One of my earliest memories is from when I was six years old. I climbed into bed one December night with my mom and dad. They were listening to coverage of the 1960/61 West Indies tour of Australia. I remember snuggling up between them as they had the transistor radio tucked up in the bedhead close to their ears to make sure the volume didn’t have to be so high as to disturb the rest of the household. Do I recall that because I was a cricket obsessive? Was this an early sign that I was destined to be an international cricketer? No. I remember it for reasons of love, family and warmth. It was easy for me to pretend I wanted to listen to cricket so I could tuck in between them both. I was asleep before I even knew who was batting or bowling. But that memory might begin to take on a different theme in the context of this story.
Of course, West Indies cricket teams and Jamaican sporting teams, along with track and field athletes, had enjoyed sporting equality for some years – that chance for Black people to pit themselves on an equal footing against others on the field of play or on the track. Anyway, while I was dozing I’m sure my mom and dad must have felt immense happiness about that, thinking back. We must remember, when the West Indies toured Australia in 1960/61, the country still had a whites-only immigration policy. The hope for the future my parents must have shared, particularly as the civil rights movement in America gathered pace.
So, in 1975 when I became one of those Black players competing on equal terms and starting off in the same Australia, I’m sure my parents had thoughts and feelings beyond familial pride. Not that they would have ever said so. To me. To each other. To other family members. My dad was in the stands to watch me make my Test debut against Australia in Brisbane. My mum was no doubt listening on the radio in bed.
What I and my family had in that moment was a form of equality. And I had that throughout my sporting career. As I have become older and wiser, I feel a mixture of emotions about that. I was darn lucky that in my chosen career as a fast bowler I was not discriminated against because I was Black. By and large I was accepted. There is some guilt that it was so easy for me when the vast majority of Black people couldn’t have imagined such a situation. And guilt – as I have said – that it took me a while to face up to that, to realise it.
Likewise that I perhaps wasn’t aware of how important it was to be visible to other Black people. To be seen. To say, ‘Hey, here we are taking them on. We’re as good as them at anything. Not just sport.’ In fact, in recent years, since I’ve been going to work in South Africa, I came to realise through stories told to me by Black Africans there that they could never watch the all-conquering West Indies team of the 1980s. Apparently the apartheid regime of the time did not want Black Africans to see other Black people triumph, showing how good they themselves could be. The regime didn’t want them to start getting ideas in their heads.
What we have described so far in this book amounts to what is known as systemic racism, where every aspect of life is organised to keep the Black man down and the white man on top. Scientists, governments, educators, economists and bankers are the people who make the world turn. And they make sure that it turns away from Black people. Sport is different. It hasn’t always been that way – and I want to talk about that in more detail later – but I bring it up here deliberately to make a point about equality.
It is all we want. To be treated the same.
And, by God, Black people have gone to extraordinary lengths to get it. Have given their lives, even. I played cricket for a living. And, yes, I gave a bit of joy and relief to Black people. But then I went home to Jamaica again and didn’t dwell on the privilege that I had and they didn’t. The sacrifices that others made while I ran around a cricket field? Well, let’s say one pales into insignificance.
I am talking about Black people laying down their lives in conflicts just so they could be treated the same as white people.
Maybe you just did a double-take or had to read that sentence again. I don’t blame you. Black people gave their lives fighting for the Americans and the British in the belief that, once the guns and bombs and death had stopped, they would be seen in a new light. ‘Hey, these guys are not so bad after all… give ’em their rights.’ But you won’t have read about those stories because they are another part of history that has been ignored. Black sacrifice – to be recognised and treated with equality – has been covered up like it’s a dirty secret.
It is a harrowing symptom of the system. The slave era fostered a deep insecurity and lack of self-respect in Black people, which was then compounded by experiences in everyday life, such that they felt they had to prove they were as good as white people by dying for the cause. Were they treated the same? Did it work? Did it hell.
In America at the outbreak of the First World War, Black people couldn’t vote. But they sure could die ‘for their country’. But only once the armed forces realised they didn’t have enough white soldiers. African-Americans were allowed to enter the armed forces in 1917 after the Selective Service Act was passed. It required men aged 21–30 to register for the draft. This, as you would expect, was used as another tool to discriminate. The Black population of the US was 11 per cent, but 13 per cent of the draft was Black. More than 2.3 million African-Americans registered to fight. The Marines refused to take any people of colour. The Navy took small numbers and gave them menial jobs. So the US Army picked up the slack.
There was even a special training camp set up to train Black officers. Many felt that this was a God-sent blessing. Here was a chance to show their white ‘brothers in arms’ that they were worthy of respect. It was a chance, perhaps, to heal the racial divide, to unequivocally prove that the racist stereotypes which afflicted American life were nonsense. After all, everyone was on the same side, right?
Many African-Americans were drafted into the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment of the New York Army National Guard. They would fight and die in both world wars. They were nicknamed the Black Rattlers. There were early signs that white soldiers would be accepting of them. At a training camp in October 1917 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, two Black soldiers were racially abused by white shop owners and were refused service. Soldiers from the white 27th Division came to their aid. When there were similar incidents in other shops in Spartanburg, the 27th told businesses that if they wouldn’t serve Black soldiers, they would boycott them. ‘They’re our buddies. And we won’t buy from men who treat them unfairly.’ As usual, because in no endeavour do you find all good or all bad, there were white people who didn’t and wouldn’t put up with the discrimination, but that was among individuals, not in the hierarchy of the US military.
