study is suggestive of how stigmatized constructions of black masculinity became the
very tools used to invalidate black men’s claims to a British identity, citizenship and

more broadly the rights of belonging in British society. The racial violence of

Nottingham and Notting Hill revived these latent, yet pervasive images of black men and

 

2" Collins, “Pride and Prejudice”, 391-418.
272 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 117.

”3 Charles Archibald, “The Truth About Notting Hill,” Daily Gleaner 8 September 195 8.

159

for British observers they became powerful instruments to explain racist behavior and
rationalize racial conﬂict. 27’

Not only did British observers offer explanations which cited and reproduced
stereotypes of black masculinity and sexuality to effectively recast black migrants as
justiﬁable targets, rather than unwarranted victims of racially motivated attacks, but also,
they emphasized the deviant nature of the white perpetrators of racist violence. In an
editorial appearing in the London Times B.R. Wilson of the University of Leeds
suggested that it was imperative that international audiences be aware that incidents of
racial violence were subscribed to a certain aberrant section of society and did not reﬂect
the larger society’s attitudes about race or behavior towards non-whites. He contented,

What needs to be clearly set on record for the beneﬁt of the citizens of

Bulawayo, Pretoria, and Little Rock—whose comment has already been

forthcoming—i8 that there is no widespread hostility towards coloured

people in Britain; that they are not our basic problem, but rather an ill-

disciplined, over-paid, frustrated youth, whose life changes have been

vastly improved money-wise without commensurate social adjustment

either to preserve our traditional values or to effectively forge them for a

new way of life.”275
Wilson’s editorial insisted that explorations of the origins of racial conﬂict must include a
careful consideration of the “social causes of the mob behavior of the white population”
most of which he attributed to economic conditions generating a demand for unskilled
“socially illiterate” young workers too irresponsible to ﬁnd socially acceptable means of
venting their frustrations as the labor market Shifted and migration patterns heightened

job competition.276

 

2" Marcus Collins “Pride and Prejudice,”391-418.
27’ “Clashes in the Streets: More Than Racial Issues Involved,” London Times 5 September 1958.

27" “Clashes in the Streets: More Than Racial Issues Involved,” London Times 5 September 1958

160

Most mentions of the group of young white male working class aggressors
discussed in Wilson’s editorial referred to them as “Teddy Boys.” As an article in the
London Observer noted, “Teddy Boys” was a “generic term for the whites who seemed to
be leading the riots,” adding that for Americans, the equivalent referent would be “poor
white trash.”277 In his study of the Notting Hill violence, Edward Pilkington has noted
that the term “Teddy Boy” emerged in the early 19508 out of a new “Rock ‘n’ Roll”
culture prevalent among young white working class men. According to Pilkington, the
“Teddy Boy” image became a symbol of moral decline and lawlessness and was
generally associated with the worst elements of working class life including crime, gangs
and violence.278

The rebellious nature of violent-prone “Teddy boys” was only part of the
problem. In addition to a ﬁxation on the reckless behavior of “Teddy Boys” inﬂamed by
the presence of black newcomers who threatened white working class men’s socio-
economic positions and took sexual liberties with white women, the local communities
themselves, became marked territories that served as breeding grounds for socially
deviant behavior. In the process, the various episodes of interracial violence and the
communities in which they occurred, as a whole, became constructed as deviant spaces of
masculine aggression waged between an “irresponsible minority” of black and white

working class men over issues of living space, economic opportunities and unregulated

black male sexuality.279 Describing the St. Ann’s community where most of the violence

 

277 “Man’s Inhumanity to Man. ..In England,” London Sunday Observer 7 September 1958.
27" Pilkington Beyond the Mother Country, 94-95.
279 This reference is taken from a statement issued by the Nottingham Consultative Committee for the

Welfare of Coloured People, an interracial local welfare association. “ ‘lrresponsible Actions’ at
Nottingham,” London Times 27 August 1958.

161

occurred in Nottingham, one paper suggested that episodes of interracial violence erupted
in a “squalid district” of the city “where the popular idea of a good time...is ‘beer, ﬁsh-
and-chips, and a good ﬁght on Saturday night.”280 Commenting on the public chatter
surrounding the setting of most of the racial violence occurring in London, one Notting
Hill resident insisted explained,

I cannot help feeling that some of the comments on Notting Hill which

have appeared in the press have been actuated by a class prejudice which

is no less reprehensible. Reading some of the comments I have gathered

that we in Notting Hill are a brothel-bred rabble inhabiting leprous

tenements who have no right to complain of anything.281
This Notting Hill resident’s observations are suggestive of the ways in which the quest to
explain and interpret racial violence as something that was conﬁned to a deviant sector of
society constructed the violence as representative of intra-class conﬂict as opposed to an
interracial conﬂict indicative of the state of race relations or widely prevalent attitudes
towards black people in Britain among indigenous white Britons.

Certainly, there existed alternative explanations of the violence that focused on
the range of historic and structural conditions mediating the explosion of racial conﬂict in
Britain during the summer of 1958. Undoubtedly many British observers agreed with
sociologist Kenneth Little’s assertion quoted in the Manchester Guardian Weekly that the
history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism played a vital role in conﬁguring
“popular ideas about the coloured races, particularly the Negro” and that these ideas
”282

informed racial prejudice against black migrants and notions of “coloured inferiority.

Surely many white Britons supported the position of the National Council of Civil

 

28° “Menace Behind the Brawl,” London Observer 31 August 1958.
28' Kit Evans, “Roots Of Racial Prejudice,” Manchester Guardian 18 September 1958.

2‘2 Kenneth Little, “Racial Myth and Prejudice,” Manchester Guardian Weekly 23 September 195 8.

162

Liberties who condemned the British Government for indirectly sponsoring
institutionalized racial discrimination and attributed racial tensions to an endemic
problem of structural racial inequality of access and opportunity. As one representative of
the NCCL surmised,

If the Govemment-subsidized British Travel and Holidays Association had

never allowed hotels which refused accommodation to coloured people to

appear on its lists, if magistrates had exercised their powers under the law

to refuse to renew licenses of public houses which discriminate against

coloured people, if the local administration had refused licenses to dance

halls which impose a colour bar, and people in authority were given a lead

in a ﬁght against discrimination instead of in many cases tacitly condoning

it, then this kind of thing would not have happened.283
Nonetheless, this type of historical and structural analysis of the dilemmas of race and
race relations in Britain society in the wake of news of “race riots” becarrre marginal to
interpretative narratives that highlighted the problems of the growth of an
overwhelmingly black male migrant population within a socially deviant sector of society
plagued by sexually frustrated “Teddy Boys”, housing shortages and economic
insecurity. These were the narratives that became co-opted into official explanations as
prominent political organs attempted to translate the social context and origins racial
conﬂict for international audiences.

During the same week that violence erupted in the streets of Notting Hill, London
delegates prepared for the opening of the annual Trades Union Congress, the largest and
most inﬂuential national labor association in Britain. In lieu of the violence, Peter
Maurice of the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union urged the General Council of

the organization to prepare a public statement addressing the “outburst” of racial violence

in Britain. Maurice noted that while the organization was not in a position to pass a

 

28’ “Magistrate Asks for Voluntary Curfew,” London Times 3 September 1958.

163

deﬁnitive motion because it was unclear if the violence was the result of “street gangs,
used to ﬁghting among themselves” or the work of Fascist organizations exploiting racial
tensions in certain areas, it was important that the Trades Union Congress expressed
concern about the violence. Maurice urged,
We have got to fact the fact that racial prejudice does exist among some of our
people. We have got to face the fact that the activities of a minority of coloured
people may cause antagonism against coloured people in general. We have got to
face the fact that unemployment, bad and inadequate housing, are going to make
these problems come to the surface.284
In response to Maurice’s request, Vincent Tewson, General Secretary of the
Trades Union Congress, issued a statement on behalf of the General Council condemning
what he labeled as “isolated outbreaks of vicious hooliganism Nottingham and one area
of London.” Echoing similar sentiments of surprise at the news of “race riots” in Britain
reﬂected in the reactions of many international spectators, Tewson explained,
Delegates to the Trades Union Congress, like our colleagues throughout the
Commonwealth, are shocked and deeply disturbed by the recent isolated
outbreaks of vicious hooliganism in Nottingham and one area of London,
culminating in violence and assault on British citizens of different races.

Hinting of the possibility that the violence might be attributed to Fascists agitation,
Tewson noted, “Evidence is accumulating that elements which propagated racial hatred
in Britain and Europe in pre-war days are once more farming the ﬂames of violence.”
Tewson’s remarks drew attention to speculation that the London violence in particular
could be linked to Fascists groups, the most visible being Oswald Moseley’s Union
Movement which actively promoted a “Keep Britain White” campaign opposing black

“immigration” and essentially demonizing the growth of black communities in Britain.

Tewson reminded his audience that the Trades Union Movement in Britain had been

 

28’ “Report of Proceedings at the 90th Annual Trades Union Congress,”September 1-5, 1958 p. 378 London
Metropolitan University Trades Union Congress Library, London, UK.

164

outspoken in condemning “every manifestation of racial prejudice and discrimination in
any part of the world.” Although he did draw a direct link between migration and racial
conﬂict, Tewson concluded his remarks by adding that while “immigrants from many
countries” had been “freely accepted” by unions and “in general have been integrated
into industrial life,” addressing other areas including the problems associated with “social
integration” and housing had proved more formidable. In the wake of racial conﬂict,
Tewson suggested that local communities pursue efforts to “further tolerance” and
greater understanding of the “difficult problems” facing “immigrants” adjusting to life in
Britain. 285

What is most signiﬁcant to consider about the response issued by Trades Union
Congress officials is their anticipated audience. The proceedings of the General
Council’s meeting indicate that officials meticulously deliberated over the form, scope
and content of their ﬁrst public response to the violence, especially given that many of
the facts pertaining to the clashes had yet to be established. However, ofﬁcials decided
that a statement was indeed appropriate at the time—not necessarily for its potential
worth among unionists or even the larger British community— but as Tewson
maintained, it was most useful as a means of inﬂuencing “overseas opinion, particularly
in the Commonwealth.”286 Union ofﬁcials were acutely aware of the international
implications of the news of “race riots” and rightly assumed that observers ﬁ'om abroad
would pay close attention to domestic reactions and explanations. As noted earlier, news
of “race riots” compromised widely held images of Britain’s national character on issues

of race. The survival of those images pivoted in many ways on how British public

 

2" 1bid., 458-459.

2“ 1bid., 459-460.

165

opinion accounted for episodes of racial violence in a nation which had staked its own
national identity and derived international legitimacy in world affairs by embracing anti-
racist politics and the rhetoric of multiracial egalitarianism.

The international ramiﬁcations of the news of “race riots” also concerned
government ofﬁcials as they too attempted to weigh in on the possible causes of racial
conﬂict and formulate working narratives to explain the violence. Hugh Gaitskill, leader
of the the Labour Party noted, “nothing can justify the rioting and hooliganism.”
Gaitskell insisted, “Such behavior can only damage the reputation of our country in the
world, weaken the unity of the Commonwealth, and increase racial tension
without. . .solving the underlying social and economic problems.”287 Concerned that the
violence might be “exaggerated at home or oversea,” the govemment’s ﬁrst public
response to the violence reﬂected in a statement issued by Home Secretary R.A. Butler
stressed that the most pressing issue involved “the maintenance of law and order.”
Thwarting any speciﬁc references to the racial undertones of the Nottingham and Notting
Hill violence, Butler’s statement characterized the Situation as unbridled acts of
lawlessness and further implied that the violence was a breach of some sort of established
code of social conduct for which the government and local authorities could and would
exercise the “utmost strictness” in restoring through existing legal channels.288

In the days that followed, government ofﬁcials began to formulate more concrete
explanations for the violence which highlighted the broader socio-economic context of

race relations in Britain. In a report compiled by Home Office officials and submitted to

British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan detailing the incidents of interracial violence in

 

2’7 “Government Warning on Race Riots,” London Times 4 September 1958.

2“ 1bid.

166

Nottingham and Notting Hill London, British government ofﬁcials outlined four key
factors contributing to racial conﬂict. First, the report listed white men’s jealousy
“because white girls are attracted to coloured men.” Secondly, the report noted that
increasing unemployment and job competition among largely unskilled workers “has
undoubtedly increased the antagonism between white and coloured.” The report also
made reference to “teddy boys” induced to “stir up still more trouble” as local public
opinion in the areas turned against black residents. Finally, the report added that in the
area of housing, “Where there is overcrowding whites sometimes become embittered
because they feel that the immigrants are increasing their difﬁculties.”289 The
government report reﬂects an aggregate of a range of public chatter and speculation about
the origins of and broader social context ﬂaming racial conﬂict. Perhaps more
signiﬁcantly, the government report represents one of the most important portable public
narratives generated by British observers to interpret the Signiﬁcance of the racial conﬂict
and its wider implications for both domestic and international audiences.

While narratives problematizing the presence of a growing black migrant
population, acts of “hooliganism” by Teddy Boys and the concentrated social deviance of
certain working class communities, all served as talking points to rationalize the
existence of racial conﬂict; but what could serve as a viable solution? In a telegram
dispatched to all Commonwealth governments including colonial territories sent just one
day after news reports began to circulate pertaining to racial violence in Nottingham an
ofﬁcial of the Commonwealth Relations Ofﬁce noted,

While police reports make it clear that coloured persons involved in last

Saturday’s rioting in Nottingham were almost exclusively West Indian, press
comment here tends to see this incident in round terms of coloured versus white.

 

2’9 Race Riots Meeting At Chequers,” London Observer 7 September 1958.

167

Publicity, is moreover, bound to lead to further pressure for some form of

immigration control.290

As the violence spread to London in the weeks that followed debate over
migration restrictions became ﬁrmly implanted in public discussions concerning the
incidents of racial discrimination. Just two days after the ﬁghting began in Nottingham,
J .K. Cordeaux, a Conservative M.P. for Nottingham Central linked the conﬂict to
Britain’s open-door Commonwealth migration policy which had in recent years
facilitated the grth of an unprecedented black population in Britain. 29’ Cordeaux’s
Parliamentary colleague and fellow party member, Norman Panell of Liverpool agreed
with Cordeaux’s logic and maintained that, “The Nottingham ﬁghting is a manifestation
of the evil results of the present [migration] policy.” Panell reasoned that, “unless some
restriction is imposed we shall create the colour bar we all want to avoid.”292 Cyril
Osborne, Conservative M.P. for Louth proposed a one year moratorium on all
Commonwealth migration except in the case of “bonaﬁde students” irnploring that the
Nottingham violence should serve as “a red light to all of us.” According to Osborne, the
alternative would be devastating to race relations in Britain. He insisted, “It will be black
against white. We are sowing the seeds of another ‘Little Rock’ and it is tragic.”293

When British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan issued his ﬁrst public statement

on the incidents of violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill, although he emphasized that

 

29° PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Commonwealth Relations Office to Canada, New Zealand, South
Africa, India, Pakistan, Ghana, and other Commonwealth countries dated 26 August 1958.

29' “Nottingham M.P.s Urge Curb on Entry of Immigrants,”London Times 27 August 1958. A similar
version of this article appeared in the Jamaican press on the following day. See “Nottingham MP8 Seek
Curb on Immigrants,” Daily Gleaner 28 August 1958.

”2 “Renewed Call for Changes in Immigration Law,” London Times 28 August 1958.

29’ Ibid.

168

the events represented a breach of law and order requiring “the utmost strictness” by law-
enforcing agents, he also noted that the Government had “for some little time” been
examining the impact of “the country’s time-honoured practice to allow free entry” to
those migrating from Commonwealth territories. MacMillan pointed out that the
Government would not make any hasty decision regarding a major policy change on the
subject of Commonwealth migration without “careﬁrl consideration of the problem as a
whole;” however, the timing of his comments drew clear connections between racial

29" In fact the subject of Commonwealth

tensions and the effects of black migration.
migration controls had been actively pursued in various Government departments as early
as 1952 when the Ministry of Labour established a commission on the Employment of
Coloured People in the United Kingdom to study and collect data pertaining to “coloured
immigration” which was later used in Cabinet discussions resulting in a draft immigration
restrictions bill in 1955.295 Racial violence gave this long-discussed agenda new life and
more importantly, it provided a more volatile and receptive public climate to test the case
for restricting black migration—in this instance, as a means of addressing racial tensions
and quelling the spread of interracial conﬂict.

What dominated public debate on the question of migration controls in the wake
of the Nottingham and Notting Hill violence was the unavoidable racial undertones that

any form of restriction might convey and the larger implications concerning the concept

of British citizenship. In an editorial appearing in the London Times T.E.M McKitterick

 

29"“Government Warning on Race Riots,” London Times 4 September 1958; See also “MacMillan Warns
Govt. Will Use ‘All Strictness’ to End Clashes,” Daily Gleaner 4 September 1958 and “Britain’s PM
Warns Race ‘Troublemakers,’” Trinidad Guardian 4 September 1958.

295 James and Harris, Inside Babylon, 59-68. Paul, Whitewashing Britain. Government consideration of
migration controls in the early 19508 will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.

169

summarized this issue in an appeal against the introduction of migration controls.
McKitterick concluded that any form of Commonwealth migration restriction “would be
a breach in the basic principles behind the phrase ‘citizen’ of the United Kingdom and
Colonies’.” He further added that “It would inevitably lead to colour discrimination and
the creation of two classes of citizenship.”296 McKitterick’s remarks captured one of the
major subjects framing current historical debate over race, citizenship and migration in
postwar Britain. As McKitterick rightly surmised, under the terms of the British
Nationality Act of 1948, migration became an institutionalized right of British citizenship
which extended to all nationals of Commonwealth territories; therefore the introduction
of Commonwealth migration restrictions inherently dismantled the egalitarian principles
buttressing the ideal of a transracial, transnational British citizenship by excluding certain
categories of Commonwealth nationals from enjoying the migration privileges attached to
their British citizenship.

Focusing largely on the perspectives of government officials, in her analysis of
race, citizenship and migration, historian Kathleen Paul has asserted that debates over
migration controls in the wake the Nottingham and Notting Hill riots implicated the
state’s role in establishing “separate spheres of nationality” that essentially propagated
racialized notions of British citizenship privileging whiteness and marginalizing the
citizenship status for black Commonwealth migrants. While Paul highlights the ways in
which the state manipulated the subject of migration controls as a means of producing
racialized notions of British citizenship to the detriment of black Commonwealth
migrants, Randall Hansen contends that restricting black migration was not a widely

supported agenda among government ofﬁcials. Instead Hansen has argued that

 

29" “Easing Racial Tensions,” London Times 4 September 1958.

170

government action concerning Commonwealth migration policy—which did not
ofﬁcially take place until the passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962—
was driven by an “illiberal” British society. Although Paul and Hansen disagree on the
extent to which the state promoted Commonwealth migration restrictions aimed at
limiting black migration as a means of institutionalizing discrimination against non-white
British citizens, both agree that the subject of migration controls—particularly in the
wake of the Nottingham and Notting Hill conﬂict represented an expression of British
racism. While there is certainly much validity to this contention, there is another
trajectory from which one may gauge this matter.297

Suggesting that curbing black migration might remedy racial conﬂict represented
yet another discursive medium to preserve the “mystique of British anti-racism.”
Reducing the social dilemmas of race and race relations in British society to a problem of
migration presented an ahistorical narrative implying that racism and racial conﬂict had
no place historically or structurally in British society until the advent of large-scale black
migration and the grth of more visible black communities in the postwar period. This
ignored the long history of negative racial stereotypes of black colonials circulating in
metropolitan culture historically and the history of racial conﬂict in cities including
Cardiff and Liverpool during early twentieth century.298 Moreover, this assumption
relied on the notion that black migrants exacerbated racial conﬂict and virtually
exonerated white Britons from addressing their own racial prejudices, stereotypes,

stigmas and exclusionary practices.

 

297 Kathleen Paul Whitewashing Citizenship (1 99 7); Randall Hansen Citizenship and Immigration in
Postwar Britain ( I 999)

29" Fryer, Staying Power, 298-310, 367-371; See also Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians.

171

But to what extent did the “mystique of British anti-racism” persevere despite the
news of “race riots?” To what extent did overseas audiences accept British explanations
of the origins, causes and remedies concerning violent racial conﬂict? No doubt these
questions cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, however, anecdotal evidence
does suggest that British efforts to preserve the “mystique of British anti-racism” were
not ignored by international audiences. Although J arnaican Prime Minister, Norman
Manley encouraged West Indians in Brixton to “Remember what the American Negroes
have had to put up with. And remember at last they are winning,” his timely comparison
of West Indians in Britain and black Americans was more likely an attempt to compare
the potential of racial progress rather than similarities between the historical processes
and structural determinants shaping race relations in British and American society. Just
days before his tour of Brixton Manley commented, “I am satisﬁed the great majority of
the English people are not against West Indians, only a narrow section of the community.
No doubt this is agitated by the ‘Keep Britain White’ Fascist movement.” Manley’s
remarks suggested that he agreed with British assessments that the violence was indeed
the result of an aberrant section of society inﬂuenced by extremist propaganda rather than
an endemic social problem.299 Hugh Cummins, the Premier of Barbados echoed
Manley’s position on the causes of the violence. Cummins noted, “We feel that the
trouble is the result of gangster-type Teddy boys and probably Fascism. . .We feel that the
average Englishman doesn’t explode into intense racial feeling”300

While the legal punishments for those found guilty of inciting and or participating

in the violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill ranged from small ﬁnes to extended

 

2'99 “Nigerial Official Blames Inﬂux of West Indians,” Trinidad Guardian 5 September 1958.

30° “Barbados Premier Arrives,” London Times 8 September 1958.

172

prison sentences, many international observers seemed to endorse the manner in which
British courts responded to the violence. British diplomats in Germany noted that overall
in the German press, “The Sharp sentences passed at Old Bailey on white youths who
beat up coloured people have received wide approval,” adding that this “attitude contrasts
with German criticism of [the] latest development at Little Rock.”301 Similar to the view
in Germany, British ofﬁcials in France suggested, “The bad impression made by these
‘riots’ has since been to some extent corrected by the severity of the sentence passed on
four of the ringleaders.302 These sorts of remarks suggest that international observers
bought into British interpretations that the violence was the result of a breach of law and
order instigated by reckless youth, rather than any pervasive existence of racism or
widespread hostility towards black migrants. Moreover, these comments highlight that
the punishments disseminated by the British legal system to the perpetrators and the
restoration of public order in the aftermath of the violence served as means of redeeming
Britain’s tarnished image on issues of race and race relations.

As one local magistrate doled out four year prison sentences to nine young white
men charged with attacking black men during the height of the racial clashes in Notting
Hill, he admonished,

You are a minute and insigniﬁcant section of the population who have

brought shame upon the district in which you live, and have ﬁlled the

whole nation with horror, indignation, and disgust. . .Everyone,
irrespective of the colour of their skin, is entitled to walk through the
streets in peace, with their heads erect, and free from fear. That is a right
which these courts will always unfailingly uphold...AS far as the law is
concerned you are entitled to think what you like, however foul your

thoughts; to feel what you like, however brutal and debased your
emotions; to say what you like providing you do not infringe on the rights

 

30’ PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Bonn, Germany to the Foreign Ofﬁce dated 25 September 1958.

302 PRO DO 35/7992 Telegram from Paris to Foreign Office dated 25 September 1958.

173

 

of others or imperial the Queen’s peace, but once you translate your dark

thoughts and brutal feelings into savage acts such as these the law will be

swift to punish you, the guilty and to protect your victims.”303
On same day that the London Times printed the magistrate’s remarks, a reprint appeared
in the Trinidad Guardian along with the following editorial commentary:

The Judge’s action should go far in helping not only to nip in the bud the

burgeonings of further racial troubles...but [also] in restoring to coloured

people in Britain a sense of being under the Shelter of the great rock of

British justice, which has stood the test of time.”304
Two days later the Trinidad Guardian carried an editorial by James Nestor which noted
that the four year prison terms issued to the “English hooligans” responsible for attacking
black men in Notting Hill had restored Trinidadians’ “faith in the British Government
and “in one breath shown to the world that British justice still remains the highest
achievement of man.” Nestor maintained that the triumph of “British Justice” should
offer an example to Britain’s “American cousins,” as he proposed “Could the Americans
rise above their sordiness of J immy Wilson and Little Rock? Can they really redeem
themselves and enforce justice as impartially as the English?”305

The images of race and race relations in Britain that emerged in the aftermath of
violent racial conﬂict between black and white residents on the streets of Nottingham and

Notting Hill London did much to challenge widely held perceptions of British racial

liberalism and tolerance. News of “race riots” contradicted the “mystique of British anti-

 

303 “Four-Year Terms For Nine ‘Nigger-Hunting’ Youths,” London Times 16 September 1958.

30"“9 London Youths Jailed for Colour Manhunt: Judge Says Attacks Were Vicious,” Trinidad Guardian
16 September 1958; “Trinidad Praise For British Justice,” London Times 17 September 1958.

’05 James Nestor, “British Justice Has Justiﬁed Our Faith,” Trinidad Guardian 20 September 1958. Jimmy
Wilson had been convicted of stealing less that $2.00 from a white woman in Alabama and received the
death sentence for his crime. His case drew international headlines and served as a potent symbol of the
virulence of American racism.

174

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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21 1110‘

time

racism” which informed the ways that white Britons viewed themselves, their
relationship to other societies and Britain’s image in international politics. Less than one
year after news of “race riots” occasioned white Britons to take an introspective
examination to account for images of race that countered the “mystique of British anti-
racism,” another instance of racial violence, the murder of Kelso Cochrane, would create
a moment when visions of Britishness were fractured, contested and reconﬁgured—this

time by black migrants.

