BLACK LIBERATION TIME
Muhammad Ali was the greatest heavyweight boxing champion of all time. Malcom X and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated but the words of these great orators were reverberating in our spaces and places. Yet in school I was still being told that black people had been ‘discovered’, and apparently before we were discovered we were uncivilised, unsophisticated and unintelligent.
It wasn’t so much the racism from other kids that was bothering me at this time. I was a big kid, and any kid that came to me with racism would have a fight on his hands, and besides, most of the people around me were black. In fact, the white kids feared us because in some areas, like Handsworth and Aston, our gangs were much bigger than theirs. Sometimes white kids would be too scared to pass us on the street or walk through one of our areas, but we would reassure them and let them pass. There was no way they would be attacked simply because they were white, but they would be attacked if they messed with us.
Plenty of white boys and girls were hanging out with us because we had cool music, cool smokes and cool style, and they wanted some of that. No, the racism I was seeing at this time came firstly from the police – who were relentlessly stopping and searching us, even right outside the school gates – and that which I came across in school. It’s hard to say if the teachers were serious, hardcore or even soft racists, but the books they were teaching from, and their Anglocentric world view, were seriously racist.
While we were supposed to have been discovered, uncivilised, unsophisticated and unintelligent, they were great, civilisers of savages, never to be slaves, rulers of the waves, victorious and right. I can’t believe that most of the teachers teaching this stuff really believed it, especially when I consider that all the teachers I’ve come across as an adult are open-minded and curious, so what was happening back then? I go with the idea that they were just obeying orders, but when it came to the teaching of the Nazis I was told that obeying orders couldn’t be used as an excuse. Or maybe they just didn’t know any better.
It wasn’t the only thing they didn’t know the truth about – at the time I was struggling very badly with dyslexia (and so were other kids I knew) but teachers back then didn’t know what it was, so I was ‘stupid’.
On television I caught glimpses of the heroes of the Black Power movement. Muhammad Ali, Stokley Carmichael and Yuri Kochiyama were all preaching about the condition of black people, and Angela Davis was still regarded as the most dangerous person in the USA. Something had happened and something was happening; I just wasn’t fully aware of what it all was – I was too busy trying to survive in my home town – but I felt that my struggle in Birmingham, in the West Midlands of England, was connected to the struggles of people in Birmingham, Alabama, in the USA, and I could feel something calling me, but I didn’t quite understand it all.
Pastor and Mum didn’t really comment on the Black Power movement. Pastor mentioned it was good that Muhammad Ali wouldn’t go to Vietnam, but that was it. I remember Mum coming in one day and being really happy because she’d heard a woman in a restaurant had thrown a cup of tea over Enoch Powell. In terms of the politics of race they’d mention the ‘colour bar’ and places that were off-limits because they were hostile, but in terms of the politics that was going on in the big world, very little comment. For them it was all about Jesus.
All I knew then was that I didn’t like people killing people and I didn’t like people killing animals – but all I wanted was a girlfriend who didn’t eat meat and wasn’t a racist.