It was a false dawn. White regiments refused to fight with the 369th. When deployed in France, units of the 369th were given mainly labour, service and supply jobs. They were subjected to racist abuse and treated as inferiors. Just like at home, then. With the white Americans refusing to have anything to do with them, the generals had a problem. What to do with the 369th? The solution was to make them fight alongside the French army, not the Americans. They wore American uniforms but were issued with French weapons and helmets.
The French were delighted to have them, not least because they had suffered desertions and were desperate for reinforcements, and treated them as they would any other unit in their army. Not that they came with exactly a ringing endorsement. In one of the most shameful and racist documents I have had the misfortune to read, the US Army produced a pamphlet called ‘Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops’. Written by US General John Pershing, it was stunning in its vehemence and hatred of the Black race. This is how the New York State Military Museum records the episode and, I have to say, I couldn’t put some of the objections better myself.
Pershing stated that the Black man is an ‘inferior’ being to the White man. The Black man lacks ‘civic and professional conscience’ and is a ‘constant menace to the American’. It is startling that Pershing called the Black man a menace to the American, as if the Black Americans were not really Americans. And this is how the US Military regarded Black units. Pershing continued, ‘We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service.’ The use of ‘we’ in Pershing’s words essentially places French and Americans on the same side for being White. Pershing also added that ‘we’ must not commend too highly the Black American troops, especially not in front of White American troops. Pershing added that an effort must be made to prevent the local population from ‘spoiling the Negroes’. Startling is his use of the word ‘Negroes’. Later he adds, ‘Familiarity on the part of White women with Black men is furthermore a source of profound regret to our experienced colonials, who see in it an overwhelming menace to the prestige of the White race.’ Pershing seemed more concerned that his White troops not be offended, than by the outcome of the war.
Maybe if you are white you are reading that and thinking, Wow. As a Black man I read it and just shrug my shoulders. It is not surprising to me in the least. I just want to repeat the hatred for a moment, to let it linger. Blacks inferior intellectually. A degenerate danger to the white race. A menace to the prestige of the white race. A threat to white women (by the way, the US Army falsely accused Black soldiers of a cumulative number of rapes more than the entire army put together). And also, ‘spoil’? Does he mean being treated like a normal human being is to be spoiled?
What was that I was saying about being on the same side? The irony was that during the conflict the Germans produced propaganda leaflets which they dropped on the 369th questioning why they were fighting for their oppressors and saying that ‘the Germans have never harmed you’. Despite their own side spreading hate against them and not even wanting to fight with them, the 369th were unmoved and the German pamphlets only made them more determined to prove everybody wrong.
Luckily, the French were having none of it, either. Pershing hadn’t done his research. The French had plenty of Black soldiers and they had performed with bravery and brilliance in fierce battles at Verdun, Aisne, Compiègne and, infamously, the Somme. They had fighters from Morocco, Senegal and Algeria. It was normal for white to fight alongside Black guys and they welcomed the 369th with open arms. This served to infuriate and terrify the white Americans further.
A memo, signed by colonel J. L. A. Linard of the American Expeditionary Force Headquarters, raised white American concerns that Black soldiers and officers working with the French were being treated with too much ‘familiarity and indulgence’. They couldn’t stomach the French socialising with the Black soldiers. They wanted the French to treat them the same way as they did, which was to put up ‘whites only’ signs in camps, impose curfews and refuse to shake their hands.
They went further. The Americans spread rumours that the 369th were incompetent. The French investigated. Their report concluded: ‘the Blacks were regularly subjected to racist white officers and non-commissioned officers, and that these white officers often provided poor leadership and sent poorly equipped troops into battle, then covered up their mistakes by placing blame on their Black troops’.
The French needn’t have bothered to investigate. The 369th were fearless and they soon realised that. They earned the nickname the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’. The Hellfighters spent 191 days under fire in the trenches, more than any other American unit. They never lost a foot of ground. They never had a man taken prisoner. Only once did they fail in their objective, and that was down to artillery support not turning up. They fought in Champagne, Argonne, Alsace. And they suffered 1,500 casualties, the highest of any US regiment. They were the first Allied unit to reach the banks of the Rhine. I had no idea about that until I started researching their story.
The 369th had in their ranks one of the great war heroes. Private Henry Johnson was a railway station porter from Albany. One night in the Argonne forest, Johnson and Private Needham Roberts were attacked by dozens of Germans. Johnson and Roberts were almost immediately wounded. But they fought on. Johnson used grenades, his rifle and then, when the Germans made it into his trench, he used his knife and bare hands. He killed four, wounded twenty and the Germans did not break through. He suffered twenty-one wounds and needed a steel plate inserted in his foot. The French recognised his valour – he was awarded their highest military honour, the Croix de Guerre. The Americans did not. He didn’t even get a disability pension. He died in poverty in 1929, aged just thirty-seven. Only after a campaign highlighting his bravery did Johnson receive a Purple Heart, America’s highest military honour. It only took another seventy-two years. Johnson was one of 170 soldiers of the 369th to receive a Croix de Guerre. The regiment as a unit also earned a Croix de Guerre and many other awards.