175

CHAPTER FOUR
“Are We To Be Mauled Down Just Because We Are Black?”: Black Bodies
and the Gendered Dimensions of Grassroots Race Politics
On June 6, 1959 over one thousand mourners gathered in Ladbroke Grove

London to pay their ﬁnal respects to thirty-two year old Antiguan-bom Kelso Benjamin
Cochrane. One local newspaper remarked that although the Prime Minister of the West
Indies Federation, the High Commissioner of Ghana, and the Mayor of Kensington took
part in the interment displaying a casket adorned with a wreath “From the Martyrs and
Victims of Oppression” in Nyasaland, sympathy messages from the People’s National
Party in Trinidad, and condolences from the Liberian Government, Cochrane’s “only
claim to national fame was that he became the murder victim of a gang of white boys.”306
According to Olivia Ellington, his ﬁancée, Cochrane left home around eleven on the
evening of May 17, 1959 headed for St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, to receive
treatment for a broken thumb, but never returned home. Just hours later, Joy Okine, one
of the few witnesses to the murder, recalled hearing the words “Hey Jim Crow” shouted
from the direction of ﬁve or Six young white men who then attacked Cochrane from
behind in a brief scuffle which left him lying on the pavement with a single stab wound

307

to the chest. While law enforcement ofﬁcials acknowledged that Cochrane’s murder

99308

was the result of an “inter-racial ﬁght, police detectives suggested that the murder had

 

30” “1,200 Moum Cochrane: Scene at Graveside,” The Kensington News and West London Times 12 June
1959. For other news reports detailing the funeral of Kelso Cochrane see “800 Mourners March to
Graveside: Elaborate Precautions Against Any Disorder,” Kensington Post 12 June 1959; “Big Crowd at
West Indian’s Burial” London Times 8 June 1959; “PM at Kelso’s Burial,” Sunday Guardian 7 June 1959.

307 “Jamaican is Stabbed to Death in Fight at Notting Hill,” News Chronicle and Daily Dispatch 18 May
1959; “Coloured Man Stabbed to Death,” London Times 18 May 1959; “WI Groom-To-Be Dies After
Quack,” Trinidad Guardian 18 May 1959.

8 “More Violence in North Kensington,” London Times 18 May 1959.

176

“absolutely nothing to do with racial conﬂict,” but was more likely motivated by
robbery.309 Although law enforcement ofﬁcials attempted to rrrinirnize issues of race as
mitigating factors related to the Cochrane murder, voices from within migrant
communities of Aﬁican descent in Britain interpreted Cochrane’s tragic death as yet
another example of the problem of race in British society.

On the day following Kelso Cochrane’s murder, Alao Bashom of the Committee
of Aﬁican Organizations and representatives of various African and West Indian
organizations met and drafted an open letter to British Prime Minster, Harold MacMillan
addressing the racial undertones of the murder. The letter stated emphatically, “There is
evidence to show that Kelso Cochrane was murdered because he was colored,” which
could be attributed in part to the presence of “brazenly active” organized racist
campaigns in North Kensington and greater London including the Empire Loyalists and
the White Defense League. In an adjunct statement, the organizations declared that the
Cochrane murder, “rivals what we have seen or heard in Little Rock or the recent
lynching of Mr M.C. Parker of Poplarville Mississippi.”3 ’0 By equating their plight with
those of disfranchised black Americans in the Jim Crow South, black migrants made
implicit references to the ways that racism was embedded in the overall structure of

British society, despite the egalitarian ideologies of citizenship policies. Recalling the

 

30’ “Race Tension Increased By Murder,” London Times 19 May 1959.

3 1° “Coloured People ‘Have Lost Conﬁdence’ in Police: Open Letter to the Prime Minister,” Manchester
Guardian 19 May 1959. Mack Parker was a black man accused of raping a white woman. While being
held in a Poplarville, Mississippi jail, Parker was abducted by a lynch mob, beaten, shot and eventually
carried across state lines. His body was later found in the Pearl River. When the FBI withdrew from
investigating the Mack Parker’s lynching, the case rejuvenated the long held campaign championed by Ida
B. Wells in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for federal anti-lynching legislation. See also
“Anti-Lynching Law,” London Times 28 May 1959 and Howard Smead, Blood Justice: The Lynching of
Mack Charles Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

177

ways in which the murder conjured images of racial violence which had received
widespread attention both in Britain in abroad less than a year earlier, the letter directed
to the Prime Minister stated, “Hardly the ink has dried on the screaming headlines in the
national press, about the racist disgrace of Nottingham and Notting Hill Gate of last
August, [and] another heinous crime has been committed.” The organizations urged that
Government ofﬁcials “condemn publicly this murder as a Sign that at topmost levels, the
rights of Commonwealth citizens, irrespective of colour are held sacred” revealing that,
“feeling runs high and Africans and West Indians are bitter over the murder of one who,
but for the Grace of God, might have been any one of us,” leaving many asking, “‘Are we
to be mauled down just because we are black? ”3' I
In addition to urging Government officials to take a proactive stance in the search
to bring Cochrane’s murderers to justice, the letter demanded that the Government
provide “adequate police protection” for black citizens and support of legislation
addressing racial discrimination and incitement.” The organizations reminded the Prime
Minister that the Govemment’s stance towards issues pertaining to race relations had
implications that extended beyond the shores of the British Isles. The organizations
explained,
The peoples of this Commonwealth, the overwhelming majority of whom are of
Afro-Asian Caribbean descent are looking towards this British Govermnent to
insure that for which we fought against in 1939-1945 is not allowed to rear its

ugly head again and that the British Government is serious about its professions
of a multi-racial Commonwealth of equal peoples.312

 

3”Emphasis added. PRO CO 1028/50 Letter ﬁ'om Alao Bashom to Harold MacMillan dated 18 May 1959;
“Coloured People ‘Have Lost Conﬁdence’ in Police: Open Letter to the Prime Minister,” Manchester
Guardian 19 May 1959; “Coloured Folk Have Lost Conﬁdence,” Kensington Post 22 May 1959; “Race
Tensions Increased By Murder,” London Times 19 May 1959; “2 Detained in Notting Hill Murder Probe,”
Trinidad Guardian 20 May 1959.

3” PRO co 1028/50 Letter from Alao Bashom to Harold MacMillan dated 18 May 1959; “Coloured
People ‘Have Lost Conﬁdence’ in Police: Open Letter to the Prime Minister,” Manchester Guardian 19

178

In the weeks that followed, images of the murdered body of Kelso Cochrane
became critical channels through which black political agents in postwar Britain
demonstrated their alignment with an ongoing diasporic struggle against the interfaces of
global racisms that sought to contain, exclude, and demean peoples of African descent in
their quest for social equity, political rights, full citizenship, and racial democracy.
Throughout London, grassroots political campaigns in black communities used vigils,
marches and memorials, including a funeral, to shape a transnational dialogue on race in
Britain by transforming the body and memory of Kelso Cochrane into a political site
representing a broad range of experiences of black people in not only Britain, but also the
Caribbean, Aﬁica, the United States and the larger Diaspora.

This chapter explores how the aftermath of the murder of Kelso Cochrane served
as a critical moment of political mobilization among black communities in postwar
Britain. While police and other public ofﬁcials dismissed the Cochrane murder as a
random act of violence, this chapter focuses on how black migrants interpreted his
murder and used it as a context to articulate issues including racial violence,
discrimination and the struggle for black citizenship rights. In addition to illuminating
black political activity in postwar Britain, examining the political implications of the
murder of Kelso Cochrane also unearths a broader narrative about the transnational and
diasporic nature of issues of race and citizenship in the postwar world. What did it mean
for Aﬁicans and West Indians to pose the question “Are we to be mauled down just

because we are black? ” as part of a political dialogue between black communities and

 

May 1959; “Coloured Folk Have Lost Conﬁdence,” Kensington Post 22 May 1959; “Race Tensions
Increased By Murder,” London Times 19 May 1959; “2 Detained in Notting Hill Murder Probe,” Trinidad
Guardian 20 May 1959.

179

the British Government at a particular historical juncture when discourses of blackness
permeated the intemationally-recognized racial politics of decolonization, the US. Civil
Rights Movement and anti-apartheid? Moreover, what did it mean for the gendered and
racialized murdered body of Kelso Cochrane to be appropriated as a political
representation of the plight and interests of black communities in Britain and beyond?
This chapter uses these questions as interpretive guides to situate the murder of Kelso
Cochrane as a point of departure to examine the global dimensions of local race politics
and gendered strategies of black political mobilization in postwar Britain.

The chapter begins with a broad overview of the global politics of race in the
period leading up to Kelso Cochrane’s senseless murder. At the time of Kelso
Cochrane’s untimely death, the international politics of race had reached climatic
proportions to the extent that many could ﬁnd much veracity in Dubois prophetic
declaration that indeed, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color
line.”3 ’3 Cochrane died at a volatile political moment when the global structures
buttressing white supremacy were steadily becoming unglued. This section of the
chapter pays particular attention to the ways that race became a prevailing subject of
interest and debate as the world community began to recover from World War 11, make
sense of its causes and substantiate the ideological principles of anti-fascism, democracy,
self-determination and freedom which had deﬁned the Allied credo during the war. The
struggles of people of African descent around the world for human rights, civil rights,
social justice and racial equality prominently ﬁgured into international debates

surrounding these issues. As a result, the glaring problems of race epitomized by Jim

 

3" This statement was used in the preface of the 1900 Pan African Conference Address to the Nations of
the World authored by W.E.B. Dubois. W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantom
Books, 1989), xxxi.

180

Crow America, South African apartheid and Britain and other European powers’
racialized colonial regimes in Africa and the Caribbean were now the subjects of
international scrutiny and became powerful representations of a nation’s image in global
politics. When black activists in Britain declared Kelso Cochrane’s death a “race
murder,” they no doubt understood the international implications of this statement, and
indeed hoped to garner worldwide attention to the struggles of black people in Britain by
positioning them within broader ongoing transnational dialogues about questions of race
and rights.

To be sure, black activists around the world had long blurred the boundaries
between the domestic and the international politics of race in framing the struggles of
black communities. Elaborating on his oft-cited proclamation deﬁning race or the “color
line” as the paramount problem of the twentieth century, in 1906 W. E. B. DuBois
explained that “The Negro problem in America is but a local phase of a world

problem.”3 ’4

As black political organs in Britain reacted to the death of Kelso Cochrane
and transformed his body into a political platform to engage larger social issues affecting
black communities in Britain including racial violence, inadequate police protection,
housing and employment discrimination and the need for anti-discrimination legislation
they too, understood the plight of black migrants as a segment of a global racial dilemma

witnessed by black migrants in Britain and shared by black people in such places

including the United States, the Caribbean and Africa.

 

.3” W. E. B. DuBois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” in W. E. B. DuBois, ed. David Levering Lewis, 42;
For a more detailed historiographical treatment of DuBois’s theme see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local
Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal of American History 86
(December, 1999): 1045-1077.

181

The second half of this chapter examines the process through which Kelso
Cochrane became a symbol of the politics of race as experienced by black migrants in
Britain. To engage this issue, the chapter examines the evolution of what Alrick
Cambridge has referred to as a “black body politics.” Cambridge has argued that the
perceived mistreatment of black bodies can serve as a powerful centrifuge around which
the defense of the ‘black community’ is organized. In serving this purpose, Cambridge
noted that the natural physical black body can be transformed into a symbol of the
experiences and historical realities of a broader political, cultural, and ideological social
body. Thus, the physical black body becomes a site for the articulation of discourses of
racism and simultaneously anti-racism.3 '5 In tracing the process through which black
organizations used the murder of Kelso Cochrane to launch a “black body politics”
campaign, this chapter pays close attention to the ways in the politicization of Kelso
Cochrane’s body unveils a gendered arrangement involving black women’s use of a black
male body for political engagement is unveiled. This chapter examines this issue and
uses it as a starting point to suggest how historians might reassess the gendered images of
black community life and the nature, scope, and complexity of black women’s political
participation.

The Global Politics of Race in the Postwar World

On 14 August 1941, US. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime
Minister, Winston Churchill issued a joint statement of “common principles” which they
intended to use to guide national policy and to ultimately pursue “their hopes for a better

ﬁrture for the world.” Written on the eve of Pearl Harbor and as just as much of Europe

 

3”Alrick Cambridge, “Black Body Politics” in Where You Belong: Government and Black Culture eds.
Alrick Cambridge and Stephan Feuchtwang (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), 108-110.

182

remained engulfed in the ﬁght against Hitler’s Nazi regime, in what became known as the
Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill expressed their respect of the principle of
national self-determination and declared a belief in “the right of all peoples to choose the
form of government under which they will live.” Months later, the United States and
Britain along with eventually forty-four nations including Liberia, Haiti and Ethiopia
united in a pledge to uphold the tenets of the Atlantic Charter and “to preserve human
rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands” as a part of the Declaration
of the United Nations.3 ’6

These two pronouncements formed the basic ideological commitments that would
shape the emergence of the United Nations in the postwar world. To be sure, in a ﬁght
against the spread of German Nazism and fascist terror and repression, these lofty
principles provided a means to distinguish and authenticate the Allied cause. Self-
determination, human rights and justice all constituted discourses that promoted the
inextricable ideals of freedom, democracy and equality. AS such, these ascribed
principles supplied those struggling to promote and attain these ideals with an
intemationally-sanctioned language of possibilities. While World War II served as a
catalyst for the development of an international dialogue on questions related to basic
human rights, social justice and a group of people’s entitlement to chose their own form
of government, qualifying the meaning of these espoused principles and translating them
into collective action remained a paramount task confronting the postwar international

community.

 

3 '6 For full text of the Atlantic Charter see Douglas Brinkley and David R. Farcey-Crowther, eds, The
Atlantic Charter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), xvii-xviii; Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 146.

183

Even before the close of World War II, the racial implications of the provisions
outlined in the Atlantic charter and the Declaration of the United Nations began to
unfold. Whereas British labor leader and future Prime Minister, Clement Atlee declared
that the Atlantic Charter’s support of national self-determination was “equally applicable
to all races, including Asiatics and Africans,” Churchill later explained to the House of
Commons that the charter concerned “primarily, the restoration of the sovereignty, self-
govemment, and natural life of the States and nations of Europe. . .under Nazi yoke,” and
therefore did not apply to the “separate problem” of the “progressive evolution of self-
governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British
crown.”3 '7 In subsequent statements, Churchill suggested that he envisioned the war as a
means to sustain, rather than dismantle European empires in Aﬁica, the Caribbean and
Asia. He noted that his wartime agenda involved the restoration of France “with her
empire gathered around her” and further maintained that he had no intentions of presiding
over “the liquidation of the British Empire.”3 '8 Although Churchill made it clear that he
viewed the Atlantic Charter as more of a tool of war, rather than a broader referendum on
imperialism, and certainly not the hierarchies of race and power which held them intact,
Paul Gordon Lauren has noted that the rhetoric of the charter accentuated the rising tide

of nationalist sentiment in the colonies and beyond, and laid a critical ideological

 

3” House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 374 cols. 68-69. A180 quoted in Charles Lutton, “The
‘Atlantic Charter’ Smokescreen: History As a Press Release Journal of Historical Review (Winter, 1984):
203.

3'8 “‘Great Design’ in Aﬁ'ica: Mr. Churchill on Allied Plan,” London Times 1 1 November 1942.

184

foundation for the ﬂurry of decolonization movements which eventually swept through
Asia, Aﬁica and the Caribbean in the 19508 and 19608. 319

In 1944, Harold Moody and the London-based League of Coloured People held a
three day conference in which delegates devised a “Charter for Coloured People.”
Invoking the ideals expressed in the Atlantic Charter, the charter demanded that the
British Government grant colonials “full self-govemment. . .at the earliest possible
opportunity.” In addition, the charter maintained that “The same economic, educational,
legal and political rights” should “be enjoyed by all persons, male and female, whatever
their colour,” and insisted that “All discrimination in employment, in places of public
entertainment and refreshment, or in other public places, shall be illegal and shall be
punished.”320 Just weeks later, when representatives from Britain, the Soviet Union,
China and the United States gathered for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference to map out a
blueprint to implement the principles outlined in the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration
of the United Nations, reminiscent of the League of Coloured People’s “Charter for
Coloured People,” delegates also confronted the relationship between the rights of
national self-determination, human rights and race. Chinese delegates proposed that the
new international body—which would eventually become the United Nations— should
incorporate an explicit commitment to promoting racial equality as part of wider agenda
promoting global peace, self-determination, human rights and international collective
security . Although delegates from the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union

rejected the inclusion of speciﬁc references to race at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference

 

3’9 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 21 1.

32° Quoted ﬁ'om Fryer, Staying Power, 334; See also Schwartz, West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, 65;

Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 155-156.

185

when a broader and more diverse coalition of nations convened in San Francisco less than
one year later to ofﬁcially establish the United Nations, race became an unavoidable
subject of debate and remained ﬁrmly entrenched in the agenda to deﬁne the ideals which
would guide and deﬁne international politics in the postwar world.321

When the ﬁnal draft of the United Nations charter had been approved, the ﬁrst
article clearly relayed a commitment to the principles of “equal rights and self-
deterrnination” as a means of procuring international peace and security, and
acknowledged that harmonious international relations depended upon “promoting and
encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without
distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”322 The inclusion of explicit references
to race in the charter resulted from extensive debates— many of which were initiated by
majority non-white nations including India and declarations issued by representatives of
non-govemmental organizations including the NAACP—that highlighted the ways that
the ideological battle accompanying World War II centered squarely on issues of racial
superiority and race-based practices of discrimination, exclusion repression and genocide.
Paul Gordon Lauren has astutely observed, as Western powers including Britain and the
United States sharply criticized the racist policies and practices of Nazi Germany and
attempted to stake their international legitimacy on being the antithesis of German
Fascism, World War II provided a mirror for Allied supporters to examine the

contradictions between their espoused anti-fascist, anti-racist critique of Nazism and their

 

32' Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 158-164.

322 Robert F. Gonnan, Great Debates at the United Nations: An Encyclopedia of Fifty Key Issues, I 945-
2000 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 391-415; See also Lauren, Power and Prejudice I65.

186

own racially discriminatory and exclusionary policies and practices. 323 The United
Nations charter reﬂected the ways in which World War II prompted new transnational
dialogues on race and, at least in theory, made individual nations accountable to the
standards of racial equality established by the international community. However,
despite this intemationally-sanctioned conceptual leap in the potential for global racial
progress, the United Nations had its limitations. At the same time that the founding
principles of the organization touted the international community’s commitment to
safeguarding human rights and defending the rights of self-determination across the color
line, the United Nations had no intrinsic authority to enforce the institution of these ideals
and remained wedded to upholding the sovereign rights of nations to devise and adhere to
their own standards of rights and freedoms, even when they stood in stark contrast to
those set forth in the charter.324

Even though the United Nations had no jurisdiction to directly intervene in
matters conceming an individual nation’s racial policies and practices, for black activists
around the world, the organization provided a critical forum to direct their protest against
the overlapping issues of racial discrimination, race-based second class citizenship status
and racialized colonial systems— all of which effectively circumscribed access to
opportunities and stiﬂed political participation, social mobility and economic
development among people of African descent around the world. The organization’s

mandate transformed it into a promising ally in the struggle against global racisms and a

 

32’ Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 145-153.

32‘ Ibid., 166-170.

187

critical medium to attract international attention and broader coalitions of support for the
struggles and interests of black communities.325

Within months of the founding meeting of the United Nations, W.E.B. Dubois
presented a petition to the new organization initiated by the delegates of the historic
Manchester Pan-African Congress, on behalf nearly ﬁfty black organizations
“representing or supporting the rights of African Negroes and descendents of Africans in
the West Indies and the United States of America.” The petition refuted the “widespread
assumption that Negroes lack the intelligence to express their views and can only be
represented by imperial governments or by other spokesmen not of their own choosing,”
and called for greater representation of “Aﬁican colonial peoples” in international
politics “to the maximum extent possible under the present charter of the United Nations,
so that the grievances and demands of Africans can be freely expressed.”326 Two years
later in October of 1947, Dubois, in concert with the NAACP, submitted “An Appeal to
the World” to the United Nation in which he exposed the hypocrisy of America’s
professed democratic ideals, citing the historic systematic disfranchisement of black
Americans and the de facto sanctioning of racial violence including lynching. While the
NAACP’S petition focused speciﬁcally on circumstances deﬁning “the Case of Citizens
of Negro Descent” in the United States, the petition was supported by a transnational

coalition of black organizations including the Caribbean Labour Congress, the League of

Coloured People (London, UK) , the Pan-African Federation (Manchester, UK), the Non-

 

3” 1bid., 155,178, 204.

326 For full text see George Padmore, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity, A Programme of Action: History of
the Pan-African Congress, 2"d edition (London: Hammersmith Bookshop, 1963), 8-10. Also reprinted in
Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, The I 945 Manchester Pan-Aﬂican Congress Revisited (London: New
Beacon Books, 1995), 57-59.

188

 

European Unity Committee (Union of South Africa), the National Council of Nigeria and
Cameroons and the Nyasaland African Congress.327

The NAACP’S appeal to the United Nations came on the heels of similar racially
charged petitions issued by the National Negro Congress and the Indian Government in
1946, both of which condemned the racial policies and practices of the United States and
South Africa respectively. Historian Carol Anderson has noted that while the petition of
the National Negro Congress did draw international attention to the glaring
inconsistencies between the American credo of liberty and democracy for all and the
historic oppression endured by nearly thirteen million of its black citizens, as a source of
international debate over domestic race policy at the UN, it was largely overshadowed by
India’s complaint against South Africa’s burgeoning apartheid regime.

When Vijaya Pandit, sister of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru, addressed the
UN General Assembly in June of 1946, she issued a searing indictment of South Aﬁica’s
history of discrimination against Indians and other people of color in an overwhelming
black African nation dominated by coalition of whites of Dutch and English descent.
Pandit accused South Africa of ﬂagrantly violating the underlying principles expressed in
the UN charter. In doing so, She forceﬁrlly interpreted racially discriminatory policies
and practices which privileged those of European descent to the detriment of people of
color as blatant assaults on basic human rights. To be sure, Pandit did not simply frame

India’s condemnation of the South African government as a problem between two nations

with differing positions on the question of race, but more broadly, she presented her case

 

’27 Anderson, Eyes Of the Prize, 94-109; Plummer, Rising Wind, 179-182; Lauren, Power and Prejudice,
184-185.

189

 

as a compelling example of an issue——the practice of racial discrimination— that
essentially engulfed the entire world. Pandit urged her political colleagues to
Remember that, in the present case, the minds of millions of people in India and
in other parts of Asia and Africa have been moved to intense indignation at all
forms of racial discrimination which stand focused on the problem of South
Africa. This is a test case.328
In much the same way that the NAACP petition of 1947 would highlight the plight of
black Americans, yet garner endorsements throughout the Diaspora because it spoke to
historic power relations that subjugated people of African descent around the world, the
Indian delegation clearly used South Africa’s treatment of Indians as a mechanism to
both examine the impact of white supremacy on people of color throughout the world and
challenge the international community to confront the transnational effects of prejudice
and racial discrimination.329
AS would be the case with the NAACP petition submitted in 1947, debate over
the UN’S prerogatives, and essentially the international community’s role in tackling the
question of race as it pertained to the domestic policies and practices of individual nations
became contested terrain which emboldened emerging Cold War rivalries. While the
United States, Britain and the majority white nations of the British Commonwealth sided

with South Africa on the principle that the UN had no jurisdiction pertaining to matters

concerning an individual nation’s domestic affairs, the Soviet Union, the Communist

 

328 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 180-183; Anderson Eyes 017' the Prize, 86; Plummer, Rising Wind, 170-
171.

329 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 180-183; Brenda Gayle Plummer has noted that in reference to the
Indian delegation’s denunciation of South African racial policy, Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru later wrote
that the delegation “did not intend [to] raise the Negro issue, but it was not possible to tone down our
opposition on the South African question because the Americans might feel uncomfortable,” yet Vijaya
Pandit’s statements to the General Assembly do suggest that India’s attack on South Africa did
intentionally broach the issue of racial discrimination as it affected non-whites throughout the world. See
Plummet, Rising Wind, 170.

190

 

nations of Eastern Europe along with a cadre of smaller nations with majority non-white
populations supported India’s position.330 Even though South Africa’s alliance with
Britain and the United States was based on their shared commitment to preserve the
domestic jurisdiction of sovereign states rather than a defense of apartheid or racial
discrimination, the stage was set for the Soviet Union to use the contentious issue of race
to denigrate the validity of Western democracy and strategically align itself with an
increasingly inﬂuential bloc of non-white nations which would become prized allies in
the developing postwar struggle between East and West.

After heated debate, the General Assembly ﬁnally passed a resolution urging
South Africa to reexamine the inconsistencies between the international standards of
human rights and social justice conveyed in the UN charter and the conditions
experienced by Indians in South Aﬁica. Although the resolution did not include any
binding or enforceable provisions, and ultimately only represented a formal statement of
concern on the speciﬁc issue of the treatment of Indians in South Aﬁica, the simple fact
that the UN indulged an explicit debate over the global signiﬁcance of racial
discrimination and its particular manifestations illuminates the ways in which the postwar
period ushered in a new era of international relations where questions of race took center
stage.33 ’ No longer could nations including the United States and Britain turn a blind eye
to the problem of race. In the postwar world, the international political community’s
willingness to grapple with issues of race and actively promote anti-racist ideals—despite

the practical limitations of the UN authority— created a ripe climate of opportunity for

 

330 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 183; Anderson, Eyes Oﬂ the Prize,

33' Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 183; Plummer, Rising Wind, 170.

191

black activists around the world to amplify historic agendas for racial justice in the form
of equitable citizenship rights, self-govemment, non-discriminatory social policy and the
ofﬁcial prohibition of race-based exclusionary practices.332
Throughout the 19503 the racist and discriminatory policies associated with South
Africa’s system of apartheid consistently remained an issue of debate among United
Nations delegates. In 1952, the General Assembly again voted to censure the South
African Government, and in particular their enforcement of the Group Areas Act which
mandated racially segregated residential and commercial areas and effectively barred
non-whites from living and working in the most economically-viable regions of the
country.333 In a General Assembly debate in 1958, representatives from the newly
independent nation of Ghana along with those from Ceylon, Bulgaria, Ethiopia and
Ireland asserted that South Africa’s racial policies “constituted a threat to international
peace and security, as well as race relations throughout the world.” Supporting this view,
at the same meeting, representatives from the Soviet Union insisted that the United
Nations “had an obligation to continue to denounce and condemn the apartheid policy” as
long as the South Africa continued to enforce it.334 Despite strong arguments generally
waged by nations including the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and to a certain
extent, the United States, regarding the incompetence of the United Nations to intervene

on any level in matters concerning an individual nation’s domestic policy, the majority of

United Nations delegates supported various forms of official protest during the 19503

 

’32 For a summary of India’s protest and the ensuing debate on racial discrimination in South Aﬁ'ica see
Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946-1947 (Lake Success, NY: Department of Publish Information,
United Nations, 1947), 144-149.

3” Yearbook ofthe United Nations, 1952 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 291-306.

33“ Yearbook ofthe United Nations, 1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 84-85.