Upon their return to New York, for a time it seemed as though the Americans would be as proud. The 369th were given a hero’s welcome as they marched through the city to Harlem in February 1919. The New York Tribune, which estimated the crowd at 5 million, reported: ‘Never have white Americans accorded so heartfelt and hearty a reception to a contingent of their Black country-men.’ The New York Times said that, to those there, ‘all the men appeared seven feet tall’.
So, were African-Americans finally accepted? They had proved they were as brave, as strong and as smart as their white counterparts after all. They had fought and died and been wounded for the same cause. This was equality, right? Of course not. Indeed, such was the fear that they might be considered as equals, the US military swung into action.
In October 1919, General Pershing, the same man who had called Black people ‘a menace to the white race’, led a victory parade through the streets of New York. To wild and raucous cheers more than 25,000 soldiers wearing full combat gear marched behind him. The 369th were not among that number. They were banned from taking part. Military police were banned from saluting a member of the 369th. The US also banned the French military from including the fallen of the 369th in the French war memorial. They were banned from the Paris parades, too.
Around 400,000 African-Americans fought in the First World War. There were more than 2 million from African colonies and Indo-China, and 1.5 million from British India. And 100,000 Chinese labourers fought for the Allies, too. That’s 4 million non-European and non-white soldiers who participated. All of them were banned from the victory parade. The only group to be allowed was a Sikh regiment, which fought with the British. Tall, strong and physically imposing, the British felt they were worthy of representation. But no one else.
Why did the elites not want a Black or brown face to be remembered by history? It was pretty simple: they were worried about white supremacy being challenged. In Britain and the US, racism was rife. Many people believed not only that whites were superior but that different races were competing for survival. It would do untold damage if present and future generations were to be shown and told that people of colour were as good at war, at fighting, at conquering, if you will, as white people. Another theory was that, once the reality took hold in people’s minds that Black had killed white, it could destabilise the world order. The ruling elite thought they would be removed in some sort of orgy of Black-on-white violence. The Brits thought the empire would fall. All if the truth got out. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, that fear was very real and it was exposed in very small, almost irrelevant ways. Take the example of the first time a Black man hit a white man in a Hollywood film. There was a huge furore when Sidney Poitier’s character, Virgil Tibbs, a black detective, returned the compliment after being struck by the white mayor in the movie, In the Heat of the Night. This was 1967. Kudos to the director Norman Jewison. But he was Canadian so possibly had a different outlook.
The First World War was won by white people. That was what I was taught at school. And every image you ever saw was of white soldiers being brave and heroic. And every history book about the conflict told stories about the same. It reinforced white supremacy. Only now, through the power of the internet and campaigners, do we really know what went on.
Black troops had been similarly shabbily treated by the British. Just like African-Americans, people of colour across the empire believed it was their duty to fight, to show them they were as good, to gain acceptance. The British War Office did not want them, though, because of the fear of upsetting the hierarchy. My West Indian brethren came anyway. So many, in fact, that the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) was formed.
Soldiers of the BWIR received lower pay than their white counterparts. None of them could ever rank higher than sergeant. They were initially given back-breaking labouring jobs, digging trenches, stocking munitions, cleaning latrines or laying telephone wires. This was frontline, unarmed work and not some easy, safe, away-from-the-action role. Their losses were high. In total more than 15,000 served. And 185 were killed in action and more than 1,000 died from illness. No doubt some of them perished through poor equipment and maltreatment because of the colour of their skin. They fought in Palestine, Jordan, France and Flanders.
Discrimination continued when the war was over. Stationed in Taranto, Italy, the regiment was expecting to celebrate like everyone else. No chance. While the white soldiers partied, the Black soldiers were put to work. They were to build and clean latrines for the white soldiers. When they found out that the white soldiers had been given a pay rise, the BWIR said enough was enough. In December 1918 they signed a petition complaining about poor pay and lack of promotions. This ‘mutiny’ was put down by force. One Black soldier was killed. Later, sixty of the BWIR were tried for mutiny and sent to prison. One was executed by firing squad.
All lives matter, eh? Not if you’re Black. The Great War was many things to many different people. For Black people and people of colour, such was their status in life that they actually saw the senseless slaughter as something life-affirming. It was an opportunity to be the same. Sadly, it is just another tragedy to add to the long list from that terrible time.
In the end, all that was affirmed for them was that they meant less than white people. They didn’t have equality. Try to imagine that for a moment. What it must have felt like for a member of the 369th, who had seen his friends blown to pieces and maimed, who had signed up in the hope of gaining respect, to be treated in that way. What did that do for his self-esteem? What did it do to his friends and family who witnessed that cruel rejection? And for the community he came from? I don’t know how I would have possibly coped with something like that.
And I think perhaps the most awful element of these stories for me was not just that they were treated with disdain, but how there were concerted efforts by the powers that be to make sure that what they sacrificed was not recognised. It was all planned. It is surely unforgivable that they were denied the chance to partake in the victory parades.
The trashing of their legacy was deliberate and evil. Even in the brutality of war, they were not given their dues. No acceptance, no recognition, no achievements. But wait, it doesn’t end there. There was no memorial placed anywhere in England to commemorate the African-Caribbean soldiers who fought alongside the white soldiers until June 2017. And that came after a memorial to commemorate the animals that had served and died under British military command had been placed in Hyde Park, London, in December 2004. So, the animals were commemorated thirteen years before the Black soldiers who fought for Britain, and anyone with a fleeting knowledge of London will recognise how central and popular Hyde Park is for locals and tourists alike, while the memorial to the soldiers was placed in Brixton, which is a long way from the hot spots. Not much more to say there.
This was a whitewashing of history, of the collective successes and triumphs of Black people and people of colour. Collective is a key word. There was no ‘safety in numbers’ here in that regard. You might have thought that governments and the military wouldn’t have the gall to try to pull off such a stunt considering there were so many who could raise a dissenting voice. But who would hear them? Besides, this was a well-trodden path for the elite. For years and years individual Black people who had achieved extraordinary successes, brilliant minds who had saved lives and managed feats that were considered world firsts, had been airbrushed from history. Lord forbid anyone should get the idea that a Black person was as brave or strong, but as intelligent, too.
I am writing this the day after it was announced that a vaccine was ready, effective and safe to unlock the world from the grasp of Covid-19. Some media organisations called it ‘a great day for humanity’. And for sure it was a happy, hopeful day. The stock markets surged, world leaders claimed that a return to normal life – going out for meals with friends, seeing vulnerable family members again, hugging them – was on the horizon and people celebrated (in a socially distanced way, I hope!) that one of the most tragic and tough periods some of us have ever known could soon be over.
Let’s think for a second about the achievement of the scientists who made that possible. Heroes and heroines one and all. What a debt each and every one of us owes them. Think of the pride that those people must feel. And the pride of their families. It is enough to bring a tear to the eye. No doubt, in time the brains behind such a scientific breakthrough will be cheered the world over, received by heads of state, given gongs and awards and prizes, one of them maybe with the word ‘Nobel’ in. They might, even, in time, receive a statue or two.
And, if we’re being crude, think of the riches that will come the way of the individuals and companies responsible. Few would begrudge them that. After all, they could well save hundreds of thousands of lives. Grandparents will see their grandchildren grow up. Families will not be ripped apart. Loved ones will not leave us prematurely. The gift of life.
This is, of course, what scientists do. And they have been doing it for years. The history of medicine is a ticker-tape parade of brilliant discoveries by brilliant minds.
But what about the person who discovered vaccines? The very first person to do so in the Western world. Let’s think about that brilliant mind. Think of the gift of life that they bestowed on the world. Think of the way they were feted and cheered and remembered. Think of the pride their friends and family felt. And, if you like, you can think of the money that they made.
In 1721, smallpox was running riot through Boston, USA. The disease, one of the most deadly of the era with a fatality rate at 30 per cent, was carried by crew on cargo ships. It arrived in Boston via crew from a British ship docking there. Out of a population of 11,000, 6,000 were struck down and 850 died. It disproportionately affected Native Americans because they had no immunity. The colonialists, who had introduced the illness when the state of Massachusetts became a slave colony in the mid-1600s, were not as badly affected because they had had some previous exposure in Europe.
The local authorities’ only hope of controlling the epidemic was to put arrivals in quarantine. They were shut up in houses with a red flag outside and the words ‘God have mercy upon this house’ painted on the door. Those who could, fled Boston. But the vast majority who remained were terrified.
That was until a man called Onesimus revealed a treatment for smallpox. The problem was, Onesimus was a slave, from Libya. He had told his owner, one Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, that he had been inoculated against smallpox in Africa. Mather wrote that Onesimus ‘had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it… and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion.’
What Onesimus described was the process of pus being taken from a person infected with smallpox and rubbed into a cut on a person’s arm. This triggered an immune response to protect against the disease. Need I point out, again, that African civilisation had been far in advance of the supposedly superior Western super-race?
Despite Mather describing Onesimus as ‘wicked’ and ‘thievish’, he asked his other slaves whether the story was true. When they told him they’d had the same treatment and believed they were immune, Mather wrote, perhaps begrudgingly, that Onesimus was a ‘pretty intelligent fellow’. However, he had a task to convince the colonialists that it was effective. They refused to believe that a slave could possibly be right. It was no doubt dismissed as some form of witchcraft or quackery. Indeed, there was outrage at the suggestion that white people should take it seriously. Mather became almost a pariah. He was criticised for his ‘negroish’ thinking. A bomb was thrown through the window of his house but fortunately it did not go off. Mather was a victim of his own prejudice, of course. His beliefs that Black people were inferior or ‘devilish’, as he wrote, were used against him.
Only one doctor in Boston believed that Onesimus’s treatment would work. His name was Zabdiel Boylston. After another outbreak, he inoculated his family and the slaves he owned. In total, he inoculated 242 people. Only six died. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a vaccination was developed against smallpox thanks to Onesimus’s method. Edward Jenner, an English physician, got the credit and was hailed as a pioneer. He was white.
As for Onesimus, no one knows what happened to him. Some historians say he was able to buy his freedom from Cotton Mather. Let’s think about that for a second. The man who helped beat smallpox in Boston wasn’t even granted his freedom. He was still considered worthless. And, years later, a white man took the credit. To this day, smallpox is the only disease that has been completely eradicated.
It is perhaps not surprising that Onesimus would have been treated this way given the fierce and deep-rooted disease of white supremacy at the time. Slaves had no rights whatsoever. And the idea of a Black man being credited with even the smallest amount of intelligence, skill or craftsmanship – and there were many slaves denied the opportunity to patent the inventions they produced at the time – would have been met with howls of derision. And any trappings, awards or recognition? Unthinkable. Forget it.