192

against apartheid. Most did so on the premise that the United Nation’s charter
empowered the organization to take action to ensure that nations sought conformity to the
human rights provisions outlined in the organization’s charter and further stipulated in the
Universal Declarations of Human Rights approved by the General Assembly in 1948.
Although the United Nations, as an official body could not unilaterally force South Aﬁ'ica
to outlaw the system of apartheid, the numerous declarations and resolutions issued in
opposition to the nation’s domestic policies certainly raised global awareness of the
problem of ideologies of white supremacy and racial discrimination, and no doubt drew
international attention to its speciﬁc effects on the lives of people of African descent.
International interest in domestic race relations of individual nations was not

conﬁned to institutionalized political arenas. Instead, as noted in an earlier chapter, in the
postwar period questions concerning the relationship between race, human rights, civil
rights, and democracy constituted issues important to a broader international public
sphere that intensely scrutinized various events laced with implications concerning race.
Just as international audiences digested news of “race riots” in Britain at the end of
summer in 1958, the world also became ﬁxated on the case of J immy Wilson. Wilson, a
black man had been convicted by an all-white jury for stealing less than $2 from an
elderly white woman and sentenced to death by an Alabama court. After losing an appeal
to the state Supreme Court to overturn the conviction, Wilson’s dismal fate was
ultimately reversed in large part because the indignation of the international community,
whose protest pressured the Governor of Alabama to grant clemency.

In her analysis of the historical signiﬁcance of the J immy Wilson trial, historian

Mary Dudziak has suggested that the outcome of the Wilson case demonstrated how

193

issues of race preﬁgured into international perceptions of American democracy and
inﬂuenced America’s moral and political legitimacy in world affairs. In making this
argument, Dudziak presents a world in which images of race mattered and garnered
international scrutiny.335 Moreover, this was a world in which the interests of politically
disfranchised, economically exploited, and socially marginalized black people around the
globe provided a touchstone to examine widely held notions of democracy, human rights,
justice, citizenship and equality. When black activists in Britain posed the question “Are
We To Be Mauled Down Just Because We Are Black?, in the aﬁermath of the murder of
Kelso Cochrane and less than a year after weeks of “race riots” involving attacks on
black migrants by indigenous white Britons, they too were acutely aware of this world
and no doubt intended that it might work to the advantage of the cause of black rights in
Britain in much the same way that it had the previous year for J immy Wilson.
Black Body Politics and Diaspora Activism in Twentieth Century Britain

Less than one year after the Notting Hill “race riots”, the Pittsburgh Courier, the
London Times and the Trinidad Guardian all carried reports of heightened racial tensions
in London as a result of the murder of Kelso Benjamin Cochrane on May 17, 1959.336 It
is likely that news of what police labeled as an “inter-racial ﬁght” did not prove shocking
to many in London and especially those residing in Notting Hill and the larger North
Kensington borough. Just days earlier in a press conference held by the British

Caribbean Association, Labour M.P. Charles Royle along with Tory M.P. Nigel Fisher

 

33’ Mary Dudziak Cold War Civil Rights, 1-6.

336 “Race Tension in London at New Height,” Pittsburgh Courier 30 May 1959; “Race Tension Increased
by Murder,” London Times 19 May 1959; “WI Groom-To-Be Dies After Attack: Tension Mounts in
Britain” Trinidad Guardian 18 May 1959; “ ‘Racial Tension’ On in UK,” Trinidad Guardian 23 May
1959; “Jamaican is Stabbed to Death in Fight at Notting Hill,” News Chronicle and Daily Dispatch 18
May 1959.

194

implored British newspapers to give more attention to increasing unrest in Notting Hill as
a means of thwarting ongoing violence in the area.337 Likewise, a similar issue had been
noted by Robert Lightboume in West Indian Federal Parliament discussions of services
available to West Indian migrants. He suggested that more attention be devoted to
addressing the needs and interests of West Indians in Britain, alleging that “far more
incidents [involving West Indian migrants] were being kept quiet in the English Press

than published.”338

In a visit to Notting Hill just ten days prior to the murder of Kelso
Cochrane, Herbert Hill, Labor Secretary of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People in the United States also warned that racial hostilities
remained and predicted that new waves of violence were imminent.339 However, while
blacks and whites in Notting Hill might have been accustomed to the persistence of
interracial conﬂicts especially in the wake of the “race riots” of 1958, with the murder of
Kelso Cochrane, racial violence in Britain now had a more intimate nomenclature.

On May 18, 1959 at the same meeting in which members of the Committee of
African Organizations (CAO) drafted an open letter of protest following the Cochrane
murder, the group also formed a burial committee responsible for assisting the family of
Kelso Cochrane with funeral arrangements. This sub-committee later became known as

the Inter-Racial Friendship Coordinating Council (IRF CC) and eventually ﬁmctioned as

the central liaison for an estimated 46 organizations concerned with race relations and the

 

337 “Teddy Boys Thought that Beatings Would Be Allowed,” Daily Gleaner 15 May 1959; See also PRO
CO 1028/50 Letter from Alao Bashom to Harold MacMillam 18 May 1959 which also references the
British Caribbean Association’s warnings of worsening violence in North Kensington.

333 “Migrant Sen/ice: New Study Urged,” Daily Gleaner, 14 May 1959.

’39 “Slaying Stirs London Fears of Violence,” Washington Post 18 May 1959; See reference to this survey
in “Teddy Boys Thought That Beatings Would Be Allowed,” Daily Gleaner, 15 May 1959.

195

 

struggle against racial discrimination in Britain including the Committee of African
Organizations, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, the National Council for Civil
Liberties, the Coloured Peoples Progressive Association and the Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People.340 Although the CAO’s letter to the Prime Minister
clearly invoked the murder of Kelso Cochrane as a pretext to underscore demands for a
government response to racism and discrimination as experienced in black communities,
at a meeting held two days later, David Pitt, prominent West Indian physician, local
political leader, and Labour candidate for the Hampstead district insisted that only with
relatives’ permission should the members of the organization get involved with the
funeral preparations for Kelso Cochrane arguing that, “No political capital was to be
made out of the most solemn affair, otherwise the whole object of obtaining public
sympathy would be destroyed.”34' While historical records of the CAO’s meetings
following the Cochrane murder reﬂect only Pitt’s opinion of what course the IRFCC’S
role in the funeral of Kelso Cochrane should take, the tenor of his statements suggests
that there might have been some debate as to the manner in which the organization
should attempt to strike a middle ground between commemorating the death of a “quiet
and pleasant. . .young carpenter” from Antigua and the explicitly political agenda of
marking an occasion to highlight the effects of contentious race relations, racial
discrimination, violence and marginal citizenship for black migrants.342 To reconcile

these complementary, yet distinctly autonomous programs, in lieu of assisting the

 

3“ PRO HO 325/9 Special Branch Report, Scotland Yard 28 May 1959; PRO HO 325/9 Special Branch
Report, Scotland Yard 17 June 1959.

3“ PRO HO 325/9 Special Branch Report, New Scotland Yard, dated 28 May 1959.
3“ PRO co 1028/50 Letter from Alao Bashom to Harold MacMillan dated 18 May 1959. This is the one

of the descriptions of Kelso Cochrane used in the letter sent ﬁom the Committee of African Organizations
to the Prime Minister on the day following the murder.

196

 

Cochrane family with funeral preparations, members of the IRF CC agreed to hold a
public memorial service that would expressly confront the racial politics surrounding
Kelso Cochrane’s murder. To be sure, as the IRFCC publicized plans for the memorial
service and continued to dialogue with Government ofﬁcials, local authorities and the
press, the funeral of Kelso Cochrane was nothing less than a climatic moment in a series
of strategic maneuvers which transformed his body into a political focal point
symbolizing the consequences of blackness in Britain and a platform to advocate for the
recognition of black citizenship rights.

Less than one week after the Committee of African Organization’s open letter of
grievance reached the ofﬁce of the Prime Minister, members of the IRFCC arranged for a
deputation to meet with Home Ofﬁce ofﬁcials on 27 May 1959. In a memorandum
issued to Home Secretary, R. A. Butler in his absence, IRFCC representatives explained
that their purpose in meeting with Home Office ofﬁcials was to discuss steps that the
government might take to address, the “serious situation of insecurity facing the coloured
minorities in London, particularly in the Notting Hill area, as well as the obvious
weaknesses in the law-enforcing authorities to curb racist propaganda which,” according
to the IRFCC “resulted in the murder. . .of Kelso Benjamin Cochrane.” The memo
highlighted the increasing inﬂuence of organized racist campaigns in the area including
the White Defence League, the Union Movement and the Ku Klux Klan and suggested
that police apathy towards the potential of these groups to prompt violent encounters
along racial lines has generated a “loss of conﬁdence” in local authorities’ ability to
adequately provide protection for black citizens “in the face of organised attempts to stir

up race hatred against them by certain fascists groups.” According to the IRFCC, all of

197

these factors had culminated in “a situation in which ordinary citizens of all races cannot
walk the streets without fear of being involved in disturbances.” 343
It is important to note that throughout the memo, the IRFCC consistently invoked
the language of citizenship as a means to frame the problem of racial violence, and more
importantly as a vehicle to demand Government action. In particular, the organization
drew attention to the ways in which escalating racial conﬂict coupled with inadequate
police protection had effectively eroded their citizenship right to a sense of security. The
memo cited insufﬁcient police patrols in certain areas and “police bias” as contributing
factors in the creation of a “situation of lawlessness” which had resulted in “a growing
lack of conﬁdence by all citizens in the law enforcing agencies.” As a possible remedy
for this increasingly disconcerting state of affairs, IRF CC ofﬁcials suggested that the
Government urge local authorities to increase the number of constables assigned to patrol
“troubled areas” and support the introduction of “special constables” comprised of
“responsible citizens of all races” to assist the regular patrols. The IRF CC explained, “It
is, we consider both our right and our duty as citizens to demand that such duty should be

fulﬁlled, and to offer assistance if we feel that the safety of citizens demands it.”344 In a

statement to the London Times CAO chairman, Alao Bashom announced that if the

 

3‘” PRO HO 325/9 Memorandum of a Deputation Representing Interracial Friendship Co-Ordinating
Council For Presentation to the Honourable R.A. Butler, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Special
Branch Report, New Scotland Yard, dated 28 May 1959; “Coloured Plea to Mr. Butler,” London Times 28
May 1959.

3‘“ PRO HO 325/9 Memorandum of a Deputation Representing Interracial Friendship Co-Ordinating

Council For Presentation to the Honourable R.A. Butler, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Special
Branch Report, New Scotland Yard, 28 May 1959.

198

Government failed to consider requests for additional patrols, the IRF CC would seek
“full permission to organize our own defense.”345

To demonstrate the growing cadre of local support for the IRFCC’s anti-racist
political campaign, along with the memorandum, the IRF CC submitted a petition to the
Home Secretary that had been circulated by members of the CA0. Echoing many of the
sentiments expressed in the IRFCC memo and Alao Bashom’s press statements, the
petitioners noted that the “race-murder in cold blood of young Kelso Cochrane” had
occasioned the need for the British Govermnent to take immediate action to protect, “our
persons, property and rights. . .from violence,” and requested that “if the authorities are
unable to do so with existing resources, that citizens such as ourselves be given authority
as special constables to protect ourselves and our community.”346 By translating the
problem of racial violence as an inﬁ'ingement on the basic rights of protection and
security due to all British citizens, the IRF CC challenged the notion that issues of race
were simply matters of interpersonal relations beyond the purview of ofﬁcial regulation,
and therefore asserted the idea that Government had a responsibility, and indeed an
obligation to address race relations and more speciﬁcally the ways in which British
society cultivated an environment hostile towards its black citizens.

In addition to expanding patrol units in certain areas with consistent patterns of

racial violence, the deputation recommended that government ofﬁcials appoint a Select

Committee to collect evidence “from residents of all races” in areas with signiﬁcant black

 

3‘5 “Defence Group For Coloured People,” London Times 22 May I959; See also “Defense Committee For
West Indians,” Daily Gleaner 22 May 1959.

3‘6 “Petition to the Right Honorable Mr. R.A. Butler, Home Secretary, Government of the United

Kingdom,” Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Box 1, Folder 25 Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, New York, NY.

199

communities including Notting Hill, where there existed, “an immediate problem of
racial tension,” to make more informative assessments of local issues concerning race.
Moreover, the committee urged that officials support a bill criminalizing racial

47
3 In

discrimination and propaganda and other activities that might incite racial conﬂict.
appealing to the sentiments of government ofﬁcials, the [RF CC contended that “the eyes
of the world are on Notting Hill and the good name of Britain as a democratic nation in
which all can live together in mutual respect, equality and dignity” suggesting that a
response to developing issues related to race was not simply a national concern, but
rather a question of international political signiﬁcance.348
While a survey of newspaper reports referencing the meeting do not reveal all of
the names of the seven member IRFCC deputation, it is important to emphasize those
who did attend and speculate on the input of others who may have been a part of the
deputation and or key ﬁgures in shaping the IRFCC’s platform and agenda at the time.349
Published reports on the IRFCC’s meeting with Home Ofﬁce ofﬁcials reveal that David
Pitt served as spokesperson among a deputation that included Amy Ashwood Garvey,
Claudia Jones, Frances Ezrecco, Donald Ezrecco and Alao Bashom. While Pitt was the

publicly acknowledged spokesperson for the IRFCC, black women overwhelmingly

dominated the leadership of the [RF CC and undoubtedly played important roles in

 

3‘" “Home Ofﬁce Deputation,” Kensington News and West London Times 5 June 1959; “A Petition to the

Right Honorable Mr. R.A. Butler, Home Secretary, Government of the United Kingdom,” Claudia Jones
Memorial Collection, Box 1, Folder 25 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY;
Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 95.

348 PRO HO 325/9 Memorandum of a Deputation Representing Interracial Friendship Co-Ordinating
Council For Presentation to the Honourable R.A. Butler, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Special
Branch Report, New Scotland Yard, 28 May 1959.

349 “Home Ofﬁce Deputation,” Kensington News and West London Times 5 June 1959; “Coloured Plea to
Mr. Butler,” London Times 28 May 1959; “Murder Search Goes On,” Kensington Post 29 May 1959.

200

shaping the direction and content of the organization’s early activities. The ﬁrst elected
executive committee of the IRF CC included Amy Ashwood Garvey as Chairman,
Claudia Jones, as Vice Chairman, Eleanor Ettlinger as second Vice Chairman, Alao
Bashorun as Secretary, Abhimanyu Manchanda as Assistant Secretary, Pearl Connor as
Treasurer, and Frances Ezzreco, L.A. St. Villo and Dorothy Case as Committee
Members.350

Amy Ashwood Garvey, the ﬁrst wife of Marcus Garvey and co-founder of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association had a long tenure of political activism which
spanned the Caribbean, the United States, Aflica, and Britain. During Mussolini’s
invasion of Ethiopia Garvey was treasurer of the International African Friends of
Abyssinia a Pan-African anti-colonial network which was the predecessor to the
International Service Bureau founded in 1937 by George Padmore. In 1945, Garvey
served as a delegate to the Manchester Pan-African Congress and in lieu of several
sojoums to the Caribbean, Ghana, and Liberia during the 1950s, she also managed to
found the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in London in 1958.35 I

Similar to Amy Ashwood Garvey, Claudia Jones also had an extensive

international political résumé. Deported from the United States in 1955 for her

involvement with Communist Party, Jones, a native of Trinidad, was convicted under the

 

”OPRO HO 325/9 Special Branch Report, New Scotland Yard, dated July 21, 1959; PRO HO 325/9 Special
Branch Report Report, New Scotland Yard, dated 10 November, 1959; Memo, “Inter-Racial Friendship
Co—Ordinating Council: Central Executive Committee,” undated Claudia Jones Memorial Collection Box
1, Folder 27 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The ﬁrst Central Executive Committee for
the organization was elected at a meeting held on July 14, 1959. According to this memo, which
announced the ﬁrst meeting of the Central Executive Committee, both Eleanor Ettlinger and Claudia Jones
were listed as Vice-Chairmen and J. Eber, Manchanda and Bashom were listed as joint secretaries. See
also Sherwood, Claudia Jones, 94-95.

35 ' Fryer, Staying Power, 344-349; Sherwood, Claudia Jones, 44-45, 92-3; Taylor, The Veiled Garvey, 171-

173; Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, 224; See also Lionel M. Yard, Biography
of A my Ashwood Garvey: Co-Founder of the UNIA (New York: Associated Publishers, 1990).

201

Smith Act of advocating the overthrow of the United States government during the height
of McCarthyism. While in the United States, where Jones spent the majority of her years,
she held a range of positions in a number of organizations including the National Negro
Congress and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. As a member of the Communist
Party Jones assumed national leadership roles as executive secretary of both the National
Negro Commission and the National Women’s Commission. In the months preceding
the racial clashes of 1958 in Notting Hill, Jones launched the West Indian Gazette, one of
the earliest black newspapers circulated during the postwar era which advocated for, anti-
colonialist and anti-racist causes around the world.352

On the day following the meeting with Home Ofﬁce Ofﬁcials the IRFCC
sponsored a memorial service for Kelso Cochrane. According to one local newspaper the
IRF CC titled the event, simply “We mourn Cochrane.”353 By orchestrating a public
event honoring the memory of Kelso Cochrane the organization effectively created a
political forum to attract an international audience to the concerns of black communities
in Britain. The list of speakers at the service included a range of prominent political
voices including Carl La Corbiniere, Deputy Prime Minister of the West Indies
Federation, Labour M.P. Stephen Swingler, Conservative M.P. Richard Homsby, David
Pitt and distinguished Pan-Africanist Eslanda Goode Robeson. In particular, the presence
of Carl La Corbiniere and Eslanda Robeson was indicative of both the growing inﬂuence
of the IRFCC and the political afﬁliations of pivotal individuals shaping the direction of

the organization’s agenda in the aftermath of the Cochrane murder.

 

352 Buzz Johnson, “I Think of My Mother Notes on the Life of Claudia Jones (London: Karla Press,
1985) and Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999).

353 “Many Voices on Notting Hill,” Kensington News and West London Times 29 May 1959.

202

The decision to invite Eslanda Robeson was most likely connected to the
persuasive powers of Claudia Jones. Both Eslanda and her husband, world—renowned
artist and activist Paul Robeson, were close and personal friends of Claudia Jones, whom
she met during her tenure in the United States. Speaking to an audience of nearly ﬁve
hundred in front of a “larger-than-life portrait”354 of Kelso Cochrane, Eslanda Robeson
underscored the racial character of his murder stating, “I believe that Kelso Cochrane was
killed because he was coloured. He died because of racial prejudice and hatred.”355
Eslanda Robeson’s involvement in the IRF CC grassroots anti-racist political campaign in
the wake of the Cochrane murder underscores the extent to which domestic race politics
in postwar Britain evolved in relation to both a national agenda advocating for full
citizenship rights for black communities in Britain, and simultaneously, a transnational
struggle against the vestiges of white supremacy in the forms of European imperialism
and institutionalized racism and racial discrimination being waged by black communities
around the world. Having served as an ofﬁcial delegate to the historic All Africa
People’s Conference held in Accra, Ghana in December of 195 8, the ﬁrst continental-
based meeting espousing Pan-African unity, Robeson had developed an international
reputation as a staunch defender of civil rights for black Americans and African
nationalism and had become a leading member of the U.S.-based anti-colonial organ, the
Council of African Affairs. Robeson’s presence at the [RF CC public memorial ﬁrmly
implanted the organization’s anti-racist platform of black civil rights within a diasporic

context that transformed the political implications of the Cochrane murder into a

 

354 “Deputy PM Blames Facists,” Trinidad Guardian 29 May 1959.

3” “Cochrane ‘killed because of colour,”’ News Chronicle and Daily Dispatch 29 May 1959.

203

transnational problem of race that linked the struggles of black communities in Britain,
the United States, the Caribbean and Africa.356

Upon his arrival in Britain, Deputy Prime Minister of the West Indies Federal
Government, Carl La Corbiniere explained that an important aspect of his visit would
entail a govemment—sponsored investigation of the problems facing West Indian
migrants.357 In lieu of the Cochrane murder, several members of the West Indies Federal
Parliament including A.U. Belinfanti of Jamaica contended that government ofﬁcials had
a duty to send the British Government a clear message regarding their dissatisfaction with
the conditions faced by West Indian migrants in Britain. Belinfanti argued that “the time
had almost passed when they [West Indians] look on Britons as their imperial masters
and oppressors” insisting that West Indians now viewed themselves as a part of a
brotherhood “and expected to be treated as equals.”358 Appearing at the memorial as a
representative of a transnational West Indian community dispersed largely throughout
Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean, Carl La Corbiniere argued, “You will ﬁnd
it impossible to convince any West Indians that this was not a race murder.”359 His
presence at the IRF CC memorial service only reafﬁrmed this position. The IRFCC was
political product of the Cochrane murder and at the center of the organization’s initial

mandate was to facilitate a public commemoration of the body of Kelso Cochrane which

 

3“For more on the All African People’s Conference see “All African People’s Conference,” International
Organization Vol. 16, No.2 (Spring, 1962): 429-431; Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 229. A biography of
Eslanda Robeson is much needed, however Martin Duberman’s work on Paul Robeson offers the most
comprehensive treatment of her life. See Martin Baum] Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1989).

357 “West Indies Call For Ruthless Suppression of Race Hostility: Deputy Premier Visits London With
Mandate to Take Action,” London Times 25 May 1959.

”3 “WI Concerned Over Migrants,” Trinidad Guardian 21 May 1959.

359 “Many Voices on Notting Hill,” Kensington News and West London Times 29 May 1959.

204

inherently involved connecting the racial character of the murder with broader political
issues related to race and the experiences of black migrants in Britain. La Corbiniere’s
remarks emphasized that the murder was “a tragic incident in the history of the world.”360
The fact that La Corbiniere spoke at the IRFCC’S memorial service suggests that he
might have viewed the organization as an important conduit of black political interests.
His appearance allowed him an opportunity to publicly communicate a message of
solidarity between West Indians in the Caribbean and Britain and simultaneously gave
ofﬁcial legitimacy to the political agenda of the [RF CC and its leadership.

On June 1, 1959, the Coloured People’s Progressive Association (CPPA)
sponsored a twelve hour vigil outside Whitehall. Frances Ezrecco was a leading
personality in both the CPPA and the IRFCC. In the aftermath of the racial violence of
1958 in Notting Hill, she and her husband, Donald Ezrecco, founded the CPPA for the
purposes of promoting democracy, interracial unity, social incorporation for black
migrants, equal employment opportunities regardless of race, and unrestricted

3’61 In a report on community relations in North Kensington

Commonwealth migration.
released just days before the vigil, ofﬁcials of the organization echoed many of the
sentiments expressed in the Committee of Aﬁican Organization’s open letter to the Prime

Minister and the IRFCC’S memo to the Home Secretary. The report addressed the need

for more adequate police protection for black people in North Kensington and noted that

 

36° “Cochrane ‘killed because of colour,”’ News Chronicle and Daily Dispatch 29 May 1959; “Coloured
Plea to Mr. Butler,” London Times 28 May 1959.

36' Letter from Donald Ezzreco, Coloured People’s Progressive Association, to Labour Party dated 23
October 1958, Labour History Archive and Study Center, Manchester, UK; Coloured People’s Progressive
Association Flyer, undated, Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Box 1, Folder 23 Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, New York, NY; “Will Too Many Do-Gooders Pave the Path to Notting Hell?,”
Kensington News and West London Times 30 October 1959.

205

the Cochrane murder was only the “latest outrage against the coloured people” Since the
“riots” of the previous year. In announcing plans for the vigil, an unnamed spokesperson
for the organization insisted that the purpose for the event was “to make clear the concern
felt by our organization regarding the explosive situation, and also to espress (sic) lack of
conﬁdence in the arrangements for security of coloured people and all members of the
community.”362

Demonstrating at times in pouring rain beginning at six in the morning, supporters
of the Coloured People’s Progressive Association vigil carried placards displaying
Slogans such as “Only One Race—The Human Race”, “Racial Discrimination is Illegal”
while one person communicated poignant message without words by carrying a placard
bearing only the face of Kelso Cochrane.363 The tone of the vigil echoed a common
theme of many voices representing how black communities interpreted the murder of
Kelso Cochrane. The body of Kelso Cochrane was not merely a site of an individual
experience, but rather through a process of public politicization, black activists
transformed it into a political motif, symbolizing the racial elements of violence,
discrimination, and citizenship as experienced by black people in Britain.

Described by a local newspaper as “Organised with a thoroughness usually
associated with a demonstration,” the funeral of Kelso Cochrane held on June 6, 1959

represented a deﬁnitive moment in the IRFCC’S “black body politics” campaign.364

Because the IRF CC coordinated most of the arrangements and fulﬁlled all of the

 

362 “Many Voices on Notting Hill: Have We Failed?,” Kensington News and West London Times 29 May
1959, p.6.

363 “Home Ofﬁce Deputation,” Kensington News and West London Times 5 June 1959; Sherwood, Claudia
Jones, 96.

36“ “Elaborate Precautions Against Any Disorder,” Kensington Post [2 June 1959.

206

ﬁnancial obligations for the burial of Kelso Cochrane’s body, the funeral provides an
instructive historical moment for understanding the process in which Kelso Cochrane’s
body and subsequently the memory of his body, were reconstructed into political images
of black life in postwar Britain. According to IRF CC records, in addition to assuming the
cost of the funeral services, transportation for family members, wreaths, and handbills “in
respect of [the] funeral”, the organization also provided support for Kelso Cochrane’s
brother to supplement lost wages and covered the expense of advertising the memorial
service and funeral in the New Statesman, and sending cablegrams to ofﬁcials in Jamaica,
Trinidad, Antigua, Ghana, Cairo, Paris, India, and Liberia.365 By assuming responsibility
for the burial of Cochrane’s body, the IRF CC made a public claim on the ﬁnal
interpretations of Kelso Cochrane’s life and death. In making these claims on Cochrane’s
body in death, the organization actively shaped the terms by which Kelso Cochrane’s life,
and particularly the circumstances in which it was ended would be remembered.

Even though Kelso Cochrane’s brother and ﬁance attended the services and were
recognized as the chief mourners, the predominance of the IRFCC’S role in publicizing
and more importantly, politicizing the body of Kelso Cochrane through their interchanges
with government ofﬁcials and memorial activities in the days leading up to the ﬁmeral,
transformed the ﬁnal remembrance of Kelso Cochrane’s body into a public ceremony that
commemorated both the personal loss of a loved one, and a public tragedy that
encompassed the interests of an entire community. As hundreds of mourners crowded

into the St. Michaels and All Angels church, they were directed by well-dressed IRFCC

 

3“ Inter-Racial Friendship Co—Ordinating Council Report of Income and Expenditures through June 30
1959, Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Box 1, Folder 27 Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture.