White people and colonialists just couldn’t possibly countenance the idea that a Black person was capable of such ingenuity or brilliance of mind. But it is surprising that, in the hundreds of years since, the achievements of Black people continue to be ignored or airbrushed from history. On an individual level, Onesimus was something of an unfortunate trendsetter in that regard, as well as being instrumental in saving millions of lives.
I didn’t read about Onesimus until I started researching this book. It takes on greater significance because of the Covid pandemic and I can only shake my head at the idea that he was one of the very first Black people – and no doubt there were so many more who have slipped through the white parchment of history – to have their successes ignored or denigrated. I suppose, as part of my ‘awakening’, I had been for years keeping notes of others who had suffered the same fate, remembering snippets of information here and there which, when put together, grows to a mountain of injustice. People who did brilliant, radical things only to be forgotten or have their achievements stolen by a white person.
Had I known about Onesimus when I had my bit to say on Sky Sports, I would have told his story. Instead, I spoke about another man: Lewis. Howard. Latimer. I write his name with pauses to try to evoke some of the passion and emotion that I felt that day. I can remember the hurt and bewilderment rising up in me as I spoke his name. Who was he? A genius, simply put. But one you will have never heard of because there is probably not a school or college in this world that teaches his name for the simple reason that he was a Black man.
Let’s go back to school for a minute. One of the first things you learn, maybe in your second or third year at the latest, is the answer to this question: who invented the lightbulb? To a man, woman and child the answer will come back: Thomas Edison. Of course. Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. Everybody knows that. It is burned into our memory. Apart from the fact that he didn’t. At least, not a functional lightbulb.
Thomas Edison invented a lightbulb with a paper filament. It lit up the room, for sure, but it burned out by the time you clicked your fingers. The man who invented the carbon filament, which burned and burned, allowing us to have a lightbulb lasting years? Lewis. Howard. Latimer. In 1882 Latimer received the patent for that carbon filament. He literally lit up our homes. And our streets – he went on to supervise public streetlight systems in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, London.
Edison, a genius himself, may well have been the first to actually invent the lightbulb. But which is really significant? A lightbulb that burns out after seconds or one that keeps going and going, which was and is of use to mankind? I would think the latter, and Lewis Howard Latimer was the one who made it a functional reality.
I tell this story not to try to rubbish Thomas Edison or label him an intellectual thief, because he wasn’t, but simply to point out that it was inconceivable for Latimer to be given any credit at the time, or in all the years that have followed, because of the colour of his skin. Had he not been Black, had he not been the son of slaves who had escaped from Virginia and fought for their freedom in a court of law, then his name would have tripped off the tongue in exactly the same way as Edison’s.
Nor did he have the same, shall we say, appetite for self-promotion as Edison, it seems. Time magazine noted that, although Edison held the record for US patents, he had a habit of exaggeration. A 1979 profile read: ‘An incurable show-off and self-promoter who circulated so many myths about his personality and accomplishments that 48 years after his death historians are still struggling to separate legend from fact.’
Latimer didn’t stand a chance. During the 2020 US election campaign, Joe Biden was corrected by CNN when he said that Latimer had invented the lightbulb. I can tell you now, I’m with Joe. Who should receive the credit? The person who invents something that doesn’t work or the person who corrects the faults of the invention to make it useful? Or, at the very least, how about equal recognition?
Let’s keep going. Who invented the telephone? Alexander Graham Bell, right? Well, he takes almost all of the credit. But again, Latimer played a significant role. He was the man who produced the plans and drawing for Bell’s idea. Never heard about that either, did you? Latimer’s story is not hard to find. He is included in the American National Inventors Hall of Fame. His obituary in the New York Times after he died at the age of eighty in 1928 does not stint on his achievements. But none of what he did is taught in schools.
I could have filled this book with other such examples. There are plenty more Black inventors (check the list at the back of this book) whose accomplishments have struck a chord with me but who you won’t have heard of. Garrett Morgan invented the three-way traffic signal. Who doesn’t see a traffic light when they leave the house? Everybody does. But who knows the name of the man who invented it? Very few.
Morgan was born in Kentucky, USA, in 1877. He had only an elementary-school education and in his mid-teens moved to Ohio, where he took a job as a handyman. He used this money to hire tutors to get a better education and he became fascinated by machines and how they worked. He invented an improved sewing machine and his business was a huge success.
In 1914 he patented a ‘breathing device’ which protected people from harmful gases. He travelled the country selling it, employing a white actor to play the inventor because he knew fire departments wouldn’t buy it from a Black man. Some reports said his gas masks were used by American soldiers in the First World War. I wonder how many lives that saved? Likewise the traffic lights. Morgan was the first Black man in Cleveland to own a car. For all that he did, he should have owned Cleveland, not just a car.
Considering the treatment of Black servicemen during and after the world wars, it is worth pausing for a minute yet again to think about how those men wanted to give their lives just so they could be accepted. And here we are talking about more unheralded Black people who saved lives.
Otis Boykin is another. He was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1920. He invented a wire precision resistor. Now, I’m not entirely sure what that is or precisely what it does, but my research tells me it proved to be useful for radios and televisions. He modified it later so that it could withstand extreme temperatures and so the IBM computer arrived. All of this experience led to him being in demand as one of the brightest electronic innovators and to his greatest achievement: the control unit for the pacemaker. How many lives has that saved?