207

stewards including Pearl Connor wearing brightly colored dresses with either a black
armband or a patch stitched into their Sleeve symbolizing their afﬁliation with the
organization.366 Upon viewing Cochrane’s casket draped in purple and gold fabric, those
involved in the procession most likely took notice one of many wreaths sent in memory
of Kelso Cochrane including one from “West Indian sympathisers at Paddington Post
Ofﬁce” and another, from Harold Sharp, bearing the inscription: “Ever-loving memory.
Your death was by the hand of a blind man. His terrible deed has drawn innumerable
warm hearts to love towards you and yours.”367 Contrary to some West Indian ofﬁcials’
speculations that the IRFCC would only exploit the funeral for political gain, the IRF CC
did not use the funeral as a forum for open protest, but rather ingeniously crafted a
grassroots anti-racist campaign that embraced Kelso Cochrane as an emblem for the state
of race and community relations in postwar Britain.368 To be sure, the council reserved
Cochrane’s funeral for a symbolic outpouring of sympathy for not only his senseless
murdered black body, but also the plight of all black citizens of Britain.
Gender and the Invention of “Black Body Politics”

Most recent histories detailing the long history of black communities in Britain
reference the murder of Kelso Cochrane as key moment of black political mobilization

that drew greater public attention to the impact of racial discrimination and violence as

 

366 “1,200 Moum Cochrane: Scene At Graveside,” Kensington News and West London Times 12 June
1959; Trevor Phillips and Mike Phillips, Windrush, 186.

367 “800 Mourners March to Graveside: Elaborate Precautions Against Any Disorder,” Kensington Post 12
June 1959.

3‘” PRO CO 1031/2541, Notes ﬁ'om meeting, “Situation in Notting Hill” held in Colonial Ofﬁce dated 5

June 1959. This meeting was attended by Grantley Adams, Carl Corbiniere and Garnet Gordon. All three
expressed concern about the IRFCC’S exploitation of the funeral of Kelso Cochrane.

208

 

experienced by black migrants.369 In the recent BBC sponsored volume on the postwar
emergence of multiracial communities in Britain in the wake of unprecedented arrivals of
non-white migrants from the Commonwealth, journalists Mike Phillips and Trevor
Phillips explained,

The death of Kelso Cochrane—an obscure carpenter from Antigua—and the

mourning which followed it was a revelation which helped create popular

revulsion against the street violence and harassment the migrants had experienced
during the ﬁfties. It also helped to move the argument about their presence on to

a new plane. Political interest in the conditions which characterised Notting Dale

had increased and become the subject of ﬁerce debate.370
Although Kelso Cochrane, had a rather ordinary existence which most likely would not
have distinguished him in the eyes of history, he died a most remarkable death that
transformed him into a martyr for social justice and a symbol of the consequences of race
in postwar Britain as experienced by tens of thousands of black migrants.

In the ﬁnal chapter of his groundbreaking work on the Mississippi organizing
tradition, sociologist Charles Payne has emphasized the extent to which the history of the
civil rights movement in America has been constructed as a series of media ﬂash points
and lacks a sustained consideration of the intricate social processes that laid the
foundations for more publicly acclaimed events including the Brown decision, the
Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock crisis, and Freedom Summer. He notes that
media accounts and ultimately the historical narratives of the modern civil rights

movement that have emerged from them “ﬂame the story in terms of Big Events, in terms

of what white people did, in terms of traditional leaders and organizations, in terms of

 

369 Fryer, Staying Power; Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class; Ron Ramdin, Reimagining
Britain: Five Hundred Years of Black and Asian History (London: Pluto Press, 1999).

37° Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush, 187.

209

 

what happened after 1955, in terms of southern backwardness, in terms of violence-
nonviolence,” and in turn, replicate the “biases of race, gender and class, and relegated to
secondary importance the themes that would have been important from a community-
organizing perspective?“ Payne’s critical analysis reﬂects a keen awareness and
appreciation for the ways that the history of transformative moments and watershed
events is wrought with layers of equally, if not more signiﬁcant, processes of
development that contribute to our understanding of the past. In the case of Kelso
Cochrane, the interpretation of his historical legacies is complicated, and indeed to a
certain extent, deﬁned by the process through which his body became socially
reconstructed and transﬁgured into a political site symbolizing the consequences of race
as experience by one individual and simultaneously an entire collectivity of people.

Considering the IRFCC’S “black body politics” campaign in the aftermath of the
Cochrane murder offers historians a critical vehicle for examining the complex
relationships existing between gender and grassroots political mobilization. At the center
of this campaign was a nuanced interplay of gender dynamics which entailed an
organization— whose leadership and political agenda was dominated by black women—
using a black male body to construct a political movement concerning race and
citizenship in postwar Britain. Although black women were not necessarily the sole
participants in the council’s early evolution, the fact that women including Amy
Ashwood Garvey and Claudia Jones occupied top positions in the hierarchy of the
council’s formal leadership suggests that they were fundamental in shaping

organizational agendas and strategies particularly in the wake of the Cochrane murder.

 

37' Charles Payne, 1 ’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom
Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 392-404. Quotation comes from pages 403-404.

210

 

Scholars have noted that gender is associated with a number of components of
social movements including, but not limited to composition, goals, and tactics.372 In the
case of Kelso Cochrane and the IRFCC’s “black body politics” campaign, a gendered
analysis reveals a textured politicization process in which a masculine corporeal space
became a conduit for female political engagement. The body of Kelso Cochrane
represented a contested terrain manipulated and molded primarily by black women to
publicly expose racial violence and discrimination and make claims on the rights of black
citizens to adequate police protection and legal recourse to counter discrimination and
racist propaganda. Surely, IRF CC ofﬁcials including Pearl Connor and Frances Ezzrecco
found the problem of race in Britain compelling enough to meet with local authorities
ofﬁcials, hold public protest meetings and lobby Parliament well before the murder of
Kelso Cochrane, however, it was their success in recasting the murder of Kelso Cochrane
which provided an entry point to disseminate their own politics of race and promote an
anti-racist agenda to an engaged public sphere comprised of Government officials, media
outlets, black communities (both in Britain and beyond) and a host of other domestic and
international observers. If one Simply considers the image of Kelso Cochrane’s death,
rather than the process through which that image was made and assigned public meaning
as the point of departure to understand the history of grassroots race politics in postwar
Britain, one actively participates in the silencing of the voices of black women whose
organizing and strategies of mobilization were instrumental in transforming Kelso
Cochrane’s body and memory into an iconic referent for the struggle of black

communities in postwar Britain.

 

372 Rachel L. Einwohner, Jocelyn A. Hollander and Toska Olson, “Engendering Social Movements:
Cultural Images and Movement Dynamics,” Gender and Society 14 (October, 2000): 684-690.

211

CHAPTER FIVE
In this country we do not brutally insist ‘WHIT ES ONLY, ’ politely we say ‘Sorry no
coloured. ’373
-Mervyn Jones, 1961
The Evolution of Ofﬁcial Race Policy

Even before the arrival of the Empire Windrush on British Shores carrying 492
Caribbean migrants in June of 1948, British policy makers expressed concerns about the
social, political, economic and cultural implications of black migration. 374 Throughout
the 19503 and early 1960s, successive British Governments considered the possible
consequences of black migration and actively sought various measures to curb
unsponsored black migration from the Commonwealth and, in effect, stiﬂe the growth of
black communities in Britain. AS noted in earlier chapters, according to the terms of the
British Nationality Act of 1948, black Commonwealth migrants—by virtue of their
British citizenship—had a legal right to migrate, settle and work in Britain with the same
citizenship privileges extended to metropolitan Britons. Whereas the British Nationality
Act of 1948 established a legal foundation for the idea of a multiracial egalitarian British
community of citizens, black Commonwealth migration served as the vehicle through
which metropolitan Britain became one of the critical testing grounds exposing the
tensions between the ideal of a trans-racial British citizenship and the realities of race-
based discrimination, violence, exclusion and marginalization as experienced by people

of African descent which had long deﬁned the history of Empire.

 

373 Mervyn Jones, “Coloured People in Britain: Barriers on the Doorstep,” The Observer 5 March 1961.

3" Policy makers’ initial reactions to the arrival of the Empire Windrush are discussed in Chapter 2. See
also Clive Harris, “Post-War Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army,” 21-26.

212

 

With the passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 and the
adoption of the Race Relations Act of 1965, the British Government sanctioned a new
chapter in the representation of race and race relations in ofﬁcial policy. While the
British Nationality Act of 1948 codiﬁed a discourse of British citizenship espousing
principles congruent with the vision of a racially egalitarian civic community, the
unspoken, yet clearly discemable intent and ramiﬁcations of the Commonwealth
Immigration Act of 1962 effectively fractured, and all but nulliﬁed the universalism
inherent in the British Nationality Act of 1948, and used the citizenship right of migration
as an instrument to institutionalize separate categories of British citizenship which
limited British citizens of Commonwealth countries from accessing their right to settle,
work and substantiate the meaning of their British citizenship in Britain on the same
terms as their metropolitan counterparts. While the Commonwealth Immigration Act of
1962 did not Speciﬁcally make any references to race, and in fact regulated migration
based on a potential migrants’ relationship to the British labor market and perceived
economic value in predetermined professional and industrial sectors of the British
economy, the manner in which policy makers went about craﬁing the legislation, its
eventual impact on black migration patterns and most importantly, the ways in which
black migrant communities interpreted the introduction of the controls, highlights the
extent to which the act did indeed represent an ofﬁcial race policy. AS such, the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 made an ofﬁcial statement about the
receptiveness of mainstream British society to the growth of black communities in Britain

and provided a legal mechanism sanctioning a broader infringement upon an essential

213

 

ri t—the right of migration—defining black Commonwealth migrants claims to and
expressions of their British citizenship.

Just three years after the initiation of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of
1962, the British Government passed the ﬁrst national officially-recognized race policy—
the Race Relations Act of 1965. Whereas the form of the Commonwealth Immigration
Act obscured the racial character of migration controls, the Race Relations Act of 1965
explicitly addressed issues of race and drew attention to the existence of racial prejudice
and discrimination in Britain. The act resulted in the creation of a national Race
Relations Board which was to serve as a forum to mediate issues concerning racial
discrimination in public places.375. In doing so, this piece of legislation represented a
formal acknowledgment of the social relations conditioned by race which, in turn,
facilitated racism and the potential for acts of racial discrimination in Britain.

In considering the Race Relations Act of 1965 as an ofﬁcial statement about race
and race relations in Britain, it is important to note that in much the way that the outer
appearance of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 did not reﬂect the racial
agenda that Commonwealth migration controls would ultimately serve, neither did the
Race Relations Act. While clearly espousing anti-racist principles, the timing of the
bill’s introduction in Parliament— in conjunction with the extension of Commonwealth
immigration controls— and more importantly, the glaring failure of the act to address
racial discrimination in the critical areas of housing and employment suggest that the
bill’s anti-racist overtures were not necessarily meant to provide an avenue to actually
dismantle the structural enablers of racism or even provide any remedies for the practice

of racial discrimination in the arenas where it mattered most.

 

375 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, 138-140, 144-146.

214

This chapter uses both the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 and the Race
Relations Act of 1965 as points of departure to analyze the interplay between ideologies
of racism and anti-racism in the evolution of ofﬁcial race policies in postwar Britain.
Currently, the key debate framing much of the scholarship on the politics of race and
migration in postwar Britain centers on the extent to which policy makers actively
participated in shaping and institutionalizing a marginal citizenship status for black
Commonwealth migrants through the introduction of racially motivated restrictive

migration controls in the early 19603.376

More recently, Randall Hansen has raised new
questions which serve to complicate the ways in which what has been portrayed as a
linear march towards race-based Commonwealth migration restrictions lead entirely by
British ofﬁcials maybe reconﬁgured. While the dominant interpretation of the state’s
response to black migration focuses largely on the ways in which policy makers
expressed hostility towards the growing black presence during the 19508 and
consequentially constructed and appropriated racialized images and stereotypes of black
migrants—particularly those from the Caribbean colonies—to then manufacture and
justify the case for migration controls, Hansen suggests that this paradigm does not
account for the diversity of opinions characterizing government ofﬁcials’ considerations
of Commonwealth migration. Instead, Hanson draws attention to the plurality of
opinions existing within the conﬁnes of Cabinet discussions and Parliamentary debates

about the dilemmas of black migration. Hansen ﬁnds that at every critical juncture that

policy makers contemplated introducing migration controls throughout the 1950s and

 

37" For examples of this interpretation see Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, “The 1951-55
Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration,” ed., Winston James and Clive
Harlis, Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain (London: Verso Press, 1993), 55-72; Spencer,
British Immigration Policy Since I 93 9; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, esp. chapters 5-6.

215

 

even during the debates of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, there were
always forceful voices of protest challenging the racially discriminatory character of both
the idea and the means of migration restrictions. In addition, Hansen is also careful to
point out that in their preoccupation with demonstrating state-sponsored racism, scholars
including Kathleen Paul and Ian Spencer have presented a narrative of postwar black
migration that overemphasizes the role of ofﬁcialdom as an agent of postwar racism.
Instead he argues that a “complex of factors inﬂuenced government policy.” In the
process of ignoring these factors, Hanson insists that scholars have camouﬂaged the
broader setting of policy makers’ conceptions of race, the potential consequences of a
growing black population and the wider British public’s own expressions of opposition to
black migration which, in turn, has “impeded a balanced and comprehensive
understanding of British migration and race relations policy.”377

Although Hanson’s study reproduces many of the shortcomings of previous
accounts by framing the history of postwar black migration wholly ﬁom the perspective
of policy makers, his study raises two critical points that inform the central concerns of
this chapter. The ﬁrst involves the issue of historical agency, while the second relates to
historical context. Certainly, the passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962
to a large extent reﬂected ofﬁcial consensus about the need for, and the utility of
Commonwealth migration restrictions; however, the manner in which historians portray
the evolution of this policy as a pivotal chapter in the history of race, citizenship and
migration in postwar Britain Should reﬂect the constellation of voices who were invested
and who weighed in on the bill’s implications and effects—both actual and imagined.

Hansen cites a number of examples where inﬂuential government ﬁgures including

 

377 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, 10-16.

216

 

successive Colonial Secretaries and members of the Labour Party took what he refers to
as “a principled stand. . .against racism,” in their rejection of measures intended to control
black migration.378 Although Hansen does not consistently distinguish between these
officials’ objections to the intent or simply the form and public presentation of restrictive
migration controls, his work does attempt to demonstrate the existence and signiﬁcance
of voices of dissent. Contrary to the impression that Hansen’s study gives— because of
its focus on the activities of policy makers—the dissenters were not limited to Whitehall.
This chapter emphasizes how West Indian officials and black migrant communities
voiced their concerns about the introduction of Commonwealth migration restrictions and
demonstrates the ways in which they actively participated in shaping British officials’
considerations of the dilemmas and possible approaches for addressing Commonwealth
migration. Excavating and interrogating these crucial, yet all too oﬁen forgotten voices
offers a fresh perspective for understanding the politics of black migration and therefore
provides a more nuanced discussion of the boundaries of policy makers’ considerations
of the available possibilities and strategies for regulating and controlling black migration.
In addition to recognizing the historical agency of a broad range of voices of
dissent in the evolution of postwar race policy, Hansen’s study also draws attention to the
need to reframe the broader historical context in which British ofﬁcials pondered and
crafted racially charged legislation. Hansen insists that it is “untenable” to assert that the
development of overlapping policies addressing migration and issues of race occurred

absent from what was happening in the larger society and some extent the broader

 

37’ Ibid., 13.

217

 

Commonwealth and international community.379 Hansen notes that the timing of the
Cabinet’s announcement of their intentions to introduce a bill regulating Commonwealth
migration in 1961 was closely entangled with discussions and plans related to the future
of the West Indies Federation. His study also points out that by the early 19603, Britain
was moving towards closer association with the European Economic Community and
indicates that to some extent British ofﬁcials were less wedded to the mission of
fortifying the ties of Commonwealth than they had been in previous years. Hansen
suggests that British ofﬁcials’ Shiﬁ towards prioritizing continental political and
economic relations over those of Commonwealth might account for their willingness to
introduce a migration policy that would categorically redeﬁne a central right of
association which had long characterized imperial and Commonwealth relations. These
international conditions are certainly key to understanding the pace, the form and the
content that migration controls would take in their route to becoming official policy,
however they do fully explain the broader historical context framing the manner in which
British government ofﬁcials meditated on the relationship between race, citizenship,
migration, and most importantly, the transformation of British cities into multiracial
communities.

In addition to refocusing the lens through which one may observe the evolution of
the adoption of ofﬁcial race policy, a second goal of this chapter entails situating this
process within a transnational context that appreciates not only how Britain’s Shifting
relationship with the Commonwealth and European Economic Community affected
policy initiatives, but also the ways in which the postwar international community’s

preoccupation with questions of race, human rights, citizenship and democracy

 

3’9 1bid., 14.

218

preﬁgured into domestic policy agendas involving race relations. In 1965 when the
Labour Government issued a new White Paper titled “Immigration From the
Commonwealth,” it outlined a two-pronged political compromise that involved
implementing a program involving “control on the entry of immigrants so that it does not
outrun Britain’s capacity to absorb them” and adopting “positive measures designed to
secure for the immigrants and their children their rightful place in our society.”380 In
announcing this agenda, the White paper set forth two seemingly ideologically
contrasting pieces of legislation—one, a restrictionist and inherently discriminatory
migration policy reinforcing the racialized notions of British citizenship which
marginalized non-white Commonwealth nationals and had been institutionalized in the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of1962, and another, an integrationist bill with anti-
racist overtures that alluded to the egalitarian potential of British multiracialism and
eventually resulted in the passage of the Race Relations Act of 1965. This chapter
emphasizes that in order to begin to unravel the complexities of the public presentation of
institutionalized competing ideologies racism and simultaneously anti-racism, the
political signiﬁcance of race in postwar Britain must be read against the dynamics of
global race politics. It is no accident that policy makers would ﬁnd it necessary to pair
what would surely be perceived as a racist immigration policy with an anti-racist Race
Relations Act less than two years after the United Nations issued the Declaration on the

Elimination of All F orms of Racial Discrimination and on the heels of the United States

Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

38° “Immigration From the Commonwealth,” Cmd. 2739, Parliamentary Papers, August, 1965. Emphasis
added.

219

The Road To Commonwealth Migration Restrictions
Even though unsponsored non-white Commonwealth migration did not occur en
masse until after World War II, controlling the entrance of and regulating the terms of
settlement for migrant workers of color was a concern of British policy makers
throughout the early twentieth century and especially during the interwar period.
Although the exigencies of war required that Britain welcome numerous non-white
colonial workers to Britain as soldiers, non-combatant military support, medical
personnel and merchant seamen to aid in the Allied cause during World War I, when the
War ended, British officials took a keen interest in curbing the entrance of non-white
workers and policing their residency in British cities. Coming on the heels of episodes of
racial violence occurring between indigenous white residents and seafaring workers of
color, in port cities including Cardiff and Liverpool in 1919, the Aliens Order of 1920
empowered immigration officer to refuse entry to any arriving “Arab seamen” who could
not provide proof of British nationality. In January of 1921 , this policy was extended to
apply to all incoming “coloured” seamen, regardless of ethnicity or port of origin. Four
years later, under the provisions of Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of
1925, the Home Ofﬁce again codiﬁed a policy rooted in racial difference that effectively
used race as a means to denaturalized a large segment of non-white British subjects and
reinforce a racial hierarchy of British citizenship that privileged whiteness?“

The terms of the 1925 order required that all non-white seamen resident in British

ports present local authorities with documentary evidence of their British nationality or

 

3" Tabili, “ ‘We Ask For British, 1 17-121; Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 10-1 1. Tabili
notes that non-white interwar maritime community was multi-ethnic and included Arabian, Indian,
Caribbean, West African seamen.

220

register as aliens with the police. Not only did this measure continue to make it difficult
for non-white seamen, including those who were bona ﬁde British subjects to enter
Britain, but because—as many government ofﬁcials were well aware—customarily, few
sailors, white or non-white carried passports and instead used discharge books
documenting their voyages as their only travel documents. Therefore, many non-white
British subjects were forced to relinquish their claims to citizenship, face possible
deportation or register as aliens because they could not provide acceptable proof of their
British nationality. The economic ramiﬁcations of this policy for seamen of color came
to a head in 1935 with the passage of the British Shipping (Assistance) Act. This act
made it illegal for shipping companies to claim government subsidies if they employed
alien seamen and as a result, virtually shut out many non-white maritime workers— both
undocumented British subjects and alien workers—from employment opportunities on
state-subsidized vessels.382

Laura Tabili has suggested that the structure, implementation and consequences
of the Coloured Alien Seamen Order of 1925 makes the act an important precursor to
understanding many of the issues that would come to deﬁne postwar considerations of
race, migration, citizenship and national belonging. Tabili is careful to point out that
speciﬁc historical conditions mediated by the interwar economy, the demands of shipping
industry, tensions within local labor markets juxtaposed with the historic racial dynamics
of empire coalesced at a particular moment in such a way as to prompt government

ofﬁcials to institutionalize policies founded upon racial difference which redeﬁned the

boundaries of British national identity and in turn the citizenship privileges granted to

 

”2 Tabili, ‘We Ask For British Justice ', 120-122; Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 10-12;
See also Laura Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth Century Britain” Journal of
British Studies 33, 1 (January, 1994): 54-98; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 113.

221

non-white British subjects during the 19205 and 19305. While the policy did not
completely prevent non-white British seamen from migrating and working in Britain, it
most certainly relied upon racial categories to differentiate between the ways in which
white British seamen experienced their British nationality and the manner in which
colonial seamen of color could lay claim to and access the opportunities associated with
their status as British subjects.

As noted in earlier chapters, in the early postwar period up until the 19605
Caribbean migrants of African descent—and more particularly J amaicanS—represented
the overwhelming majority of Commonwealth citizens of color moving to Britain. To
understand why this occurred, in addition to analyzing the socio-economic conditions in
the Caribbean colonies informing migration, one must also note the ways in which
differing emigration procedures in certain imperial and Commonwealth outposts shaped
the possibilities for travel to Britain. Although imperial relations allowed colonial and
dominion residents free entrance to Britain well before the codiﬁcation of migration as a
citizenship right under the British Nationality Act of 1948, throughout the interwar
period, Ian Spencer has noted the existence of de facto policies of obstruction designed to
curb migration to Britain from parts of the Empire with majority non-white populations.
During the 19305, Spencer notes that the British Government made arrangements with
colonial governments including India and Pakistan that required potential migrants to
obtain certain endorsements by colonial authorities before journeying to Britain. In the
case of Cypriots, in addition to certain passport endorsements, potential migrants were

required to post a security bond and in some instances provide documentation from a

222

resident in Britain stating that they would sponsor the migrant until he/she found
employment in Britain.383
In 1950, the Colonial Ofﬁce urged all colonial governments to enforce procedures
that would limit the issuance of passports to those “whose ﬁnancial position was not
sound” and or those who could not demonstrate steady employment.384 By that time,
High Commissions in the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan were
selectively issuing British passports to primarily white applicants or those who could
demonstrate that they were a descendant of someone born or naturalized in Britain.
While West African governments such as Nigeria generally complied with the requests of
the Colonial Office, on the whole, West Indian governments were generally less
cooperative in introducing formal administrative procedures to limit emigration. In
heavily populated islands including Jamaica emigration served as a vital form of
economic relief; instead of implementing ofﬁcial measures to prevent certain groups
from migrating to Britain, Jamaican authorities did make some efforts to publicize the
potential obstacles facing migrants including the inability to secure employment or
suitable housing.385
The reluctance of West Indian governments to impose measures that would limit

emigration to Britain even as unparalleled numbers of Caribbean men and women chose

to pursue work opportunities and settle in Britain during the 19505 provides an important

 

”3 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 23-24, 41.
3“ Ibid., 31.

385 Ibid., 31-32; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 153; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain,
66. Hansen notes that according to a Cabinet report in 1953 all of the African colonies were refusing
passports to those who did not have stable employment or for those potential migrants who could not
demonstrate a certain degree of ﬁnancial solvency. This is also referenced in PRO CAB 129/65 Memo,
“Employment of Coloured People”by D. Maxwell Fyfe 30 January 1954.

223

example illuminating the ways in which the early postwar period marked a critical shift in
imperial relations. Although the British Government proved to be successful at
inﬂuencing some Commonwealth governments to institute administrative measures that
would thwart emigration to Britain—and simultaneously preserve the appearance of
Britain’s open door Commonwealth migration policy—Ian Spencer also maintains that
West Indian governments’ unwillingness to indulged British ofﬁcials’ request to strictly
regulate emigration embodied the shift towards national self-determination as self-
governing colonies began to deﬁne and exercise policies that more clearly distinguished
their own social, political and economic interests apart from those of the imperial
government.386 Considering this crucial argument complicates how one may interpret
postwar black migration as part of a chapter in the history of race and empire. Not only
did mass black migration from the Caribbean reconﬁgure metropolitan Britain a space
exemplifying to a greater extent than ever before the historic multiracialism which had
characterized the Empire, but also it served as a reminder of the ways in which black
people of the empire consistently contested the racialized limitations imposed by imperial
authority even as they strategically positioned themselves within and against the conﬁnes
of the imperial community of citizens. In doing 50, black migrants from the Caribbean
fractured and expanded the boundaries of a British identity and challenged an imperial
system founded upon racial hierarchies of race and place.

By 1961, when the Home Secretary introduced the ﬁrst Cabinet-approved
legislation to Parliament intended to regulate Commonwealth migration, “coloured
immigration” had been the subject of Cabinet discussions no less than thirty seven times

since 1945. The peak of these discussions occurred between 1954 and 1955 when the

 

3“ Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 193 9, 22,44.

224

 

Cabinet debated a proposal for migration controls drafted in consultation with ministers
overseeing the Home Ofﬁce, the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations
Ofﬁce. 387 According to migration statistics maintained by the House of Commons
between 1953 and 1954 the number of migrants entering Britain from the Caribbean
increased more than ﬁve fold, from and estimated 2,000 to 11,000. By 1955, the number
of Caribbean arrivals had more than doubled from the previous year totaling
approximately 27,500 accounting for nearly two thirds of all migrants entering Britain
from the Commonwealth.388 For some Cabinet members, including Lord Salisbury, the
leader of the House of Lords and a prominent voice within the Conservative government
during the 19505, these ﬁgures were alarming and justiﬁed cause for action.

In March of 1954 in a memo to Lord Swinton, the Commonwealth Relations
Secretary, Lord Salisbury noted, that the ﬁgures pertaining to Commonwealth migration
“make it clear that we are faced with a problem which. . .may easily come to ﬁll the whole
political horizon.”389 Well aware that the Cabinet had recently charged Swinton along
with Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary with compiling a summary of
Commonwealth deportation procedures applicable to British subjects which Britain might
be able to draw from to formulate a domestic deportation policy that would most likely
apply to criminals, vagrants, and other “undesirable British subjects”,390 Salisbury
expressed his dissatisfaction with the notion that deportation would severely curb

Commonwealth migration, maintaining that only “far reaching action” was necessary to

 

387 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I939, 51.
3“ Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 13. See Appendix.
3” PRO DO 35/5216 Letter From Lord Salisbury to Lord Swinton dated 20 March 1954.

39° PRO CAB 128/27/1 Memo, “Coloured Workers: Cabinet Conclusions” dated 3 February 1954.

225

accomplish this goal. In explaining the problems prompting and associated with
escalating Commonwealth migration, Salisbury reasoned,
We might well be faced with very much the same type of appalling issue that is
now causing such great difficulties for the United States. The main cause of this
sudden increase of the inﬂow of Blacks is of course the Welfare State. So long as
the antiquated rule obtains that any British subject can come into this Country
without any limitation at all, these people will pour in to take advantage of our
social services and other amenities, and we shall have no protection at all.“
Referencing the widely supported Cabinet suggestion to adopt deportation legislation
akin to those used by other Commonwealth governments Salisbury conceded, “It is true
that under your proposed Bill we can get rid of the worst characters,” but contended, “It
is for me not merely a question of whether criminal negroes should be allowed in or not;
it is a question whether great quantities of negroes, criminal or not, should be allowed to
come in.”392
Although Lord Salisbury represented one of the most outspoken proponents of
restrictions during the early 19505, it is important to point out how his comments
demonstrate the speciﬁcity of Government concerns related to the dilemmas associated
with Commonwealth migration. For Lord Salisbury, and presumably other supporters of
various forms of Commonwealth migration controls, at a moment when Caribbean
migrants comprised the majority of Britain’s expanding non-white Commonwealth
migrant community, the problem of Commonwealth migration was inherently tied to the
problem of growing populations of African descent in Britain. Not only did the problem

of black migration require that a majority white British society integrate darker

complexioned people of Aﬁican descent, but to be sure, the racial imagery associated

 

39' PRO DO 35/5216 Letter From Lord Salisbury to Lord Swinton 20 March 1954.

392 PRO DO 35/5216 Letter From Lord Salisbury to Lord Swinton 20 March 1954.

226

with the phenotypical markers of blackness in postwar Britain, prescribed that
mainstream society incorporate a particular type of stigmatized racial outsiders whose
presence would lead to interracial tensions, serve as a drain on public resources and pose
a general threat to the life of society. Although Cabinet members consistently referenced
their inability to measure the broader public’s concerns about the problems of black
migration, the conclusions and assumptions about the social implications of black
migration articulated by Lord Salisbury went well beyond the conﬁnes of Whitehall.

In a pamphlet issued by the Conservative Commonwealth Association of
Liverpool titled, The Problem of Colonial Immigrants characterizing the conditions
associated with black settlement in the area, members of the organization explained,

Liverpool is admittedly one of the chief centres of coloured settlement and a new

Harlem is being created in a decayed residential quarter of the city, where rooms

in large and dilapidated houses are sub let at high rentals to coloured immigrants

who exist in conditions of the utmost squalor. Vice and crime are rampant and
social responsibilities are largely ignored. Hundreds of children of negroid or
mixed parentage eventually ﬁnd their way to the various homes to be maintained
by the corporation, to be reared to unhappy maturity at great public expense.

Large numbers of the adults are in receipt of unemployment beneﬁt or National

Assistance and many are engaged in the drug trafﬁc or supplement their incomes

by running illicit drinking dens or prostitution.393
Referencing ‘Harlem,’ a major black enclave in the United States, and in particular, a hub
of Caribbean settlement, to describe black communities in Liverpool would no doubt
conjure images of race in America, which during the postwar period would have
corresponded with a history of racial tension and violence prominently on display as the
Civil Rights Movement gained international currency. In doing so, similar to Lord

Salisbury, the organization indirectly asserted the idea that the growth of black

communities alone, rather than any sort of comparable degrees of racial prejudice or

 

393 Quoted in Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, “The 1951-55 Conservative Government and the
Racialization of Black Immigration,” 62-63; See also Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 63.

227

structures of racial discrimination might lead to the types of interracial conﬂicts and
hostilities associated with American society. To be sure, however, the characterization of
the problem of black migration provided by the Conservative Commonwealth
Association appropriated and reproduced an assortment of racial imagery consistent with
the perceived socio-economic consequences of increasing black migration and in the
process, adapted and reconﬁgured many of the historic stigmas of blackness present in
the empire to construct black migrants as debased social degenerates contributing little if
anything of value to society.

Examining a host of social texts created by both white and West Indian authors
including contemporary sociological studies of West Indian migrants and literature,
Marcus Collins has demonstrated that throughout the early postwar period, images of
unskilled, unemployed, shiftless and economically dependent West Indian migrant
permeated British society. Likewise, both Collins and Wendy Webster have noted the
ways in which perceptions of an overwhelming male-dominated black migrant population
during the 19505 included representations of unstable and defective black families
damaged by absentee and or irresponsible black fathers. In addition to pointing out how
ideas about black masculinity produced gendered constructions of both the stigmas of
blackness and the problem of black migration, Collins, in particular is mindful of the
ways in which these images, bred in the colonial context translated into the very premises
used to justify discriminatory attitudes, practices and build the case for anti-migrant

legislation.394

 

39‘ Marcus Collins, “Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain,” 391-418;
Wendy Webster “ ‘There’ll Always Be an England’: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration,
1948-1968” Journal of British Studies (October, 2001): 560-2, 573-574. It is important to note that Collins
pays particular attention to the ways in which negative images of black migrants produced by West Indians

228

Considering Collins’s argument is useful in unraveling the process by which a

British society that staked its own national identity on its propensity towards racial
liberalism and ‘tolerance’ could allow landlords and employers to openly practice racial
discrimination and policy makers to consider legislation designed to exclude black
migrants—and to be sure, black British citizens—from settling in Britain. As the
pamphlet issued by the Conservative Commonwealth Association suggests, it was not
just that migrants were a racial ‘other’, but the stereotypes associated with their racial
‘otherness’ made it feasible to think of them as a socio-economic threat to the sustenance
of metropolitan values, culture and society. Collins emphasizes the ways in which ideas
about black people, and black men in particular, present in postwar Britain were
manufactured by both actual and ideological colonial encounters.395

Little more than a decade before mass black migration from the Caribbean, the
investigations of the Moyne Commission which eventually lead to the Colonial Welfare
and Development Act of 1940 had highlighted the deﬁciencies of Caribbean economies,
labor markets and social welfare infrastructures. Convened in large part in response to
working class protests occurring throughout the Caribbean islands in the 19305 and
eventually culminating in the infamous Jamaican labor rebellion of 193 8, the Moyne
Commission served as an ofﬁcial dispatch of the imperial government charged with

surveying the conditions faced by Caribbean communities and making recommendations

for new colonial policy. At the same time that the Commission provided a window into

 

themselves were oftentimes created in the process by which some West Indian men attempted to assert
their own claims to respectable manhood by disassociating themselves from the very typecasts of West
Indian men existing in the broader society. Collins also highlights the work of black sociologists including
Stuart Hall who suggested that one of the effects of a lack of suitable skilled labor opportunities was the
rise of West Indian “hustlers” essentially sought autonomy and self-respect outside of the socially
acceptable conﬁnes of a labor market that devalued black labor.

39’ Marcus Collins, “Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain,” 391-418

229

the inadequacies of the colonial government, it Simultaneously showcased a socially and
economically depraved majority black Caribbean colonial populace plagued by high rates
of unemployment, low wages, poor educational systems and inadequate health care.396 It
is reasonable to suggest that the recent images of the colonies— and essentially colonial
people— represented in the Moyne Commission reports, set against a long memory of
white British rule and perceived colonial dependence (as opposed to metropolitan-
colonial interdependence) might have easily inﬂuenced the ways in which white
metropolitan Britons encountered black colonial Britons upon their arrival in Britain in
signiﬁcant numbers in the postwar period.

By January of 1955, the Cabinet had requested that the Home Ofﬁce and the
Colonial Ofﬁce begin preparing a draﬁ bill to regulate Commonwealth migration. A
memo summarizing a Cabinet meeting held on 13 January 1955 concerning ‘colonial
immigrants’ noted,

There was general support for the view that the social consequences of the

increasing ﬂow of West Indian immigrants into this country were sufﬁciently

serious to compel the Government to take such action as was open to them, or at
least to make their attitude on the matter clear to the public.397
The memo added that “the form of the proposed legislation should be kept as general as

possible” to avoid “means that might be found in practice to allow the movement of

British subjects between the United Kingdom and independent Commonwealth countries

 

396 For more on the Moyne Commission see “West India Royal Commission Report,” Cmd. 6607,
Parliamentary Papers, 1945; 0. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean,
I 934-1939 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995).

397 PRO CAB 128/28 Memo, “Colonial Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions,” 13 January 1955. Emphasis
added.

230

to continue without hindrance.”398 In April of 1955, the retirement of Prime Minister
Winston Churchill— who had consistently supported controlling black migration during
the early 19505 and had insisted in an interview taken in 1954 that immigration was “the
most important subject facing this country”—followed by general elections one month
later slowed the pace of government action pertaining to Commonwealth migration, but
did not change its course. By June of 1955, the Cabinet had appointed an
Interdepartmental Working Party to draft a deﬁnitive statement “on the growing inﬂux
into the United Kingdom of coloured worker from other Commonwealth countries and of
the social and economic problems to which this was giving rise.” The Cabinet agreed
that that the central purpose of the report was “to ensure that the public throughout the
country were made aware of the nature and extent of the problem” of black migration and
essentially provide a platform to launch a public campaign to justify the case for
migration controls.399

Although it is clear that in June of 1955 the consensus of the Cabinet ministers
favored the move towards investigating the means by which an overwhehningly black
colonial Commonwealth migration might be regulated, when the Cabinet convened in
November of 1955 to consider a “draft bill to restrict colonial immigration,” in light of
“the rapid increase in immigration from the West Indies,” instead of moving forward,
ofﬁcials elected to table the issue. Under the provisions of the bill, all Commonwealth
migrants would be required to provide immigration ofﬁcers with evidence that they had

arranged “authorized employment” and “satisfactory housing” in Britain before being

 

”8 PRO CAB 128/28 Memo, “Colonial Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions,” 13 January 1955. Emphasis
added.

399 PRO CAB 128/29 Memo, “Colonial Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions on a Committee of Inquiry into
Colonial Immigrants,” 14 June 1955

231

admitted. 400 A constellation of factors help to explain why Cabinet ministers, who had
been intent on exploring various options for controlling black migration and building a
publicly acceptable case for legislation opted not to move forward with the bill at the end
of1955.

First, the Interdepartmental Working Party’s report on the problems associated
with black migration left much to be desired in terms of providing a smoking gun to
galvanize public support in favor of migration controls. The Working Party report noted
that despite the sharp increases in black migration between 1953 and 1955,
unemployment among migrants did not present a serious concern as most migrants had
secured employment. Citing information gleaned from records of the National
Assistance Board and the National Health Services, migration had not proven to yield an
excessive strain on public resources nor had it produced evidence of severe racial
tensions. The only signiﬁcant social problem which the report could only indirectly
attribute to migration was overcrowding in impoverished urban areas, which was also
inherently tied to a broader postwar housing shortage. In terms of casting black
migration as a social problem that required immediate attention, the most that the
Working Party’s report offered were speculations about the potential future outcomes of
current migration patterns including the possibilities of black urban enclaves, economic

401

distress and racial conﬂict. Well aware that while black migration did generate some

”402

public concern, but “had not yet aroused general public anxiety, without an

 

40° PRO CAB 128/29 Memo, “Colonial Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions on a Draft Bill to Restrict
Colonial Immigration,” 3 November 1955.

‘°‘ Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 78-79.
‘02 PRO CAB 128/29 “Colonial Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions on a Draft Bill to Restrict Colonial
Immigration,” 3 November 1955

232

authoritative statement characterizing the problems of black migration as exigent
circumstances, or a means of measuring the pulse of the public on the subject of
migration control, there was essentially no way to account for any potential public
backlash.403

Another important factor explaining why ofﬁcials shelved the 1955 bill centered
on the inability of Cabinet ministers to ﬁnd consensus about the form that the controls
should take. Some of the lingering questions still up for debate related to whether or not
the bill would apply speciﬁcally to colonial migrants (who were the real targets of
controls) or all migrants from Commonwealth countries. Additionally, members also
pondered how controls regulating Commonwealth migration might affect citizens of the
Irish Republic, who had an ambiguous relationship to Commonwealth, yet had a historic
pattern of migration to Britain and provided a valued labor resource for the British
economy.404 Some members challenged whether or not the bill should regulate entrance
based on a migrants housing or employment status or a combination of both. To be sure,
however, at the heart of discussions concerning the ﬁ'amework for exercising controls
remained the issue of how to construct a policy that would align with the intent of
curbing black migration, yet appear to be race neutral.

Doubtful that the draft bill would effectively serve the goal of controlling West
Indian migration, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary noted that legislation

9“

limited to colonial ‘immigrants , would certainly be criticised as racial discrimination,”

 

‘03 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I939, 79-80; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 142, 145.

‘04 PRO CAB 128/29 “Colonial Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions on a Draft Bill to Restrict Colonial
Immigration,” 3 November 1955. The memo noted that since 1945, an estimated 750,000 Irish had
migrated to Britain and approximately 60,000 had applied for National Insurance between the middle of
1954 and 1955.

233

as it would largely apply to a migration stream that was overwhelmingly non-white. In
addition, he suggested that any measure speciﬁcally targeting colonial migrants, the
majority of whom hailed from the Caribbean “would have a particularly unfortunate
effect” on Britain’s relationship to colonial governments in that region and “prejudice the
future association of the proposed West Indian Federation with the Commonwealth.”405
Randall Hansen has noted that Lennox-Boyd’s stance on the issue ﬁt within a longer
tradition of resistance to migration controls in the early 19505 held by Commonwealth
Relations ministers and Colonial Ofﬁce officials, including his predecessor Oliver
Lyttleton. This cadre of Cabinet ministers whose major responsibilities included serving
as the chief liaisons between the British Government and colonial and dominion
governments envisioned that regulations applying solely to colonials might damage
Commonwealth relations and essentially Britain’s position as the embodiment of
Commonwealth ideals of multiracial egalitarianism.

While Hansen references these “anti-restrictionist” positions to counter the notion
of a monolithic ofﬁcial mind on the subject of Commonwealth migration, he is somewhat
dismissive in clearly establishing the extent to which these policy makers’ reservations
were guided by anti-racist principles or simply a desire to avoid introducing legislations
that would be perceived as racially discriminatory. Disentangling the two is essential to
understanding why the regulation of black migration was merely obstructed during the
19505, rather than abandoned. The 1955 Conservative government maintained an
ideological and political commitment to sustaining and fortifying the bonds of
Commonwealth as a means of preserving, restoring and recasting Britain’s national

prestige and imperial heritage in response to an overall postwar moment of imperial

 

”5 Ibid.

234

decline. Moreover, remaining in a position to entice newly independent non-white
nations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean to maintain close ties to the Commonwealth
during and after the political process of decolonization became integral to Britain’s
international image not only as the head of a multiracial Commonwealth but also— in the
midst of burgeoning Cold War rivalries—as an emblem of the cause of Western
democracy.

The historic 1955 Bandung Conference, held just months before Cabinet members
considered the ramiﬁcations of the draft ‘immigration’ bill, sent a powerful message to
both East and West about the potentialities of Third World Afro-Asian alliances and
served as reminder to Britain and its Western allies of the importance of images of anti-
racism in building spheres of inﬂuence for Western democracy and deﬂecting
Communist encroachment. Likewise, in an international political climate sensitive to
questions of race, rights and democracy, particularly as they pertained to issues of
historic white imperial rule over majority non-white colonial populations and blatantly
discriminatory policies such as those practice by South Aﬁica’s apartheid regime, even
the appearance of a racially discriminatory policy—and particularly one that targeted a
speciﬁc non-white segment of a civic community—would draw serious international
scrutiny and no doubt affect Britain’s overseas relationships both within the
Commonwealth and beyond.

The reﬂections of Lord Swinton on the subject of ‘immigration’ legislation,
captured in a memo to prominent migration control advocate and fellow Cabinet member,
Lord Salisbury in 1954 are especially revealing. Swinton reasoned,

If we legislate on immigration, though we can draft it in non-discriminatory
terms, we cannot conceal the obvious fact that the object is to keep out coloured

235

people. Unless there is really a strong case for this, it would surely be an unwise
moment to raise the issue when we are preachirlgg and trying to practise,
partnership, and the abolition of the colour bar.
Essentially, by late 1955, Cabinet members surmised that indeed it was “an unwise
moment” to pursue legislation for which they could not deﬁnitively justify to both
domestic and international audiences. Controlling Commonwealth migration involved
altering a fundamental relationship that had historically characterized the relationship
between Britain and the Empire/Commonwealth.

During the mid 19505 British officials remained wedded to keeping these
relationships intact even as they underwent signiﬁcant changes in the midst of the move
towards decolonization. Because ofﬁcials could not ﬁnd consensus about the form that
restrictions should take it, as they remained committed to avoiding the public
consideration of a bill that could be easily interpreted as racist and or institutionalized
race-based exclusion, to circumvent the possible domestic and international consequences
including a widespread public backlash, discord among Commonwealth governments and
weakened international credibility on pressing international issues laced with racial
undertones such as apartheid and Cold War alliances, ofﬁcials decided to wait. Timing
was everything. The Cabinet resigned to postpone legislation in 1955, but migration
controls did not disappear from their agenda.

By the end of November, Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, had appointed
another interdepartmental special committee to continue to investigate “the problems
”407

which would have to be solved if we decided to introduce [immigration] legislation.

By l961when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced intentions to proceed with

 

‘06 PRO DO 35/5216 Letter from Lord Swinton to Lord Salisbury I 5 March 1954.

”7 PRO CAB 129/78 Memo, “Colonial Immigrants” by Anthony Eden 23 November 1955.

236

legislation to control Commonwealth ‘immigration’ the landscape had changed. New
developments in the colonies and shifting international commitments signiﬁcantly altered
the context in which migration restriction would be received domestically and
internationally. Most importantly, due to the incidents of racial violence during the ﬁnal
weeks of summer occurring between black and white residents in Nottingham and
Notting Hill, the issue of migration had clearly made the transition from being the subject
of private discussions among government officials to being ﬁrmly entrenched topic
which distinctly resonated in the public consciousness.

Although news of ‘race riots’ in 1958 might have provided an opportune time to
revisit and actively pursue migration controls, the opposite occurred. As noted in an
earlier chapter, the subject of ‘immigration’ became an integral component of public
debates among British observers about the social meaning of racial conﬂict in postwar
Britain, its causes and potential remedies to prevent ﬁlture similar outbreaks. In the
aftermath of the violence, ‘immigration’ became a racialized subject that garnered great
public interest and likewise was associated speciﬁcally with the growth of black, majority
West Indian, communities in urban areas. A Gallup poll conducted in the early weeks
after the violence subsided in Notting Hill reported that while 92% of people had
knowledge of the violence, only 9% attributed the violence to black residents, yet nearly
80% favored ‘immigration’ controls.408 Even though the poll suggests that many British
observers did not directly place blame for the eruption of violence on black residents of
Nottingham and Notting Hill, there seems to be some correlation between the news of

‘race riots’ and public support for the idea of migration restrictions.

 

40” Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 40.

237

In 1955, there had been no singular event or cohesive narrative available for
policy makers to draw upon to measure or shape the broader society’s disposition
towards restricting migration, but the ‘riots’ created a moment when this changed.
Whereas Lord Salisbury could only speculate that the increase in Britain’s black
population and essentially the growth of multiracial communities in Britain might
contribute to large-scale social unrest in the early 19505, the racial violence of 1958 gave
his arguments a new degree of credibility which extended beyond an elite inner circle of
government ofﬁcials and resonated among the wider British public. After the racial
conﬂict, Lord Salisbury was in a position to openly and publicly state his views about the
reasons for and purpose of migration controls. Urging that the ‘race riots’ occasioned
legislation to control black migration, in an editorial appearing in the London Times
Salisbury explained that he was, “extremely apprehensive of the results economic and
social, for Europeans and Africans alike, that are likely to ﬂow from an unrestricted
immigration of men and women of [the] Aﬁican race into Britain.”409

At the same time that news of ‘race riots’ gave public credence to the idea that
racial conﬂict and social unrest was a likely consequence of ‘immigration,’ as several
scholars have observed, increased public support for controls in the aftermath of racial
conﬂict actually had the inverse effect on the government’s ability to act. Historians
have noted that government discussions concerning controls after the violence
demonstrated a sense of wariness on the part of many ofﬁcials to introduce legislation

that might easily be viewed by domestic and overseas audiences as a reaction to racial

 

‘09 Lord Salisbury, “Inter-Racial Tensions: Need to Control Immigration” London Times 2 September
1958.

238

extremism.“0 In addition to restraining British officials from introducing policy in light
of calls to “Keep Britain White”, it is also important to note the ways in which the public
racialization of the problem of Commonwealth ‘immigration’ itself became conﬂated
with the presence of black migrants from the Caribbean in much the same manner that it
had among Cabinet members in the late 19405 and early 19505. As Kathleen Paul has
noted, the violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill transformed ‘immigrant’ into a code
word for ‘coloured.’411

Because West Indians were numerically the largest community of ‘coloured
immigrants’ and generally cited as either perpetrators and or victims in areas where
episodes of racial violence erupted in 195 8, it is reasonable to suggest that in lieu of the
violence they became the archetypical representation of the problem of ‘immigration’ and
therefore would likely be viewed as the potential targets for any form of migration
control that might be considered in the aftermath of the violence. Paradoxically, just as
the racial character of Commonwealth ‘immigration’—and in particular black migration
from the Caribbean— provided impetus for ofﬁcials to consider controlling the entrance
of British citizens, in 195 8, the public appropriation of this same rationale became a
deterrent for moving forward with legislation.

In addition to the steering away from introducing controls in the aftermath of the
news of ‘race riots’ that might appear as a capitulation to racist behaviors, attitudes or
propaganda despite increasing public support for ‘immigration’ restrictions, another very

practical reason for avoiding legislation in the late 19505 involved the overall decline in

 

4'0 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 38-41; Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 193 9, 98-
102.

4” Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 158.

239

migration from the Commonwealth, including the Caribbean. In 1956, Commonwealth
migration peaked for the decade at 46,800, with roughly 29,800 or 64% of migrants
arriving from the Caribbean. Whereas in previous years, Commonwealth migration had
shown steady increases, between 1956 and 1959, the numbers began to show signiﬁcant
decreases. By 1959, the total number of Commonwealth migrants entering Britain was
estimated at 21,600, less than half of the 1956 ﬁgure including 16,400 migrants from the
Caribbean. This suggested to some that the trends of the early 19505 might be
reversing.412
As noted earlier in 1955, after Cabinet agreed to shelve plans for introducing a

draft bill to restrict Commonwealth migration, Prime Minister Anthony Eden
commissioned a Working Party to continue to report to Cabinet ministers about the social
and economic impact of black migration. Between 1959 and 1961 this Working Party
produced a report on “coloured immigration” every four to six months with the implicit
purpose of forging a justiﬁable case for regulating black migration. In general, all of the
reports contained the same topical references to migration statistics, migrant relations
with the indigenous white population; crime; housing; employment/unemployment;
health; welfare arrangements available for migrants and speculations about future
prospects based on contemporary migration trends.413

In February of 1961 when Tory M.P. Cyril Osborne stood before Parliament and
introduced a motion to urging the Government “to take powers to control immigration

into the United Kingdom from all Commonwealth countries irrespective of race, colour

or creed,” he cited “the enormous increase in immigration” as cause for action. Alluding

 

"2 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 13. See also appendix.

“3 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I 93 9, 109.

240

to many of the issues under investigation by the Working Party, Osborne moved that
Parliament seek legislation that would require every ‘immigrant’ to provide proof of “a
guaranteed job; adequate housing, accommodation; a clean bill of heath; a clear criminal
record; and a cash deposit for two years sufﬁcient to pay their return fare is they became
a charge on public funds.” 4'4 In response to Osborne’s motion, the Labour, M.P. for
Paddington North sought an amendment to the motion that would reject “any proposal
which implies that the social and economic problems of this country are caused or
aggravated by immigrants” suggesting that any “social and economic distress in
overcrowded areas can be dealt with by the existing powers of central and local
government.415 In the course of the debate over the motions several members weighed in.
Speaking as a representative of the Cabinet, David Renton, Under-Secretary for
the Home Ofﬁce noted that the Government had been “closely watching” ‘immigration.’
Renton highlighted the relatively higher rates of unemployment among “the West Indian
labour force” as compared to the general population and the small number who lived off
“immoral earnings” and proﬁted from the trafﬁcking of Indian hemp, yet he concluded
that “immigration did not create new social problems, but increased existing ones.”
Conservative M.P. Hugh Lucas-Tooth and a fellow Labour colleague expressed that since
‘immigration’ represented a “Commonwealth problem,” the issue should be considered at
the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting before any action was taken. Amid cheers
from some Parliament members, Conservative M.P. Nigel Fisher, who was a leading

personality in the anti-colonial movement in Britain, insisted that despite Osborne’s

 

4” “Difﬁculties In Control of Immigration,” London Times 18 February 1961. Report of House of
Commons debate.

"5 Ibid.

241

pledge to explore migration controls that did not appeal to race, his motion to restrict
migration was speciﬁcally “aimed at restricting coloured immigration from the West
Indies,” where it was “strongly resented.” No doubt considering the links between
‘immigration’ and race relations ﬁrmly implanted in the public consciousness since the
Nottingham and Notting Hill violence of 1958, Fisher maintained that Osborne’s
proposal “constituted a deliberate unimaginative, and defeatist evasion of the whole
problem of race relations” which he considered, “one of the greatest problems of the
second half of the century.”416
Fisher’s comments most directly pointed to the obvious racial implications
buttressing any discussions of ‘immigration’ control; however, most of the Parliament
members who commented on the subject expressed hesitancy about accepting a proposal
to legislate on the issue because there seemed to be no exigent circumstances resulting
from migration that would compel Government to depart from tradition without further
examination of the problem and the potential effects that restrictions might have on
Commonwealth and international relations. In the midst of the debate, Osborne,
eventually withdrew his motion before a formal vote was taken. Although the reactions
of government ofﬁcials and Parliament members to Osborne’s motion to implement
Commonwealth ‘immigration’ controls in February of 1961 might suggest that
Government was well-aware of the signiﬁcant increase in non-white Commonwealth
migration, but was not yet receptive to the idea of introducing controls, by the close of

the year the full Cabinet had agreed upon a draft proposal to regulate ‘immigration’ and

armounced their intention to legislate during the following session of Parliament.