Type into Google ‘Who discovered the North Pole?’ and the answer will come back as Robert Peary. In fact, there is a chunk of evidence that it was, in fact, a Black man called Matthew Henson.
Henson, who was born in 1866, three years after emancipation, was Peary’s team-mate. They shared the dream of being the first humans to stand on top of the world, and together they endured tremendous physical and mental hardship in trying to realise it, spending eighteen years on expeditions all over the world. Seven times they tried to conquer the pole.
The pair had met when Henson was working as a store clerk in Washington, DC. He had previously been a cabin boy after he walked barefoot from DC to Baltimore – about 40 miles – looking for work because he was orphaned (his parents had been sharecroppers). He sailed all over the world on the Katie Hines, was educated on board and became a good sailor.
Peary, a US Navy officer, had employed Henson as his personal assistant. Their first expedition was to the jungles of Nicaragua. They formed a bond which would (almost) last a lifetime. Their Arctic explorations began in 1891 and together they mapped the entirety of the Greenland ice cap. Yet they kept failing in their bid to be the first to the earth’s northern-most point. Each time they got closer and today it is recognised that Henson’s skills and expertise were crucial. Peary was the frontman, the public face of the excursions. Much of the brawn and brains came from Henson, and it is widely acknowledged that he was of equal experience to Peary.
Their eighth and final attempt came in 1909. Henson believed that learning the local Inuit language could make the difference. He was the only member of the team to do so.
In freezing temperatures, howling winds and a mist that blocked out the sun, navigation was hard. But when the fog cleared Peary and Henson realised that they had overshot the pole. It transpired that Henson, who had been the lead sledge, had been the first man there. Henson said: ‘I was in the lead that had overshot the mark by a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.’ Henson had made history.
There would be no triumph, however, for Henson. Peary was furious that Henson had got there first and barely spoke to him again. ‘From the time we knew we were at the Pole, Commander Peary scarcely spoke to me,’ he said. ‘It nearly broke my heart… that he would rise in the morning and slip away on the homeward trail without rapping on the ice for me, as was the established custom.’
There was no campaign to ignore Henson’s achievements. It was considered ridiculous that a Black man could achieve something so monumental. In a book called The Adventure Gap, by James Edward Mills, it is noted how strange Peary’s reaction was, particularly as, at the outset, he said, ‘Henson must go all the way.’ The two men had been friends, team-mates and adventurers for years. Perhaps Peary’s reaction was due to the fact he had discovered incontrovertible proof that Black people were equals.
Even when sceptics raised doubts about the success of the expedition, Henson’s view was not worthy. Ironic really, because he was the only member of the crew, remember, who could speak Inuit, and they would have been able to corroborate Peary’s story. History remembered the pair differently. Peary was promoted to rear admiral and travelled the world as a superstar, feted wherever he went. Henson took a job as a clerk at the federal customs house in New York and later parked cars for a living.
Peary died in 1920 yet it took another seventeen years before the truth emerged when Henson became the first Black member of the Explorers Club. Peary had two spells as president of the club, 1909–11 and 1913–16. Henson died in 1955. On the seventy-ninth anniversary of the expedition, Henson’s body was relocated to Arlington National Cemetery and buried close to a monument erected to Peary. And in 2000 Henson was posthumously awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal. The first person to receive it? Peary in 1906.
Read between the lines of that story of ‘equality’: white man is in charge of Explorers Club, his Black ‘rival’ only allowed to join after his death. Black man has to die before he receives rightful honour, and is then buried near the white man’s monument. I guess you could say it is progress of sorts, but Henson’s life is an example of how slowly the wheels of change turn.
It also reinforces my point about education. Kids weren’t being taught the truth about one of the most significant explorations in history. They were being taught a lie convenient to the status quo, to reaffirm white supremacy. It just would not do that a Black man was equal to a white man in extraordinary feats.
It is rare to find a person of colour being hailed as a hero in the history books you find in schools. Mary Seacole is one example that springs to mind, although for depressingly negative reasons. As I said before, there are so many, but I could not ignore the Jamaican for obvious reasons.
Seacole, as you may know, was recognised for her extraordinary compassion, bravery and skill in caring for British soldiers during the Crimean War. In 2004 she was voted the Greatest Black Briton. There is a statue of her on Westminster Bridge in London. She was added to the British national curriculum in 2007.
But in 2013 a campaign started to have Seacole removed from the curriculum. Michael Gove, the education secretary at the time, said more time should be spent learning about figures like Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill. Gove’s decision followed a particularly nasty campaign by the media, claiming that Seacole ‘wasn’t really Black’, wasn’t ‘really a nurse’ and was a ‘politically correct myth’. It only becomes clear what was at play here when you consider the attack was along the lines of, ‘She was no Florence Nightingale.’
Now, what does Nightingale have to do with it? She was white, of course. And kind, caring, wise and, as you would expect, there to be glorified on the curriculum. The idea of a Black woman being considered as her equal? Of being considered as virtuous? And children being taught such things? This raised the hackles of those who felt that their history of superiority was being threatened. The two women were pitted against each other in some sort of bizarre historical nursing play-off. For anyone who had the time to read up on both women, it was patently ridiculous. Nightingale was the mother of modern nursing, Seacole gave solace and succour on the battlefield. Not that this should be relevant, but please let’s not compare batsmen to bowlers – they do different things but both are essential.