 

"6 Ibid.

242

Armed with a new report from the Working Party examining ‘coloured
immigration’ which included projections from the Government Actuary estimating that at
the current rate of migration, in twenty years the number of ‘coloured British subjects’
residing in Britain could rise to 1.5 million, on the day before Cyril Osborne presented
his motion in the House of Commons, Cabinet ministers had agreed that the Government
spokesperson—who happened to be Home Office Under-Secretary, David Renton—
“should temporise” during the Parliamentary debate on the motion in order to delay any
vote on ‘immigration’ Iegislation.’ To be sure, while Cabinet ofﬁcials had not supported
the idea of presenting a formal position in Parliament about their intentions concerning
‘immigration’, they did, however, determine that the Lord Chancellor should arrange for
a Commonwealth Migrants Committee to consider the form that legislation controlling
Commonwealth ‘immigration’ should take and report back to the Cabinet “in due
course.”“7

When Cabinet ministers convened three months later on 30 May 1961, the Lord
Chancellor reported “a startling increase in the number of coloured immigrants,” since
the beginning of 1961 and projected an armual total that might reach 200,000, thus
accelerating a rate of migration that might yield a non-white population of nearly two
million in ﬁfteen years. Given the steady increases in migration from majority non-white

Commonwealth areas, which was still dominated by West Indians, with greater arrivals

from India and Pakistan than in previous years, the Lord Chancellor stated that the

 

“7 PRO LAB l3/ I 528 Working Party Report on the Social and Economic Problems Arising From the
Growing Inﬂux Into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers From Other Commonwealth Countries,
dated January, 1961; PRO CAB 128/35/1 Possible Legislation on Commonwealth Immigrants: Cabinet
Conclusions dated 16 February 1961. The Cabinet had initially agreed to establish the Commonwealth
Migrants Committee in November of 1960. The Committee was to be chaired by the Lord Chancellor and
included the Home Secretary, the Commonwealth Relations Secretary, Colonial Secretary, Minister of
Housing, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Minister of Health and the Attorney General. See also
PRO LAB 13/ 1528 Norman Brook, Memo, “Commonwealth Migrants” 30 November 1960.

243

Committee on Commonwealth Migrants had concluded that “this movement was
reaching a stage at which the Government would be obliged to introduce legislation.”
The committee recommended that employment stipulations presented the best mediums
for exercising controls and suggested a form of regulation that would allow skilled
workers and ‘immigrants coming to speciﬁed employment for which no resident labour
was available,” to continue to enter freely, but would require all others to obtain a work
permit from the Ministry of Labour as a condition of entry.418

In response to the Lord Chancellor’s committee’s suggestions Ian Macleod, the
Colonial Secretary, expressed a general concern about the timing of any announcement
referencing the Govemment’s intention to introduce legislation to control
Commonwealth migration. Indicating no opposition to consideration of controls intended
to limit black migration, Macleod only objected to any immediate action that would
publicize the Govemment’s interests in pursuing restrictions insisting that “any early
announcement of a decision to legislate. . .would prejudice the formation of the [West
Indies] Federation.” Formally established in January of 1958, in accordance with the
provisions of the British Caribbean Federation Act of 1956, the West Indies Federation,
was a centralized self-goveming political unit comprised of representatives of most of the
British Caribbean colonies through which the British Government intended to negotiate

the transition towards full independence for a single West Indian nation-state.“9 To be

 

“8 PRO CAB 128/35/1 Memo, Possible Legislation on Commonwealth Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions
dated 30 May 1961.

“9 The territories which comprised the West Indies Federation included Antigua, Barbuda, Barbados,
Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and
Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago. For more on the West Indies Federation see Cary Fraser, Ambivalent
Anti-Colonialism: The United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940-I964 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press); David Lowenthal, ed. The West Indies Federation: Perspectives of a New Nation

244

sure, the West Indies Federation movement constituted a broader agenda of British
decolonization during the late 19505 and 19605 which by May 1961 had culminated in
successful independence movements in Sudan (1956), Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960) and
Sierra Leone (April, 1961).

Macleod’s concerns about the potential effects of announcing legislation that
would undoubtedly have its greatest impact in the West Indies, the homeland of the
overwhelming majority of Commonwealth migrants, were especially relevant given that
the West Indies Constitutional Conference was to begin on the following day in London.
During the course of the conference, designed to assemble British and West Indian
ofﬁcials to discuss the incentives and potential setbacks facing a federated independent
West Indian nation-state, Grantley Adams, Federal Prime Minister, drew clear links
between the economic solvency of a future an independent West Indian nation-state and
the ability for West Indian migrants to continue to exercise their historic right to migrate
to Britain. Adams contended,

At the moment of independence we need a period of time in which to deal with

the grave responsibilities of nationhood without having to suffer the indignity of

having a door that has traditionally and generously been kept open now slammed
in our faces. Our history has been too closely intertwined to make us think that

Britain would wish to mar the moment of rejoicing with the ill tidings that a

curtain is to be drawn between the peoples of our countries. We do not think

migration is the solution of our economic difﬁculties, but we want at least time to
show that the other remedies which we are preparing can make our people want to

stay at home because home is able to give them opportunities which they now
seek here [Britain] .420

 

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); Elisabeth Wallace, The British Caribbean: From the Decline
of Colonialism to the End of Federation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

’20 “W. Indies Appeal For Britain to Keep Door Open,” London Times I June 1961. See also “No Time To
Curb Immigration,” West Indian Gazette June, 1961.

245

Adams’s comments highlighted the extent to which migration to Britain provided much-
needed economic relief for Caribbean colonies including Jamaica by serving as an
additional employment market for West Indian workers and a source of indirect monetary
subsidies for struggling Caribbean economies in the form of remittances which in 1960
had totaled nearly 5.5 million pounds in 1961.421 Adarns’s opinion on the importance of
migration to the survival of an independent West Indian state reiterated the position that
West Indian ofﬁcials had outlined in recent talks with British Prime Minister, Harold
Macmillan during his tour of the Caribbean in March of 1961 and coincided with the
reluctance of governments including Jamaica, to introduce firm administrative controls to
limit emigration even in the wake of the highly publicized violence in 1958.422
Considering the context and the tenor of Adams’s comments on the topic migration, Ian
MacCleod, the Colonial Secretary and chief negotiator for the imperial government in the
transition to independence in the West Indies, most certainly understood that for West

Indian ofﬁcials, any overture that might negatively affect the current legal structure of

West Indian migration to Britain was not merely an unwarranted barrier to economic

 

42' Claude D. Ramsey, ed. “London Newsletter: Organ of the Standing Conference of Organisations
Concerned With West Indians in Britain,” dated February, 1962 Edric and Pearl Connor Papers, Box 4,
Folder 5 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, NY. This ﬁgure is an estimate of
“postal remittances.” In an article appearing in the West Indian Gazette, prominent West Indian political
leader David Pitt noted that the annual ﬁgures for remittances were nearly as much as the total amount of
colonial development and welfare funding given to the West Indies by Britain during the 19505.
Considering this Pitt concluded that migrants “are therefore making a substantial contribution to bridging
the gap between the poverty of the Wet Indies and the comparative wealth of Britain.” See “David Pitt
Says: W.I. Contribution Aids Britain,” West Indian Gazette October 1961.

422 “West Indians Oppose Barriers to British Immigration,” London Times 27 March 1961. In the aftermath
of the ‘race riots’, British ofﬁcials met with West Indian ofﬁcials who came to Britain to survey the
situation including Norman Manley of Jamaica and West Indies Deputy Premier Carl La Corbiniere,
requesting that they support measures of discourage emigration. Although the West Indies Federation
Government refused to implement administrative controls that would severely curb emigration, they did
agree to continue to publicize unemployment among West Indians in Britain and the difﬁculties associated
with securing housing. A few weeks after the violence, the Colonial Ofﬁce urged West Indian governors to
seek to regulate the pace that passports were being issued by considering whether or not applicants had
“reasonably conﬁdent prospects of a job and of suitable accommodation” in Britain. See also PRO CO
1032/ I96 Circular to West Indian Governors and Lord Hailes dated 24 September 1958.

246

opportunities for West Indian workers, but more importantly, it was also viewed as a
potential act of sabotage to the economic viability of a future independent West Indian
nation-state.

Noting Macleod’s well-taken position about the timing of any announcement
concerning even the possibility that Government might introduce legislation to control
Commonwealth migration, the Cabinet also wanted the Commonwealth Migrants
Committee to further examine several issues germane to the task of implementing the
type of controls suggested in their proposal. Cabinet ministers had raised a number of
questions about the nature of employment-based controls. What speciﬁc method(s)
would be used to identify those Commonwealth migrants whose employment
qualiﬁcations did not subject them to restrictions? How would the selection of
“unskilled” ‘immigrants’ for work permits through the Ministry of Labour proceed?
How would controls affect those migrating from the Irish Republic? Would legislation
address the possibilities for deportation?

In addition to these questions, Cabinet members also discussed the need to
reconcile the form of any new migration policy with any potential new commitments
regarding continental labor migration that might arise in connection with Britain’s move
towards integration in the European Economic Community.423 AS Ian Spencer has noted,
the 1956 Suez crisis severely diminished Britain’s fading imperial position and thus
marked a critical turning point towards the prospects of forging greater economic
alliances with European powers. In 1960, the Cabinet voted to develop closer association

with the European Economic Community and by August of 1961 had submitted a formal

 

‘23 PRO CAB 128/35/2 Memo, “Possible Legislation on Commonwealth Immigrants: Cabinet
Conclusions” 30 May 1961.

247

424 With little more than a proposed framework and major

application for membership.
structural issues to account for concerning the implementation of legislation to control
migration, the Cabinet instructed the Commonwealth Migrants Committee to continue to
investigate “the practicability” restrictions.425 By May of 1961, with steadily rising rates
of migration, it was clearly no longer a matter of deciding if restrictions were warranted,
but rather it was an issue of timing exactly when the Government might be in the best
position to legislate. The investigative committee needed time to resolve the anticipated
dilemmas concerning how controls might be carried out. Moreover, government officials
wanted to ﬁnd an optimal moment to announce their intentions to introduce legislation
that would certainly be viewed by West Indians as a threat to their economic security,
both as individual workers and as a collective independent nation.

On 11 October 1961, Home Secretary, R.A. Butler presented a motion to
introduce legislation “to control, but not to stop” Commonwealth ‘immigration’ to Britain
at the Conservative conference of Parliament members. Addressing rank and ﬁle
members of the Conservative caucus in Parliament, Butler estimated that total migration
from the West Indies, India and Pakistan would topple 100,000 and suggested that in lieu
of current trends, the slightest economic downturn may create difﬁcult and possibly
dangerous social conditions which the Government had to seek to circumvent. Appealing
for support of the motion Butler maintained that the employment sector presented “the

only effective way” to control ‘immigration’ and encouraged his colleagues “to think like

a jury whether you are going to support this resolution.” Alluding to the notion that the

 

mSpencer, British Immigration Policy Since I 93 9, 126-127.

’25 PRO CAB 128/35/2 “Possible Legislation on Commonwealth Immigrants: Cabinet Conclusions” 30
May 1961.

248

rising numbers of unprecedented migration from the Commonwealth—which still
represented an overwhelmingly non-white, majority black migration from the Caribbean
colonies—unequivocally made the case for restrictions exigent and compelling, Butler
insisted that while the Government would be “departing from a great tradition. . .we might
be able to work out a system which is humane, unprejudiced, and sensible which might
help to meet economic problems that might be too much for our country, ” and the
motion “overwhelmingly” passed.426

On the previous day, the full Cabinet had agreed that the Government would
introduce legislation to control Commonwealth migration in the next session of
Parliament in accordance with the recommendations of the Commonwealth Migrants
Committee and in consultation with the Working Party examining the socio-economic
impact of “the growing inﬂux. . .of coloured workers” from the Commonwealth. On 26
September 1961, the Working Party had submitted its latest report for Cabinet review. In
it, the Working Party noted that during the month of August 1961, there was “a net
inward movement of coloured people from the Commonwealth” of 15,700 which was the
“highest monthly ﬁgure ever recorded.” Of that total, approximately 7,700 migrated
from the Caribbean, 2,400 from India and 3,000 from Pakistan. The report mentioned
that despite an increasing inﬂux of non-white Commonwealth migration there had been
”427

“no serious racial disorders since 195 8” and “remarkably little unemployment.

Despite their inability to pinpoint any concrete social or economic conditions

 

4‘6 “Early Law to Control Immigration: Jobs Must Be Waiting or Services in Demand,” London Times 12
October 1961

427 PRO CAB 128/35/2 “Commonwealth Immigrants, Recommended Legislation: Cabinet Conclusions”
10 October 1961; PRO LAB 8/2704 Working Party Report on the Social and Economic Problems Arising
From the Growing Inﬂux into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers From Other Commonwealth
Countries 26 September 1961

249

necessitating immediate controls of Commonwealth migration beyond the fact that it had
brought an unparalleled number of non-white British citizens to Britain in steadily
increasing proportions since the late 19405, the Working Party recommended the
adoption of “ﬂexible employment” controls ultimately designed to limit the migration of
people of color and in effect stiﬂe the growth of multiracial communities in Britain.

Under the proposal submitted by the Working Party and later adapted as the
framework for legislation by the Cabinet, a potential migrants’ relationship to the British
labor market determined whether or not he/she would be subject to restrictions. The
proposal outlined three categories of Commonwealth migrants. Category A comprised
those migrants who had a job awaiting them in Britain upon their arrival. Category B
encompassed, “those who have undergone apprenticeship or training or have professional
or educational qualiﬁcations or experience accepted as likely to be useful” in Britain,
while Category C constituted all other migrants and presumably “unskilled” laborers
seeking to enter Britain. According to the Working Party’s proposal, those who fell into
Categories A and B would not be subject to controls and would be freely admitted to
Britain under the same provisions codiﬁed under the British Nationality Act of 1948.
However, those in Category C would be allowed entry on a ﬁrst come, ﬁrst serve basis
within the parameters of a predetermined quota established by the Ministry of Labour. In
addition to creating an instrument to regulate inward movement from the

Commonwealth, the Working Party’s proposal also contained a component that would

250

empower the Home Secretary to deport ‘immigrants’ convicted of offences punishable by
any term of imprisonment.428

While the Working Party’s proposal—which members of the Commonwealth
Migrants Committee actually presented to the full Cabinet— appeared race-neutral in that
it would apply universally to all Commonwealth migrants regardless of race or country of
origin, in practice Government ofﬁcials seemed to be convinced that it might serve the
dual purpose of limiting non-white migration and simultaneously preserving an open
door policy for more desirable migrants moving from majority non-white regions of the
Old Commonwealth. During Cabinet discussions Butler maintained that, “the bill itself
applied to all Commonwealth citizens irrespective of colour,” however, “it would be
evident in its operation that the control was being applied in practice only to coloured
people.”429 It is quite likely that Butler was familiar with the conclusions of an earlier
Working Party report that had anticipated that higher proportions of migrants from
majority white regions in the Old Commonwealth would either be skilled laborers or
have prearranged employment before their arrival, thus excluding them from restrictions.
Keeping this in mind, members of the Working Party surmised that employment-based
controls would offer the most viable option to because they could be applied “equally to

all parts of the Commonwealth, without distinction on grounds of race and colour,” yet

 

425 PRO LAB 8/2704 Working Party Report on the Social and Economic Problems Arising From the
Growing Inﬂux into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers From Other Commonwealth Countries 26
September I 96 l

429 PRO CAB 128/35/2 “Commonwealth Immigrants, Recommended Legislation: Cabinet Conclusions”
10 October 1961

251

“in practice. . . [they] would interfere to the minimum extent with the entry of persons
from the ‘old’ Commonwealth countries.”430
Voices of Dissent and the Construction of Ofﬁcial Race Policy

The period between Home Secretary R.A. Butler’s announcement of the
Government’s intentions to implement an ofﬁcial policy regulating Commonwealth
migration in October of 1961 and the ﬁnal vote on the Commonwealth hnmigration Act
of 1962 in Parliament represents an interesting moment to examine the range of voices
that must be considered in understanding the relationship between the politics of race,
migration and British citizenship. Whereas much of the scholarly literature on this
subject tends to conﬂate the point at which the British Government publicly expressed
their intentions to legislate Commonwealth migration and the passage of the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 as a single deﬁnitive political moment shaping
the history of race, migration and citizenship in postwar Britain, in order to fully
comprehend the process in which the act came to represent an ofﬁcial statement on race
and race relations in Britain, it is important to highlight the ways in which voices of
dissent—regardless of their inability to thwart the bill’s passage—mattered in terms of
the ways in which the bill was viewed and interpreted both domestically and abroad.
Without voices of dissent, Government officials might have succeeded in passing
legislation with the racially biased intent of curtailing black migration, yet appearing, or
at least publicly interpreted as race neutral because it applied universally to all

Commonwealth subjects. Voices of dissent exposed for public consumption the obscured

objectives and hidden transcripts shielded by a migration policy structured to favor those

 

43° Quoted from Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, I 1.6. This quote is from a Working Party

report from April, 1961.

252

with prearranged employment or Skills deemed beneﬁcial to the British economy, but
nonetheless inherently designed to establish an undetectable racially inspired barrier to
limit black migration and the growth of black communities in Britain. In doing so, voices
of dissent provide an important, yet all too often overlooked trajectory to analyze the
process in which ‘immigration’ restrictions became a publicly recognized discourse of
institutionalized racism despite certain policy makers’ desire to frame the public
presentation of controls as a color-blind initiative.

While it is clear that news of the Nottingham and Notting Hill ‘race riots’
certainly heightened a public consciousness of the relationship between race and
‘immigration’ it was precisely this connection that policy makers’ advocating legislation
to control Commonwealth migration in 1961 hoped to downplay as the bill moved
through Parliamentary channels and circulated in the public sphere in the process of
becoming adopted into law. Voices of dissent made this impossible, and likewise framed
their opposition to the bill largely on the racial character of the bill and the manner in
which the bill served as an ofﬁcial policy of racial discrimination and exclusion that
would preclude non-white migrants— and more speciﬁcally black migrants from the
Caribbean— from accessing and exercising their right of migration in accordance with
the terms of their British citizenship guaranteed under the British Nationality Act of
1948. There are at least four signiﬁcant groups of dissenters that merit attention: black
newcomers, British Parliamentary critics, West Indian ofﬁcials and black political agents
in Britain. All of these groups in different ways challenged the underlying premise of a
migration policy that would inherently denaturalize a category of citizens on the basis of

their national origin in civic body politic whose borders were to transcend the boundaries

253

of nation-states and unite a transnational, trans-regional, trans-racial community of
British citizens. In doing so, not only did each of these groups of dissenters assert a
fading, yet publicly and politically viable concept of Britain as a space embodying
Commonwealth ideals of multiracial egalitarianism, but more importantly, in the process,
they constructed the Commonwealth hnmigration bill as the antithesis to these ideals and
thus a political tool of institutionalized racism.

In introducing the provisions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill for a second
reading in the House of Commons, Home Secretary R.A. Butler emphasized the
escalating rates of Commonwealth migration and reminded his Parliamentary colleagues
that while the British economy was currently experiencing full employment, in the event
of recession, increased employment competition coupled with an already strained
housing market would lead to dire social conditions. Butler maintained that the possible
outcomes of increasing migration warranted immediate attention as a preventive measure
in reducing the possibilities of an unmanageable socio-economic situation exacerbated by
newcomers. Butler maintained that “the justiﬁcation for the control. . .is that a sizable
part of the entire population of the earth is a present legally entitled to come and stay in
this already densely populated country.”43 I Conceding the fact that Commonwealth
migrant workers were valued contributors to the British economy, particularly in the
arenas of health care and public transportation, Butler, however, argued the increasing

proportion of incoming migrants “have presented the country with an intensiﬁed social

 

43' Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 687-689.

254

problem. . .by the sheer weight of the numbers,” that undermined efforts to improve social
conditions related to such areas including housing and urban renewal.432

As noted earlier, although public receptiveness to migration control peaked in the
aftermath of the Nottingham and Notting Hill violence of 195 8, between 1956 and 1959,
the annual totals for Commonwealth migration declined signiﬁcantly. By the end of
1960, this trend had reversed. In the ﬁnal report issued by the Cabinet’s Working Party
on Commonwealth migrants, ofﬁcials framed the urgency for legislation largely in terms
of the dramatic increases in the rates of migration since 1959 and the rising monthly
totals for non-white Commonwealth migration during the ﬁrst eight months of 1961.
Although Commonwealth migration slowed in the late 19505, at the end of 1960
government records indicated that no less than 49,650 West Indians of a total of 57,700
Commonwealth migrants entered Britain. One year later, the total ﬁgures for
Commonwealth migration had more than doubled at 136,400. While Caribbean migrants
still dominated with 66,300 net arrivals, there were signiﬁcant increases in migration
from India and Pakistan.433

Although one may not have a written record to glean what black newcomers

arriving in Britain in the wake of speculations about and considerations of restrictions in

 

‘32 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (694) cols. 694-695.

‘33 Layton-Henry, The Politics oflmmigration, 13; PRO LAB 8/2704 Working Party Report on the Social
and Economic Problems Arising From the Growing Inﬂux Into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers
From Other Commonwealth Countries 26 September 1961. It is clear that the Working Party report issued
in September 1961 followed the pattern of previous reports issued during the late 19505 by paying
particular attention to the higher rates of West Indian migration in framing “the social and economic
problems” of Commonwealth migration; however, it should be noted that the report did ﬁnd “the
substantial increase in the number of people from the Indian sub-continent. . .particularly disturbing since
many of these people do not speak English, and they are the more difﬁcult group to assimilate.” This is an
important conclusion to highlight because although black migration from the Caribbean might have been
the initial targeted population of migration controls due to the higher rates of their migration to Britain
during the 19505 and early 19605, as Indian and Pakistani migration begins to surpass West Indian
migration in the mid 19605, South Asian migrants become more prominently integrated into social
narratives problematizing ‘immigration.’ See Appendix,

255

the early 19605 thought about the speciﬁc intent of the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill
and its role as an ofﬁcial race policy, their individual decisions to journey to Britain in an
effort to ‘beat the ban’ speaks volumes about the ways in which they might have
imagined how the policy would restructure their position within the British citizenry and
prevent them from exercising their right to migrate and settle in Britain. As noted in an
earlier chapter, as black migrants from the Caribbean made choices to migrate for a host
of reasons during the 19505 and early 19605, they did so with a consciousness of their
status as British citizens and an awareness of the fact that their citizenship granted them
the right to live and work in Britain. Just as one can assert that black newcomers’
individual acts of migration gave substantive meaning to the idea of a multi-racial
transnational British citizenry institutionalized by the British Nationality Act of 1948, it
is equally as important to underscore how the continuation, and indeed intensification of
this process of claim-making during the consideration of the Commonwealth Immigration
bill functioned a medium through which black migrants explicitly challenged the policy’s
intent to contain the growth of black communities in Britain and the evolution of Britain
as a multiracial society.

When black newcomers crossed the borders of the British Isles in record numbers
during the early 19605 before the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 went into
effect in July of 1962, they expressed their understanding of the ways in which migration
controls would alter their relationship to Britain and subsequently dilute the material
value of their British citizenship in the colonial context. Although they would still be
considered members of the British Commonwealth community of citizens, migration

restrictions which prevented them free entry to Britain reinforced the hierarchies of race

256

and place that had historically fractured the experience of imperial belonging for black
colonial subjects. Whether it was to seek better employment opportunities, join family
members, escape difﬁcult living conditions or simply to live in closer proximity to
Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the Tower of London, as black migrants clarnored onto
boats and planes in unrivaled numbers in the period preceding the passage of the
Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, they staked claims on their rights as British
citizens and in the process, simultaneously refuted the fundamental concept of
Commonwealth migration controls which essentially used national origin as a means to
differentiate shared rights in what was ideally a transnational, trans-racial egalitarian
community of British citizens.

As the Commonwealth Immigration Bill made its way through Parliament, some
of its most vocal opponents included members of the Labour Party. During the second
reading of the bill, the most extensive debate of the bill took place in the full House of
Commons. In the course of the debate dissenters honed in on the racial character of the
bill and the potentially devastating effects of the bill on Caribbean economics,
Commonwealth relations and international issues concerning race relations. Leading the
charge against the bill for the Opposition Party, Labour M.P. and former Commonwealth
Relations Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker outlined a number of points of contention
with the introduction of migration restrictions and the proposed formula for exercising
controls. Walker noted that Cabinet members proceeded with the bill “without adequate
inquiry” and or consultation with Commonwealth governments. He insisted that because
the bill revoked “the long standing right of free entry to Britain” held by Commonwealth

citizens, it essentially would “undermine the strength and unity of the Commonwealth.

257

In addition, Walker also pointed out to his Parliamentary colleagues that the bill, in its
present form, granted the executive government “excessive discretionary powers” and
introduced “a colour bar into our legislation,” while at the same time failing to address
the real origins of “the deplorable social and housing conditions under which recent
Commonwealth immigrants and other subjects of Her Majesty are living.” For Walker,
all of these considerations provided grounds for Parliament to reject the bill during it
Second Reading. 434

In response to the Home Secretary’s statistical rationale for legislation, Walker
agreed that the “net ﬁgure of migration” was “absolutely critical” to any decision to
regulate Commonwealth migration, but suggested that the Home Secretary’s appraisals
were somewhat inﬂated and presented a “wholly exaggerated” portrait of the potential
impact of the current state of Commonwealth migration.435 Citing a study conducted by
the Economist Intelligence Unit, Walker insisted that Government ﬁgures for migration
did not account for return migration among West Indians which was estimated at no less
that 20% between 1955 and 1960. Moreover, Walker asserted a laissez-faire economic
argument that market relations alone would regulate acceptable levels of migration. He
insisted, “There is a direct relation between labour demand and immigration.”436 While
Butler had careﬁllly noted that “one-quarter of the population of the globe” currently had

the right to enter Britain,437 Walker retorted,

 

43" Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1963 (694) col. 705.
‘35 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1963 (694) col. 710.
43° Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (687), col. 710.

‘37 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (687), col. 687.

258

Many people talk about millions of people coming here; he [Butler] talked about a

quarter of the population of the world coming here. But a limit is set on the

numbers coming here by the economy itself, by the need of the economy for

labour. . .The truth is that there is a fairly quick adaptation of the numbers to the

movement of the economy to and fro.438

Walker’s strongest criticisms of the Commonwealth Immigrants bill, centered on
the racial undertones implicit in its structure. Reiterating the rationale used by the
Commonwealth Migrants Committee to recommend employment-based restrictions
during Cabinet discussions that would appear race-neutral, yet most likely affect
migration patterns along race lines, Walker also surmised that under the bill,
“Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders will overwhelmingly fall into the
acceptable categories,” and certainly “Some coloured immigrants will come in because
they have jobs and voucher.” However, he insisted, “the overwhelming majority of those
trying to get in on the open quota will be coloured people,” and concluded, “The net
effect of the Bill is that a negligible number of white people will be kept out and almost
all those kept out by the Bill will be coloured.”439

Aside from the actual design of the controls, what most clearly exposed the
racialized intention of bill for Walker was the exclusion of Irish migrants ﬁ'om any of the
regulations included in the legislation. Initially, Cabinet ministers had suggested that
Irish migrants—whom the Home Secretary estimated entered Britain at a rate of between
60,000-70,000 annually— would be subject to controls in the same manner as all other

Commonwealth citizens; however, given the tremendous strain that regulating such a

heavy, and to be sure welcomed, ﬂow would place on the Ministry of Labour,

 

‘38 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (687), col. 710.

‘39 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (687), col. 709.

259

Government ofﬁcials decided to exempt movement from the Irish Republic from
controls.440 In response to this exclusion, Walker maintained, “before the Irish were taken
out, the Bill was very careful to cover up this racial discrimination,”441 but in its new
form by exempting the Irish, Walker accused the Home Secretary of advocating “a Bill
which contains bare-faced, open racial discrimination. . .written—not only into its spirit
and its practice, but into its very letter.”442
Walker was not alone in his condemnation of the racial dimensions of the bill.
Fellow Labour Party member Charles Royle suggested that the bill amounted to ofﬁcial
capitulation to the type of racial extremism promoted by “Fascist thugs” and seconded
Walker’s contention that with the exclusion of the Irish, the bill would disproportionately
affect non-white migrants and therefore operate as “a colour bar bill.”443 Conservative
M.P. Nigel Fisher, who along with Royle maintained membership in the British
Caribbean Association, a Parliament lobby sympathetic to West Indian interests,
suggested that the very idea of legislation ending unrestricted entry for Commonwealth
citizens was “quite inimical to our whole concept of a multi-racial Commonwealth.” For
Fisher, the Commonwealth ideal of multiracialism served as a powerful intemationally-
recognized example of anti-racism and provided a means of validating British moral

legitimacy in the arena of race relations. In his opinion, Commonwealth migration

restrictions—and particularly those structured to excluded non-white migrants—struck at

 

44° Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 688.
4‘“ Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 708.
“2 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 706.
“3 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) cols. 744, 747-748. Royle also noted

that hish migration to Britain at 353,000 between 1945 and 1959 exceeded total Commonwealth migration
at 333,000 during the same years.

260

the heart of the Conunonwealth model and thus undermined Britain’s position as a moral
arbiter on issues of race in world politics. Alluding to what he viewed as the blatant
hypocrisy of the Commonwealth Immigrants bill Fisher explained:

It seems strange to me that in Africa we attack apartheid and preach partnership,

but in the United Kingdom we are today taking powers to exclude coloured

British citizens, which is really a form of apartheid, and are evading our

opportunity, that splendid opportunity, to practise partnership and so make our

contribution to the improvement of race relations throughout the world. Our

words to Aﬁica are inconsistent with our action today in the House of

Commons.444

Elaborating on a point that had been raised during Patrick Gordon Walker’s
diatribe against the bill, Fisher also agreed that that the structure of the bill did not favor
West Indian migration in particular. Fisher insisted that because West Indians did not
generally arrive in Britain with prearranged jobs and were less likely to meet British
standards of “skilled” labor, it was most probable that Caribbean migrants would only
gain entry though undeﬁned quotas.445 While Fisher qualiﬁed this assertion with a
simple reference to the differing interpretations of “skilled” labor as deﬁned by
Caribbean economies, industries and labor markets as compared to those in Britain, his
comments highlight an even more complicated relationship between ideas of “skilled”
labor, race and the systematic processes of exclusion affecting black migrants which the
Commonwealth Immigrants bill purposed to exploit.

Clive Harris has noted that black migrants entered a British labor market that, by

design, facilitated their concentration in jobs considered as semi-skilled or unskilled.

Highlighting a host of factors including the unwillingness of unions and employers to

 

“4 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) cols. 778-779.

“5 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 785.

261

accept apprenticeship credentials obtained in the Caribbean or recruit black workers into
training programs for “skilled” occupations, along with the persistence of racist
stereotypes about black migrants’ work ethic and their abilities as compared to their
white counterparts, Harris maintains that not only did these practices result in the
deskilling of black migrant labor, but it also channeled black workers into less desirable,
lower paid “unskilled” jobs. In doing so, he notes that the deﬁnition of “skilled” labor
became “saturated with a credo of racialized meanings such that certain types of work
[were] deemed to be unsuitable for some [black] workers and unskilled by virtue of the
occupants who performed them.” 44"

Harris’s point is critical to understanding the rationale behind implementing
employment controls as a means to exclude black workers. The logic of the bill rested
upon the notion that black workers were inherently “unskilled,” based in large part by
their position within the British labor market. In much the same way that racialized
assumptions about black migrant laborers provided the basis for their systematic
exclusion from accessing certain occupational opportunities in a British labor market in
which they had a right to expect full incorporation, the architects of the Commonwealth
Immigrants bill used a similar reasoning in crafting legislation that, in practice, would
largely exclude a presumably “unskilled” black migrant working class. To be sure, this
same rationale formed the basis for Parliament members including Patrick Gordon
Walker and Nigel Fisher to express their opposition to the inherent racial character of the
legislation.

Hugh Gaitskill, leader of the Labour Party also weighed in and focused his

opposition to the bill on issues of race. Gaitskill insisted that the social “harmony” of any

 

44" Clive Harris, “Post-War Migration and the Industrial Reserve Army,” 27-30, 50.

262

multiracial society depended on the principle on “non-discrimination.” Gaitskill
contended, “the test of a civilised country is how it behaves to all its citizens of different
race, religion and colour,” and concluded, “By this test the Bill fails, and that is why we
deplore it.” Alluding to similar comparisons between the bill’s intent and the racially
discriminatory policies and practices of South Africa’s apartheid regime, Gaitskill
predicted that upon the Bill’s passage, “the Nationalists in South Aﬁica will be rubbing
their hands and saying, ‘You see, even the British are beginning to learn at last.’” 447

In addition to reiterating many of the racially discriminatory features of the Bill
highlighted by his Labour colleague Patrick Gordon Walker, Gaitskill also paid careful
attention to the potentially devastating economic impact of migration restrictions in the
West Indies. Referencing the high unemployment rates in the more heavily populated
islands including Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados, Gaitskill rehashed similar arguments
asserted by West Indian ofﬁcials who maintained that migration to Britain provided a
vital source of economic relief. For these reasons, Gaitskill beseeched the Government to
“drop this miserable, shameful, shabby Bill. . .before they deal another deadly blow at the
Commonwealth.”448

Ofﬁcial protest against the bill on the grounds of race was not limited to Labour
Party members and moderate Conservatives in Parliament. In many ways, Parliament
members, including Gaitskill, articulated points of contention that explicitly addressed

the concerns regarding the impact of the bill as viewed through the eyes of West Indian

ofﬁcials and other prominent spokespersons for West Indian communities in Britain and

 

“7 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 802

“8 Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1961-1962 (649) col. 800,803. See also “Commons Storm
Over Immigration,” London Times 17 November 1961.

263

the Caribbean. In a telegram to the national secretary of the Labour Party dated just
weeks after Home Secretary, R.A. Butler had received approval to move forward with
introducing legislation to control Commonwealth migration, Jamaican Premier, Norman
Manley expressed his apprehension about the implications of such legislation as the
related to issues of race and Commonwealth relations. Manley noted:
This proposal we are certain will be a damaging blow to the Commonwealth.
Moreover [the] proposal will vitally injure Jamaica and other parts of the West
Indies at this critical moment in our history. We cannot see any economic reason
for curbing migration now and recruitment in the West Indies for the British
[labor] Army underlines [the] employment situation in England.449
In soliciting Parliamentary support against the bill Manley reminded Labour Party leader
that from the perspective of many West Indians, the, “Decision [to legislate] will be
interpreted widely as based on colour.”450
When news of the Conservative conference’s acceptance of the Home Secretary’s
recommendation to pursue migration controls reached Jamaica’s Opposition Party leader
Alexander Bustamante, he immediately issued a telegram to the Prime Minister
condemning restrictions on Commonwealth migration. Bustamante noted
Commonwealth migration to Britain had been a common practice for decades, yet it
appeared that it was only the recent increases in West Indian arrivals which seemed to

occasion the Government’s interest in limiting this tradition. Bustamante maintained that

it was obvious that any restrictions on Commonwealth migration would in fact “be only a

 

“9 Telegram from Norman Manley to the Secretary of the Labour Party 26 October 1961, Labour Party
International Department Records, Box 1, File: Jamaica: Correspondence and Documents, 1955-1963,
Manchester Labour History Archives, Manchester UK.

45° Telegram from Norman Manley to the Secretary of the Labour Party 26 October 1961, Labour Party

International Department Records, Box 1, File: Jamaica: Correspondence and Documents, 1955-I963,
Manchester Labour History Archives, Manchester UK.

264

camouﬂage for colour discrimination,” which he “vigorously” protested.45 '
Bustamante’s political rival, Jamaican Premier, Norman Manley concurred with his
assessment and insisted that, “the decision to limit migration to Britain would not have
been made if the migrants had been people of European origin.”452 By November of
1961, Manley had announced the commission of a Working Party established to examine
the implications of the Commonwealth Immigrants bill and the potential impact on the
Jamaican economy. From Manley’s perspective, migration to Britain was unequivocally
an “economic necessity” which provided relief for overloaded Caribbean markets and a
supply of workers to fulﬁll labor shortages in British industries.453

Although Jamaican migrants represented the overwhelming majority of West
Indian migrants who journeyed to Britain during the early postwar period, the range of
protests against the racial character of migration controls and their potential economic
impact on Caribbean economies demonstrates the ways in which the issue represented a
centripetal force uniting West Indian leaders and communities across island differences.
While Colonial Secretary Ian Macleod had been successﬁrl in halting the announcement
of the Government’s intentions to legislate in this arena during the midst of key
discussions concerning the transitions towards independence in the British Caribbean in
the form of a federated West Indian nation, when Jamaica, withdrew in September of
1961 following a popular vote against a referendum to remain apart of the association,
Cabinet members decided that there was no longer a pressing agenda that would prevent

an announcement of their intentions to pursue controls in the upcoming session of

 

45‘ PRO PREM I 1/3405 Telegram to the Colonial Secretary from K. Blackbume 12 October 1961.
’52 “West Indies Government Oppose Colour-Bar Bill,” West Indian Gazette December 1961.

”3 “West Indies Government Oppose Colour-Bar Bill,” West Indian Gazette December 1961

265

 

Parliament. As one traces dissent among West Indian ofﬁcials, it is interesting to note
that precisely when Jamaica’s withdrawal from the West Indies Federation effectively
served to diminish the concept of a West Indian nation of people united by common
interests which transcended island insularities, paradoxically, the subject of
Commonwealth migration to Britain provided a medium through which West Indian
ofﬁcials articulated the overlapping interests of a West Indian community whose borders
traversed regional distinctions.

On the day following the ﬁrst extensive Parliamentary considerations of the
Commonwealth hnmigration Bill, Grantley Adams registered an ofﬁcial protest to the
consideration of migration controls in his capacity as Prime Minister of the West Indies
Federation. In a scathing dispatch to British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, Adams
characterized the bill as a “ﬂagrant disregard of every liberal principle on which Britain
has based its customs and traditions since Lord Mansﬁeld’s famous judgment of 1772.”
Speaking on behalf of a transnational West Indian migrant community, both in Britain
and beyond, Adams insisted, “West Indians are ﬁrmly convinced that by this action
Britain has begun to take steps which are no different in kind to the basis on which the
system of apartheid in South Africa is based.” Adams concluded his remarks by noting,
“It will in [the] future be difficult for any person from the Commonwealth to accept

unreﬂectingly the oft-repeated assertion of a multi-racial partnership.”454

 

‘54 “W. Indies Protest to MacMillan,” London Times 18 November 1961. Adams’s reference to Lord
Mansﬁeld is a reference to the Somerset case, discussed in Chapter I, in which the English courts found
that an enslaved person could not be forcibly sent out of England to be reenslaved in the colonies if he/she
deserted their service in England. Although Mansﬁeld’s decision did not outlaw the practice of slavery in
England, because it granted James Somerset freedom ﬁom enslavement and carved a new space to frame
anti-slavery as antithetical to British law and tradition, it became a cause celebre in the history the abolition
of slavery in the British Empire. See also David Lorimer, “Black Slaves and English Liberty: A Re-
Examination of Racial Slavery in England,”121-150; William R. Cotter, “The Somerset Case and the
Abolition of Slavery in England” History 79 (February, 1994): 31-56.

266

Barbadian Premier, Hugh Cummins shared Adams’s concerns about the ways in
which migration controls would “do irreparable harm to Commonwealth unity,” as they
would devalue the meaning of British citizenship for people of African and Asian descent
from the Caribbean.455 Speaking on behalf of the government of British Guiana,
Brindley Binn suggested that migration control represented a form of economic
divestment in the Caribbean. Binn’s remarks drew attention to the ways in which
Britain’s tradition of open door migration policies for British Commonwealth citizens
had long offered West Indian workers employment opportunities and routes towards
social mobility outside of the limits of struggling Caribbean economies which had in turn
beneﬁted not only individual workers and their families, but also the broader economic
infrastructure of Caribbean societies. To be sure, Binn also noted that the manner in
which the bill would curtail the freedom of movement of “British subjects and citizens”
between the Caribbean and Britain also introduced an “undesirable colour-bar” into
British policy which contradicted the basic foundations of Commonwealth solidarity.456

For Garnet Gordon, High Commissioner for the West Indies Federal Government,
the timing of the bill was especially germane to West Indian opposition to the bill.
Gordon drew attention to the fact that just as the British Government planned to pursue a
program of migration controls structured to excluded certain categories of British citizens
largely on the premise that the British economy would eventually become unable to
withstand the strains of integrating rising proportions of migrant labor to the detriment of

already disconcerting social conditions, the Tory Government began the process of

 

’55 “West Indies Government Oppose Colour-Bar Bill,” West Indian Gazette December, 1961.

“’56 Ibid

267

cementing their integration within the European Economic Community (Common
Market). Established in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Rome in 1957,
the EurOpean Economic Community sought greater economic cooperation between
Western European states and supported the free movement of European workers among
its member states. In August of 1961, the British Government submitted a formal
application for membership in the European Economic Community which would no
doubt entail the consideration of immigration policies that would allow for greater
freedom of movement for continental migrants seeking employment in British
industries.457 Garnet Gordon found this coincidence especially troubling. Gordon
suggested that even the “possibility of non-British Europeans, exercising rights permitted
to citizens of the Commonwealth restrictively, calls for much explanation.” Yet clearly
aware of a broader racial undercurrent guiding the British government’s seemingly
contradictory actions, Gordon noted, “But then, of course, the immigration from Europe
would not be coloured.”458

In addition to ofﬁcial protest from West Indian government ofﬁcials, black
political leaders and organizations in Britain also registered public opposition to the
introduction of legislation to curtail Commonwealth migration. Just days following the
announcement of plans to pursue legislation in upcoming session of Parliament, West
Indian Gazette editor Claudia Jones spoke at a protest meeting convened by the

Movement for Colonial Freedom, an anti-colonial pressure group chaired by Labour,

M.P. Fenner Brockway. Speaking on a platform which included Trinidadian activist and

 

457

Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 193 9, 127.

453 “West Indies Governments Oppose Colour-Bar Bill,” West Indian Gazette December I961.

268

local councilor, David Pitt, Jones insisted that the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill
“reﬂected the fear of unity of coloured and white workers and people,” and “aimed at
spreading racialist divisions.”459
Even before the Tory Government publicly committed to introducing a new
Commonwealth migration policy, Jones’s West Indian Gazette, which had become a
leading conduit of black political activity in Britain in the aftermath of the murder of
Kelso Cochrane, had taken a stance against any proposal that would infringement upon
the rights of Commonwealth citizens to enter Britain. An article appearing in the Gazette
in September of 1961 maintained that for many migrants, movement to Britain was an
economic “necessity” mediated by the dire social and economic conditions resulting from
centuries of imperial rule in the Caribbean colonies. The article cited an interview by
one Jamaican newcomer who explained, that he would “sweep trash on the streets of
England,” because in his opinion, “To stay at home is to die.” In addition to highlighting
the ways in which migration to Britain provided economic opportunities—even the most
basic—unavailable for many West Indian workers in their homelands, the article also
reminded black migrants in Britain that above all, “As British Commonwealth citizens,
we have a right to come” and therefore should “be asked to apologise for our
nrunbers.”460
Once the Home Secretary had publicly asserted the Government’s intentions to

pursue legislation, the West Indian Gazette intensiﬁed its critique of migration controls

and centered their opposition squarely on the ways in which the bill would serve as an

 

‘59 Sherwood, Claudia Jones, 98. See also “Hecklers Grapple With Dr. Soper,” London Times 3 November
1961.

46° “New Arguments Against Migration Restriction,” West Indian Gazette September, 1961.

269

r -.: ".It' ‘m‘hu-nnm'

 

ofﬁcial policy of racial discrimination which would preclude black migrants from
exercising their rights as British citizens and effectively diminish the principles of racial
egalitarianism which buttressed the Commonwealth ideal of multiracialism. In the
October, 1961 issue of the Gazette, Jones ran an article that insisted,
A bill to ban coloured immigrants no matter how disguised or covered up with
generalities is still a colour bar bill. It is widely feared that its passage would
cultivate just the opposite of those ‘virtues’ which Her Majesty held to be
essential to Commonwealth unity. For it would promote racialism, and disunite

the Commonwealth peoples based on the colour of a man’s skin, and his origin,
rather than his worth.46'

On 14 January 1962 Claudia Jones and supporters of the West Indian Gazette
participated in a protest against the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill sponsored by the
Movement for Colonial Freedom. Following the protest, the London branch of the
Trinidadian-based Peoples National Movement hosted a joint Conference on Immigration
and West Indian Federation which convened representatives from a number of West
Indian, Aﬁican and Asian organizations and activists throughout Britain including Jones
and staff of the West Indian Gazette, the West Indian Students Union, the Conference of
African Organizations, the Standing Conference on West Indian Organizations, the
British Guiana Freedom Association, the Indian Workers Association and the newly
formed Pakistani Workers’ Association and West Indian Workers’ Association, both of
which had been established in Birmingham in opposition to the Commonwealth
Immigrants bill. This meeting resulted in the formation of the Afro-Asian Caribbean
Conference (AACC) which pledged to serve as a united front against the implementation
of racially discriminatory migration policy that would disproportionately affect

Commonwealth migrants of African and Asian descent. The Conference resolved that

 

46' “Bill to Ban Us Expected,” West Indian Gazette October, 196 l.

270

the Commonwealth Immigration Bill, “when stripped of its ﬁne phrases is nothing but a
legalizing of race prejudice and Colour discrimination,” that represented a “departure”
from the “may British “tradition of non-discrimination.”462
When the AACC reconvened four days later to formulate a plan of action to
galvanize support against the introduction of what was regarded as “legalized apartheid”,
the conference decided to organize a series of public demonstrations to expose the racial
character of the Commonwealth Immigrants bill’s intent and to rally public support in
order to pressure Government ofﬁcials to withdraw the legislation from Parliamentary

463 The members of the AACC agreed to sponsor a two day vigil outside of

consideration.
Admiralty House, where Cabinet meetings were generally held, and the Home Office on
beginning on 10 February 1962. Timed to coincide with the last day that the
Commonwealth Immigrants Bill would be debated in a House of Commons committee
before a vote by the full House, the Conference also planned a mass Commonwealth
lobby which was to be followed by a public protest meeting on 13 February 1962.464
As a means of gaining greater political legitimacy and a broader audience and
coalition of support for the anti-restriction and essentially anti-racist platform promoted
by the AACC campaign against the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, the organization
invited the High Commissions of India Nigeria and the West Indies to participate in

protest activities, offer ﬁnancial support and issue public statements condemning the

racial undertones inherent in the bill’s intent and structure. Claudia Jones initiated much

 

”’2 Claude D. Ramey, ed. “London Newsletter: Organ of the Standing Conference of Organisations
Concerned with West Indian in Britan,” November, 1962 Edric and Pearl Connor Papers, Box 4, Folder 5,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; “What is the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference,” West
Indian Gazette February 1962; Sherwood, Claudia Jones, 98-99.

‘63 “Anti-Colour-Bill-Lobby-Feb 13” West Indian Gazette February, 1962.

“”Ibid.; Sherwood, Claudia Jones, 98-99.

271

of the correspondence with Commonwealth government officials, trades unions and other
anti-racist sympathizers including members of the Labour Party. Echoing many of the
sentiments expressed by Parliament members including Nigel Fisher and Hugh Gaitskill
expressed in earlier debates about the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, in a letter urging
support for the AACC campaign to have the bill withdrawn, Jones characterized the bill
as an “obnoxious piece of legislation [that] knocks down the very foundation of the
Commonwealth.” In addition to being “anti-British” in the sense that it departed from
Commonwealth traditions of universalism and multiracialism by undermining the
citizenship rights of certain categories of British citizens in such a way that would
disproportionately affect people of color, Jones considered the potential effects of the bill
as a threat to the possibilities of working class interracial unity. Moreover, she
maintained that the bill represented a “discriminatory move” that essentially “ﬂouts the
UN. Charter of Human Rights, is an insult to human dignity and is a slur to the fair name
of this Country, the citadel of democracy.”465

In response to the request of the AACC, government representatives from India,
Nigeria and the West Indies issued public statements condemning the bill Speciﬁcally
because of its racial implications. Indian ofﬁcials expressed objections to “any kind of
control based on race or colour discrimination” and maintained that if such measures took
effect public pressure might compel the Indian Government to “contemplate reciprocal
action.” Representatives from the newly independent Nigerian Government maintained,

“Nigeria deplores the racial overtones of the bill and the encouragement which it may

 

”5 Claudia Jones (on behalf of the Afro-Asian Caribbean Conference) to Unknown Addressee 31 January
1962 Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Sherwood,
Claudia Jones, 99.

272

give and in fact has given to racialist and fascist elements in the country,” while Garnet
Gordon of the West Indies High Commission reiterated the West Indies Federal
Government’s “unequivocal stand against the Bill.” 466

In crafting a public message against the Commonwealth Immigration’s Bill, not
only did the AACC oppose the systematic, and no doubt, intentional disfranchisement of
non-white British Commonwealth citizens by revoking their rights to migrate and settle
in Britain, but the organization also closely scrutinized the process by which the bill
would facilitate and essentially sanction racially discriminatory social practices to the
detriment of black migrants already resident in Britain. In particular, a public statement
distributed in conjunction with the AACC House of Common’s lobby, drew speciﬁc
attention to a provision of the bill that made it a criminal offense for a person to
“knowingly” harbor another person whom he/she has “reasonable grounds” to believe
was residing in Britain unlawfully. The organization contended that the phrase
“knowingly” had virtually no “practical value” and therefore would serve as a tool to
perpetuate and essentially reinforce racially discriminatory social practices against black
migrants already in Britain. The AACC reasoned that since “certain landlords and
landladies already practice colour discrimination,” the bill reinforced their exclusionary
racial practices and essentially gave them leverage to refuse housing to black migrants.467
In making this point, AACC members highlighted the process in which the potential

outcomes of the Commonwealth Immigrants bill affected the citizenship rights for black

migrants seeking to journey to Britain, and those already residing in British communities.

 

4“ “Anti-Colour-Bill-Lobby-Feb 13,” West Indian Gazette February, 1962.

”7 Statement on Commonwealth Immigration Bill, undated, but references the House of Commons Lobby
on 13 February 1962, Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, Schomburg Center for Research on Black
Culture, New York, NY.

273

 

The Race Relations Act of 1965 and the Transnational Politics of Race

Because the Tory-controlled Government eventually succeeded in passing the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 into law, one might ﬁnd it easy to conclude
that voices of dissent played insigniﬁcant roles in inﬂuencing the institutionalized politics
of race, migration and citizenship in the early postwar period. In fact, although Randall
Hansen’s recent analysis of these overlapping issues points to a lack of scholarly
attention to the multiplicity of opinions shaping the evolution of postwar Commonwealth
migration policy, his own treatment of dissent among members of British ofﬁcialdom
concludes that “In the end, the sound and fury” of Parliament members including Labour
Party leader Hugh Gaitskell’s “embittered attack on immigration control signiﬁed
nothing, and both parties settled into a quiet acceptance of the 1962 system of control.”468
While this argument may be tenable if one focuses solely on the implementation of
ofﬁcial policy, it is rather dismissive of the ways in which an assortment of voices of
dissent facilitated a public dialogue about the racial character of Commonwealth
migration restrictions that indeed framed the policy as a government-sanctioned discourse
of institutionalized racism.

Although Cabinet members purposed to introduce a migration policy whose
public presentation camouﬂaged their intent of curbing a predominately black
Commonwealth migration, this feat could not be accomplished to a large extent because
of the ways in which voices of dissent emanating from Parliament, the West Indies and
black communities in Britain publicly exposed the racially discriminatory undertones

obscured by the bill’s structure. In opposing the bill on the grounds of its racial

implications at a moment when people of Aﬁican descent from the Caribbean represented

 

‘68 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, 127.

274

the greatest proportions of Commonwealth newcomers, voices of dissent disseminated a
particular conceptualization of ‘immigration’ controls as an anti-black policy of
institutionalized racism.