Few were more hysterical than the Nightingale Association, which seems to exist to rail against comparison of the two women and yet is full of articles doing exactly that, only in grossly unfavourable terms to Seacole. It is nothing short of a character assassination, claiming she was a criminal for wearing war medals which weren’t hers, repeating that she wasn’t really Black and slyly questioning her motives: ‘she missed the first three battles [in Crimea] to tend to her gold stocks’.
It’s worth pointing out that Seacole felt she suffered racism in her bid to be taken on as a nurse, first with the Americans and secondly with Nightingale herself. She wrote in her autobiography:
Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? I had an interview with one of Miss Nightingale’s companions. She gave me the same reply, and I read in her face the fact that, had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it.
Many of the arguments against Seacole being on the curriculum focus on her colour. That she is a poster girl for the politically correct who desperately need a heroine. Excuse me, but Black people, as I think I have proved in this very chapter alone, should not need some sort of politically motivated campaign to gain recognition. Just don’t hide their accomplishments and they will become self-evident. What, precisely, is wrong about championing and remembering Black achievers? It should, in fact, be a matter of championing achievers, full stop. Irrespective of the colour of their skin. And that should be the case with all well-thinking people.
But there are those who say that this is Black people trying to take over, to punish white people and to denigrate their achievements. Give me a break. As I’ve said before, what is really going on is their belief that they are superior is being challenged and they cannot stand it. So they attempt to continue to whitewash history. Listen, having equal recognition for all achievers does not lessen anyone’s achievements. And, surprise, surprise, it came from a government responsible for the Windrush scandal. This was when the UK government deported – and threatened many more – the people, and their children, who they had pleaded with to come over and help rebuild the country after the Second World War. The same political party who relied on and encouraged support from sections of the population who no doubt had some hostility to Britain’s diverse racial history.
Why, I wonder, when it has been proved that Black kids do better at exams when they learn about historical figures they can identify with, would they not teach pupils about such people? Is it not time that the lessons taught in schools reflect the multicultural nature of the society being taught? I heard the British prime minister himself say that you can’t go back and edit history. Well, I would suggest that history has already been edited and what we’re asking is for it to be unedited, to reflect all achievers, not just what suits one set of people.
Black achievements and sacrifices have been ignored. And every time there have been successful Black expressions, through culture, religion and indeed sport, there has been a move to beat it down, too. I should give my views, mainly, on sport. It is the context of my life, after all. But music moves every man, woman and child more than sport. And without Black people we would not be tapping our feet in the same way.
Because of music’s universal appeal it is important to note how Black influence and invention could rate as one of the biggest whitewashes in history. Sure, everyone knows that rap, hip-hop, soul and gospel are what you might call ‘Black’ music. But blues, jazz, rock and roll, country, funk and house were born back in the plantation fields. Music was escapism from the horrors of slavery.
The blues has its origins in the American South and the first recordings were made in the 1920s by Black women. Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, would not have existed without the blues. These days, Elvis would be criticised for cultural appropriation. That’s a buzz phrase, among some others, that people get agitated about, but it’s not something that bothers me at all. I only mention it to show the origins of the music.
Elvis was deliberately and consciously positioned as an artist who blended Black and white. And it could be argued that the way his music and style did that helped bridge the racial divide. That’s not a ground-breaking view, though. But I bet you don’t know that ‘Hound Dog’, one of his greatest hits, was first performed by a Black woman. Big Mama Thornton was one of the most influential blues singers in the 1950s. ‘Hound Dog’ was written for and inspired by Thornton. And her version sold more than 2 million copies. Of course, Thornton barely made any money, but Presley’s version three years later was one of the biggest money-spinners of his career.
Dominic James ‘Nick’ LaRocca is the composer, wrongly, credited with ‘inventing’ jazz. He was white. Can anyone really, with a straight face, say that white people invented jazz? Charles Joseph ‘Buddy’ Bolden was one of the earliest jazz musicians in 1900 and was regarded by his contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of ragtime music, or ‘jass’, which later became known as jazz. He was Black, of course. He was barely fifty-four years old when he died in 1931, leaving behind no written scores or recorded music as all his performances were live and full of improvisations, which is exactly what jazz is. LaRocca was born in 1889 and, by the time he formed his Dixieland jazz band in 1916, Buddy had already been going for quite a few years.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, another forgotten name, was the ‘mother’ of rock and roll legends like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. Sister Rosetta was a singer, songwriter, guitarist and recording artist who was popular in the 1930s and 40s, mixing spiritual lyrics and rhythmic accompaniments, which was the precursor to rock.
Country music, however, is supposed to be as white as it gets. Stetsons, pick-up trucks, cowboy boots and white faces dominate. It was, in fact, heavily reliant on African-American culture because of the playing of the banjo by Blacks in the south of America. This can be traced back to the seventeenth-century slave ships, where the captors made Africans bring instruments from their homeland. The ‘akonting’ was an early folk lute version of the American banjo and came from West Africa. The banjo and the accompanying vocal style were appropriated by minstrel or ‘blackface’ shows. The ‘blackface’ image perhaps intentionally or unintentionally showing the connection to the slaves who invented this style of music. This was the beginning of country.