The process by which ‘immigration’ controls became public symbols of
institutionalized racism and racial discrimination is key in considering the how British
Government ofﬁcials came to embrace anti-racist integrationist policies beginning with
the passage of the Race Relations Act of 1965. At the same time that Cabinet members
of successive Conservative Governments debated and strategized about how to best
implement seemingly race-neutral policies designed to limit black migration during the
19505, they also consistently rejected anti-discrimination measures introduced in
Parliament during that same period. By February of 1964 when the Labour Party
committed to introducing anti-discrimination legislation patterned after a proposal
submitted by left-wing anti-colonial advocate and Labour M.P. Fenner Brockway,
Brockway had presented similar Private Member’s bills to outlaw racial discrimination in
public places in nine previous Parliamentary sessions, the ﬁrst which was put forth in
1955.469 A complimentary logic helps to account for why British ofﬁcials shied away
from anti-discrimination policies at the same time that they avoided pursuing migration
controls. Essentially, both legislative discourses— one racially exclusionary, and another
racially integrationist— would function to destabilized the Commonwealth ideology of
multiracial egalitarianism. Just as migration controls represented a departure ﬁom the
traditions of citizenship rights and privileges which had fortiﬁed Britain’s historic role as

the centrifuge of the Commonwealth by creating disparate rights of migration for British

 

4‘” Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, 213-214; Hansen, Citizenship and
Immigration in Postwar Britain, 139.

275

citizens, largely on the basis of race, the utility of a national race policy that would
address, and more importantly, acknowledge racial discrimination was also perceived as
antithetical to Britain’s role as a beacon and defender of Commonwealth racial
democracy.

The Race Relations Act of 1965 emerged as part of a two-pronged “package
deal” initiated by Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice and detailed in a White Paper on
“Immigration in the Commonwealth” issued in August of I965. 470 The ﬁrst part of the
policy proposal described measures intended “to control. . .the entry of immigrants so that
it does not outrun Britain’s capacity to absorb them,” while the secondary portion the
White Paper detailed “positive measures designed to secure for the immigrants and their
children their rightful place in our society.”“" Although Labour Party ofﬁcials had
initially made public pronouncements that the Party would rescind the Tory-backed
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, by 1965 when Labour had regained control of
Government, the position of the Party had shifted and the provisions outlined in the 1962
were extended to place even greater restrictions on Commonwealth migration to

Britain.472 Under the 1962 legislation, only migrants who had made prior employment

 

47° PRO PREM 13/382 Letter from Home Secretary, Frank Soskice to Prime Minister, Harold Wilson 4
January 1965; F0 371/ 178454 Letter from K.R.C. Pridham of the Foreign Office to Lord Caradon, British
Representative to the United Nations 1 January 1965.

"'Parliamentary Sessional Papers, vol. xxviii, 1964-I965 Cmnd. 2739 (London: HMso, 1965).

472 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, 119, 129-131; Spencer, British Immigration
Policy Since I 939, 134-136; Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 77. Scholars have cited a number
of reasons which contributed to the shift in the Labour Party’s position on Commonwealth migration
controls between 1962 and 1964 when the Party stated the necessity of controls as part of its platform
during the 1964 election. In 1963 the Parliamentary leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskill died in
January of 1963. As noted earlier Gaitskell had been an outspoken critic of the migration controls and was
inﬂuential in shaping the Labour Party’s anti-restrictionist platform concerning controls during the early
19605. Scholars have noted that Gaitskell’s predecessor, Harold Wilson did not necessarily share the same
zeal about opposing the issue. To be sure, another point worthy of mention is that Gallup poll surveys

276

 

arrangements (Category A), workers with skills deemed most valuable to the British
economy (Category B), as well as spouses and dependant family members were exempt
from restrictions; all others (Category C) were selectively admitted on a ﬁrst come, ﬁrst
served basis by applying for a predetermined annual allotment of vouchers distributed by
the Ministry of Labour. The White Paper of 1965 announced the Government’s
intentions to prescribe an annual quota of 8500 for Category A and Category B workers
and completely abolished Category C vouchers. Likewise, considering the signiﬁcant
numbers of family reuniﬁcation migrations, estimated at roughly 30,000 annually, the
White Paper also included plans to restrict the entry of dependents to exclude extended
family members and children over 16.473
It is important to note that in introducing the new provisions associated with the
1965 White Paper on “Immigration From the Commonwealth” Home Secretary Frank
Soskice found it imperative that a proposal to enforce tighter migration controls be
counter-balanced with “positive” anti-discrimination to receive bi-partisan support in
Parliament and wide-ranging public support. In lieu of this rationale, Soskice put forth
the Race Relations Bill which, in its original form, criminalized activities which might
incite racial hatred and discrimination in the public sector. Scholars have described
Soskice’s pairing of immigration restrictions and anti-discrimination legislation as a

political maneuver designed to depoliticize race and ‘immigration’ in the wake of the

 

taken after the passage of controls showed more than 60% of the public supported the Commonwealth
Immigration Act of 1962.

473 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since I 939, 134-136; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in

Postwar Britain, 109-1 1 l, 129, 150-152; Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 75-78; Paul,
Whitewashing Britain, 166, 174.

277

474 As a result of the 1964 election, popular Labour

1964 Smethwick campaign.
incumbent Patrick Gordon Walker, who had been tapped by Labour Party leaders to
become Foreign Secretary, was defeated by Peter Griffiths, a lesser known political
outsider. While nationally the Labour Party gained seats in Parliament, Grifﬁths, won on
an anti-black platform that incorporated the infamous slogan, “If you want a nigger for a
neighbor, vote Labour.”475 From the perspective of Labour leaders the Smethwick
debacle served as a potent reminder of the increasing political stakes of race and
‘immigration.’ Even before the general election, the Labour Party surveyed the
Smethwick community and found that residents were less inclined to support Patrick
Gordon Walker because of his voting record on the issue of migration which many
believed dramatically compounded housing difﬁculties in the area.476 Given the
considerable national public support of controls the Labour Party did not necessarily want
to compromise its Parliamentary majority by positioning itself as an anti-restrictions
Party. The defeat of Patrick Gordon Walker, who had been a steadfast opponent of

Commonwealth migration control, particularly because of their racially exclusionary and

discriminatory intent had proven the extent to which the politics of race and migration

 

474 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 132-141; Layton-Henry, 77-78; Spencer, British Immigration
Policy Since I 939, 136. For more on race, party politics and the 1964 Smethwick campaign see also
Nicholas Deakin, ed. Colour and the British Electorate I 964: Six Case Studies (London: Pall Mall, 1965)
and Anthony Messina, Race and Party Competition in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

‘75 “Immigrants Main Election Issue At Smethwick,” London Times 9 March 1964.
47" Smethwick Survey Summary Report 13 October 1964, Labour Party Records Related to the 1964
General Elections, Manchester Labour History Archives, Manchester, UK. The survey also found that

“traditional supports” of the Labour Party in the areas also felt “alienated” because of a perceived sympathy
towards “coloured immigrants from the Commonwealth” in the area.

278

mattered and constituted a divisive set of issues that could determine electoral outcomes
and shift power dynamics in Government.477

While it is certainly feasible to conclude that Soskice’s “package deal” of
migration controls and anti-discrimination legislation was simply a politically expedient
attempt to reframe the Labour Party’s image in relation to the issue of ‘immigration’,
while preserving its avowed commitment to anti-racism, this argument does not account
the ways in which policy makers anticipated the international implications of backing
migration controls that had been publicly exposed and interpreted as racially
discriminatory in both domestic and overseas. In a speech given at a meeting of the
Socialist International held in Amsterdam in September of 1964, Labour leader and
future Prime Minister Harold Wilson outlined what he perceived to be “major themes of
world affairs.” Citing international concerns including disarmament, nuclear proliferation
and aid for developing countries, Wilson’s ﬁnal point dealt with the issue of race
relations. Paying homage to “all those who played a part in the great Washington
Freedom March,” Wilson used the case of South Aﬁica as talking point to discuss the
ways that the issue of race relations had become a deﬁning component of world politics.
He explained:

...increasingly race relations present us with a challenge in terms of relations

between countries. The prospects in South Aﬁica grow darker daily. Dr.

Verwoerd is now outraging the whole of Africa by his naked racialism and is not

threatening the integrity of neighboring territories including Bechuanaland,
Basutoland and Swaziland. What is happening in South Africa is no longer an

 

477 In addition to opposing the Commonwealth Immigrants in Parliament, even after its passage, the Labour
Party continued to condemn the bill on the grounds of its racial intent during the second half of 1962 and
1963, which transfonned the Party into somewhat of an anti-restrictions faction. A Labour Party pamphlet
issued during this period stated, “By restraining the right of Commonwealth citizens to come to Britain, the
Conservative Government has given way to the pressure of colour prejudice. The Labour Party is
determined to oppose any form of color prejudice.” See pamphlet, Immigration... The Facts, undated,
Labour Party Archives Research Department Files on Race Relations and Immigration, Box One, File
Dates, 1962-1963, Manchester Labour History Archives, Manchester, UK.

279

internal matter. It presents a challenge to the whole of the free world and to the

great principles of the UN.478
To be sure, the United Nations agreed with Wilson’s position and in fact had staked its
international legitimacy largely on its willingness to engage questions of race. Less than
a year before Wilson’s speech, the General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously
adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination. Reafﬁrming the international body’s commitment to upholding anti-
discriminatory and anti-racist principles in accordance with the tenets of the United
Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the declaration on racial
discrimination resolved “to adopt all necessary measures for speedily eliminating racial
discrimination in all its forms and manifestations, and to prevent and combat racist
doctrines and practices in order to promote understanding between races and to build an
international community free from all forms of racial segregation and racial
discrimination.”479 The declaration deﬁned “racial discrimination” as, “any distinction,
exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic
origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition,
enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in
the political, economic, social, cultural or any other ﬁeld of public life.” 480

To be sure, the adoption of the Declaration represented the culmination of

decades of struggle, protest and petitioning by black communities throughout the world

 

"8 Harold Wilson, Speech on “Major Themes of World Affairs” given at the Socialist International meeting
in Amsterdam 9 September 1964, Papers Related to the 1964 General Elections, Labour Party Records,
Manchester Labour History Archives, Manchester, UK.

479 PRO LAB 13/1936 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination

48° Ibid.

280

[hi-w

and demonstrated the growing international inﬂuence of an expanding contingent of
newly independent Afro-Asian states who had remained steadfast in keeping the
overlapping global issues of colonialism and racism ﬁrmly planted in international

481

politics. The spirit of the UN. Declaration manifested itself in historic civil rights

legislation in the United States and the reversal of immigration policies designed to limit
the inﬂux of non-whites in such places including the United States and Canada.482
Situating the Labour Government’s decision to couple ‘immigration’ restrictions and
anti-discrimination legislation within this pivotal international political moment is key to
unpacking the complexity of race politics in postwar Britain.

During considerations of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 a host of
voices of dissent had successfully framed migration controls as policies of
institutionalized racism and racial discrimination. Surely Labour Party leaders were well
aware that there would be a degree of public backlash, particularly among
Commonwealth audiences, that would highlight the ways in which British migration
policies embodied racist undertones just as the international community was intensifying
its support for nations to institute anti-racist policies and to eliminate all manifestations of
racial discrimination in the public sphere. It is against this backdrop that one must
consider the ways that the Race Relations Act of 1965 functioned as an anti-racist gesture

which paradoxically facilitated the ﬁrrtherance of a racist and racially exclusionary

political agenda.

 

‘3' Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 239-248; See also Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize and Brenda Gayle
Plummet, Rising Wind

“2 Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 246.

281

In its ﬁnal form, the Race Relations Act of 1965 was severely diluted as it was
originally conceived by the Home Secretary. Where Soskice had purposed to criminalize
activities inciting racial hatred and the practice of discrimination in public places, instead
the bill, established a national Race Relations board that would serve as an agent of
conciliation to mediate disputes involving issues related to racial incitement and
discrimination. Absent from the legislation was reference to mechanisms to address
racial discrimination in the key areas of housing and employment. As noted in earlier
chapters, for black migrants, this is where policies addressing racial discrimination
mattered most. Because of this glaring omission, black and Asian migrant coalitions
including the nationally supported Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD)
opposed the legislation.483

For the Labour Party leaders, the introduction of a Race Relations policy was
inextricably bound with the international political community’s preoccupation with issues
of race and the problem of racial discrimination. In a conﬁdential memo to a Cabinet
ofﬁcial, K.R.C. Pridham of the Foreign Ofﬁce noted that it was important to time the
introduction of anti-discrimination legislation so that Parliamentary debate on the bill
would coincide with UN. General Assembly debates on the International Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Pridham explained,

Although we can expect to gain some credit in the UN. for the decision to

legislate against racial discrimination, much of the credit may be lost if, when the

domestic legislation is introduced into Parliament it is seen that little or no
account has been taken of the draft UN. Convention. Many delegations-

 

”3 Letter to CARD Membership from CARD Organizing Secretary 28 April 1965 The letter noted,
“Because...the Bill refers only to discrimination in public places, parliamentary procedure makes it
impossible for the Bill to be amended to include housing, employment and the other main areas that our
proposal and petition demand.”

282

especially th4e Afro-Asians—are likely to take the line that a good opportunity was
being lost.48

Pridham’s memo is suggestive of the ways in which the evolution of anti-discrimination
legislation in Britain was not merely domestic in scope, but was meant to conform to a
broader international political current seeking to remedy historic problems of race. This
is an important point to consider when examining the postwar politics of race and
migration.

By the mid 19605 migration had become a racially charged public issue, wrought
with racist undertones. Taking a cue from the Smethwick campaign of 1964, when
Harold Wilson’s Labour Government purposed to extend the provisions of the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 to level a political playing ﬁeld stacked against
the Labour Party concerning the volatile issue of ‘immigration,’ coupling it with the Race
Relations Act provided a means to balance the public presentation of a policy of
institutionalized racial discrimination with an anti-racist policy of integration that would
not appear to alienate British policy from international trends related to the elimination of
racial discrimination and exclusion. It is only when one broadens the scope of analysis
to locate the transnational politics of race in the postwar period, that one can examine
how both grassroots black political agents and British ofﬁcials acted in relation to an
international climate sensitive to questions of race to shape and inﬂuence domestic

political agendas related to black migration.

 

4‘” PRO F0 371/ 178454 Letter from K.R.C. Pridham, Foreign Ofﬁce to Home Ofﬁce 8 December 1964.

283

CONCLUSION

This dissertation has attempted to narrate and analyze two intertwining histories.
One is a story of Caribbean people of African descent and their struggles and negotiations
to substantiate the meaning of their membership in an imperial community of British
citizens. Just as the rhetoric of a transatlantic anti-slavery movement manufactured
universalizing discourses of citizenship which supplied enslaved black laborers and freed
people with a language to envision, articulate, and seek to actualize a British citizenship
status that permitted them certain rights, privileges and entitlements, similarly, the ideals
of a postwar multiracial Commonwealth reinvented the historic concept of a trans-racial
British citizenship status and guaranteed its ofﬁcial legitimacy under the provisions of the
British Nationality Act of 1948. Although British policy makers did not necessarily
imagine how the meaning and the actuality of the citizenship right of migration to
metropolitan Britain might facilitate the transformation of British cities into reconﬁgured
imperial spaces reﬂecting more of the racial and ethnic diversity which had long deﬁned
Empire, for Caribbean migrants, their postwar migrations to Britain demonstrated a clear
understanding of their relationship in the imperial community of citizens and represented
an act through which they made claims upon and sought to validate what it meant to be
British on their own terms.

Having exercised a claim to British citizenship by traveling to Britain, many black
migrants from the Caribbean found striking discrepancies between their expectations of
life in Britain and the realities of racial prejudice, discrimination and exclusion, coupled
with feelings of exile and non-belonging. It was not necessarily that black migrants came

to Britain with the expectation that life in Britain would not have its difﬁculties, stages of

284

adjustments and even disappointments, but rather, they came with a desire to at least
belong and to maximize the opportunities available for social and economic mobility.
Author Donald Hinds, who migrated to Britain from Jamaica to join his mother in 1955,
explains:

When a migrant makes up his mind that he is going to Britain, he hardly expects

to ﬁnd an earthly paradise. He expects to work for his living, and doubtless to do

royally well. . .He believes he ought to be accepted, and his being a British subject

is reason enough.485
Hinds’s insightful comments draw attention to the notion that it was not enough for
migrants to simply have the opportunity to move to Britain to substantiate their status as
British citizens, but just as important, migrants intended that their movement and
settlement would be qualiﬁed by the experience of being “accepted” as workers,
neighbors, patrons, entrepreneurs, men, women and children on a similar basis as their
white metropolitan counterparts. Confronting a labor market that, by design, channeled
migrants into lower paying, less desirable jobs, and a housing market plagued by massive
shortages, the impact of racial prejudice and discrimination cemented the marginal
citizenship status of black Commonwealth migrants in British society; but nothing
conﬁrmed this more than acts of racial violence.

The Nottingham and Notting Hill violence, which largely involved attacks on
black migrants by indigenous white residents, motivated by a mantra to “Keep Britain

White,” followed by the senseless and unsolved murder of Kelso Cochrane less than a

year later at the hands of “a gang of white boys,” energized grassroots black political

 

‘85 Hinds, Journey To An Illusion, 35.

285

 

organizations in Britain.486 The politicization of the Cochrane murder and the “black
body politics” campaigns waged through the efforts of activists including Claudia Jones,
Frances Ezzrecco and members, supporters and sympathizers of the Inter-Racial
Friendship and Coordinating Council and the Coloured People’s Progressive Association,
provided yet another means through which black migrant communities made claims upon
their citizenship status and sense of their rights of settlement and belonging. More
importantly, black migrants’ political activities in the aftermath of the death of Kelso
Cochrane carefully articulated the ways in which migrants felt that many of their rights of
citizenship remained unfulﬁlled due to inadequate police protection, a lack of anti-
discrimination legislation and the existence of unchecked organized racist campaigns.
But what did it mean for black migrants to assert these sorts of claims on their
British citizenship and expose the inconsistencies between the ideal of Commonwealth
racial democracy and the existence of racial prejudice, violence, discrimination, and
exclusion at a particular historical juncture when the international community carefully
scrutinized questions of race and judged a nation’s international legitimacy in world
affairs based on the representation of their domestic race relations? The second storyline
interwoven throughout this study concerns the ways in which black migrants, white
Britons, and British policy makers confronted and contested the racial character of ideas
of ‘Britishness’ and British citizenship, both as an ideal and a lived experience at a
particular moment when issues of race and race relations mattered and remained integral
to international politics. Anticipated by the pronunciations of the Atlantic Charter (1941)

and crystallized in the United Nations Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of

 

”6 “ ‘Keep Britain White’ Call in Notting Hill Area,” London Times 10 September 1958; “1,200 Moum
Cochrane: Scene at Graveside,” The Kensington News and West London Times 12 June 1959,

286

Human Rights (1948), and the emergence of the United Nations as a forum for anti-racist
and anti-colonial debate in the aftermath of a War fought in defense of human rights and
to preserve a respect for national self-determination, the early postwar period signaled a
profound shift in the international political community’s willingness to engage the effects
of racism and racial discrimination. To be sure, the images and personalities associated
with historic social movements for black rights waged by and within black communities
throughout the world including the US. Civil Rights Movement, nationalist movements
in Aﬁica and the Caribbean, and anti-apartheid campaigns in South Aﬁica became a vital
means through which the world came to view and access the “problem of race” and its
manifestations.

In much the same way that images of “Little Rock” became inscribed into
international dialogues about race in such a way that tarnished visions of American
democracy, news of young, working class white “teddy boys” attacking black migrants in
Notting Hill without provocation, threatened to dismantle “the mystique of British anti-
racism,” and undermined Britain’s position as a historic beacon of racial liberalism and
‘tolerance.’ The responses of white British observers and ofﬁcials were conditioned, to a
large extent, by a need to reconcile the news of ‘race riots’ with intemationally-
recognized national myths about British racial attitudes and race relations in Britain.
White British audiences were well aware that the international community would have
much to say about the highly publicized news of ‘race riots’ in Britain and likely criticize
the nation’s reputation for racial liberalism as compared to other nations including the
United States and South Africa, as well as its tendency to proffer itself as the embodiment

of Commonwealth ideals of racial egalitarianism. To account for the glaring

287

 

discrepancies between racially-motivated violence against black migrants and notions of
an anti-racist metropolitan British society, a range of British commentators and ofﬁcials
offered a constellation of interpretations of the meaning and implications of racial
violence in Britain which essentially ascribed the origins of the racial conﬂict to the
actions of a deviant section of white society reacting to social problems exacerbated by
increasing black migration. In the process, the broader society was absolved ﬁ'om
confronting the existence of embedded structural patterns and quotidian practices of
racism and discrimination present in British society, and thus was able, to a certain
extent, to preserve the “mystique of anti-racism” and reconﬁgure a shattered notion of
what it meant for white Britons to be British.

Just as a race-sensitive international climate mediated the reactions of white
Britons to news of ‘race riots’, this same context provided black migrants with a forum to
lodge their discontent with their marginal citizenship status and draw international
attention to the cause of black rights in Britain. The process by which black activists
transformed Kelso Cochrane’s murdered black body into a political site representing the
interests and concerns of black communities in Britain involved the appropriation of
images of a transnational global black struggle which positioned the experiences of black
migrants in Britain with those of black Americans, oppressed black Africans in such
places including South Africa and Nyasaland, and anti-colonial movements the
Caribbean and Aﬁica. In doing 50, black migrants made their struggle to qualify the
meaning of their British citizenship into a domestic cause illustrative of a broader,
transnational problem of race experienced by black communities throughout the African

Diaspora.

288

The evolution of ofﬁcial race policies discussed during the 19505 and later
implemented during the 19605, served as a crucial backdrop which placed the survival of
black migrants’ claims to and means of substantiating the rights of [a multiracial British
citizenship into a clear contest with a racially exclusive vision of Britishness founded
upon imperial hierarchies of race. To be sure, this struggle involving race and the
meaning of British citizenship did not take place in a domestic political vacuum, but
rather was attuned to the potential international consequences of race politics. When
black migrants joined a chorus of dissenters including British Labour Party leaders and
West Indian ofﬁcials in opposing the introduction of Commonwealth migration
restrictions on the grounds that the policies were inherently designed and intended to
limit the entrance of a largely black population of Commonwealth migrants, they
successfully transformed the issue of ‘immigration’ controls into an ofﬁcially sanctioned
symbol of institutionalized racism and racial discrimination.

When the new Labour Government revisited the issue of migration controls in
1965 after the defeat of a popular Labour candidate in the racially charged 1964
Smethwick campaign and in the wake of unwavering popular support of migration
restrictions, despite their racist and racially discriminatory implications, Cabinet officials
felt that it was necessary to package race-based controls with anti-discrimination
legislation. The international politics of race buttressing the coupling of these two
seemingly disparate pieces of legislation should not be underestimated. Just when the
growing inﬂuence of a steadily increasing contingent of Afro-Asian states facilitated the
adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and

nations including the US and Canada introduced civil rights and new migration policies

289

congruent with the ideals of integration and multiracialism, the introduction of an ofﬁcial
policy of anti-discrimination was a politically expedient means of remaining within an
international trend towards state action supporting the elimination of racism and
discrimination. Thus a policy espousing anti-racist principles became part of the public
presentation of the means through which the British Govermnent hoped to strengthen a
policy which had been publicly exposed as racially discriminatory.

This study concludes with the introduction of the Race Relations Act of 1965 and
therefore positions its emergence as the culmination of nearly two decades of contestation
over the meaning of British citizenship prompted by the migration of an unprecedented
number of black migrants largely from the Caribbean colonies to Britain. On the one
hand the Race Relations Act of 1965 served as a historic declaration that racism, and
racial prejudice and discrimination were part of the fabric of British society and signaled
that the British Government was willing to regulate is impact on the lives of racial
minorities in Britain. In this sense, the legislation spoke to a tradition and legacy of claim
making by people of African descent in the Empire to integrate and incorporate
themselves into what it meant to be British and to possess British citizenship. However,
the fact that the Labour Government pursued anti-discrimination legislation as part of a
broader political agenda of furthering racially exclusive migration controls gives the
policy a very different meaning. When considered as part of a “package deal” to promote
a vision of British citizenship that marginalized people of African descent and other
Commonwealth populations of color, the origins of the Race Relations Act of 1965 point
to a long history of the “tensions of Empire” and the “dialectics of inclusion and

exclusion,” which have historically framed black communities relationships to notions of

290

 

Britishness and membership within the imperial community of British citizens.487 This
dissertation hopes to have provided a starting point to rethink the politics of black
migration, issues of citizenship and race in postwar Britain. First and foremost, this study
demonstrates that the voices, perspectives, activities and experiences of black migrants
mattered and held transformative power. In making claims to British citizenship through
the act of migration black migrants ﬂexed the boundaries of what it meant to British in
Britain and called into question exclusive notions of Britishness that marginalized people

of African descent and to be sure, all non-white British Commonwealth citizens.

 

”7 Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), I-37

291

 

APPENDICES

 

292

APPENDIX A

ESTIMATED NET COMMONWEALTH MIGRATION

(1953-1962)

West Indies India Pakistan Others Totals
1953 2000 2000
1954 1 1000 11000
1955 27500 5800 1850 7500 42650
1956 29800 5600 2050 9350 46800
1957 23000 6600 5200 7600 42400
1958 15000 6200 4700 3950 29850
1959 16400 2950 850 1400 21600
1960 49650 5900 2500 -350 57700
1961 66300 23750 25100 21250 136400
1962* 31800 19050 25080 18970 94900
Totals 272450 75850 67330 69670 485300

*These ﬁgures represent net arrivals for the ﬁrst six months of 1962 before the
Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 took effect in July of 1962.

Source: Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race ’ and ‘Race

Relations in Postwar Britain. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992), 13. These statistics
are based on records maintained by the House of Commons.

293

 

NEW COMMONWEALTH MIGRATION

APPENDIX B

(AUGUST l960-AUGUST 1961)

West Indies India Pakistan Totals
Aug-60 5800 550 340 6690
Sept-60 7900 l 100 400 9400
Oct-60 5350 340 300 5990
Nov-60 3300 640 400 4340
Dec-60 2900 1050 760 4710
Jan-61 1900 560 400 2860
Feb-61 2500 I200 650 4350
Mar-61 5800 1750 2100 9650
Apr-61 8300 1400 1660 l 1360
May-61 7450 1750 1180 10380
Jun-61 3850 2150 1850 7850
Jul-61 6150 2250 2300 10700
Aug-61 7700 2410 3000 I31 10
Totals 68900 17150 15340 101390

Note: These ﬁgures represent gross arrivals and do not account for return migration.
Source: PRO LAB 8/2704 Working Party Report on the Social and Economic Problems

Arising From the Growing Inﬂux Into the United Kingdom of Coloured workers From
Other Commonwealth Countries 26 September 1961.

294

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