Although musical history is another story that had been whitewashed, I had thought the modern industry was more inclusive. And by that I mean we have visible Black stars, like Beyoncé or Rihanna or Jay-Z. And not just ‘stars’ in the common sense of the word, but titans who are powerful and influential enough to move into other industries and dominate. That is change for the better. Not since the great man, Bob Marley, was in his prime have we had Black musical artists crossing divides and breaking down barriers.
Country music still has a lot of work to do, though. In 2017 a multiracial artist called Kane Brown was topping all the country charts but was ignored by industry executives at the Country Music Awards. Lil Nas X, a rapper and country music kid from the projects in Atlanta, Georgia, remixed a song with Billy Ray Cyrus, a country music legend. ‘Old Town Road’ became US number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a record-breaking number of weeks, but it didn’t have the same influence on the country music chart from which it was ‘dropped’ earlier. Note the language, ‘dropped’ – that means it was originally classified as country. Billboard decided that the song did not embrace enough elements of ‘today’s’ country music. Country music radio stations also refused to play the song.
Those who know better say that ‘today’s’ country music has lost sight of its roots, the Black instruments and traditions of its origins. The New York Times went a bit further; they translated this as ‘the song is too Black for certain white people’.
Sport doesn’t have this problem. If you win, you are recognised and revered. If you are good enough, you play, although this tends to apply more to individuals than team sports. In any individual endeavour on the sporting field, there can be no doubt about who is fastest, strongest, fittest or most skilled. The finishing tape does not discriminate. Hence Hitler could do nothing about Jesse Owens showing up his so-called superior race in the 1936 Munich Olympics. Winning margins are difficult to dispute but it can be a bit different when it comes to teams. And I had personal experience of that when playing for the West Indies.
Maybe you know this. Maybe you don’t. The greatest sports team ever was the West Indies cricket team that I was a part of. No team has been so dominant or unbeatable over as long a period. Ever. This is not a boast, or rose-tinted bias. It is a simple fact. Between June 1980 and up to the start of March 1995, West Indies did not lose a series. We beat everybody for fifteen years, both home and away. No other sporting team, in any discipline, anywhere in the world, dominated for that long, not even domestically, let alone internationally.
Is that West Indies team now revered and recognised? For sure. Books have been written about it, films made and legacies have been long-lasting. I know that without membership of that team, I would not have had a career in broadcasting. But there is no doubt that when we were beating everybody out of sight, there was an effort by some in the cricket establishment and the media to malign what we were doing and how we were doing it. And that’s because the story of West Indies cricket is one about a mainly Black team taking on and defeating ‘white supremacy’. Indeed, because the Black Power movement had not long since been seen as a destabilising influence in America in particular, one media personality thought it wise to try to throw mud on what we were accomplishing by trying to stick the label of Black Power militancy on the team.
Without slavery, there would not have been cricket in the Caribbean. It’s so obvious it doesn’t really need saying, but the colonial rulers brought the sport to the islands and the slaves watched and, eventually, learned to play. But they were not allowed to bat. The Black man learned to play cricket because the back-breaking hard work of bowling the ball in extreme heat suited their supposed inferior status. The slave master would bat. The Black man would bowl or be sent to collect the ball.
Batting was also seen as something of an art form, something beautiful, technical and highly skilled that only the white man could do. Bowling the ball was about being strong and fit. On racial lines, cricket has moved on from those ideas, although to this day the phrase ‘it’s a batsman’s game’ probably has a nod to that slice of history. Indeed, that view continued in the Caribbean for many years. In the eighteenth century, Blacks were not allowed to play in official matches. And it wasn’t until 1906 that a West Indies touring team included Black players. And only when the natural brilliance of players like Learie Constantine and George Headley became undeniable did attitudes really change. They made their debuts for West Indies close together, Constantine in 1928 and Headley in 1930.
Headley was a trailblazer. He was made the first ever Black captain for the West Indies in 1948, an extraordinary achievement because if folks were stubbornly convinced that batsmanship was for ‘whites only’, they were practically immovable about who should lead a team. A Black man didn’t have the wit, ingenuity or respect, apparently. Headley apart, every West Indies team from 1900 to 1957 was captained and managed by a white person when the white population in the islands was decreasing and the number of Black people playing cricket was rising exponentially. Michael Manley, the former Jamaican prime minister, described Headley as ‘Black excellence personified in a white world and white sport’. It was Michael Manley’s political party, the People’s National Party, albeit in the days of his father, Norman Washington Manley, that pressured the all-white West Indies Cricket Board to make Headley skipper against England in Barbados. It would be only one game. The job full-time was too much ground for them to concede. It would be another eleven years before the West Indies had a full-time Black captain, the esteemed Frank Worrell.
Headley knew what he represented. When he toured Australia in 1930, he wrote ‘African’ on the immigration form. He was also known as the Black Bradman. This moniker was considered a feat in itself because Don Bradman was regarded as the greatest ever. So, there was a Black man who stood shoulder to shoulder with him in terms of ability – and there was recognition that this was the case, although we West Indians, and Jamaicans in particular, preferred to call Bradman the White Headley. I’m not sure why anyone of colour had to be compared to a white person and called the ‘Black whatever’. I have never heard of ‘the white Pelé’ or ‘white Muhammad Ali’, ‘white Michael Jordan’. I think you get my drift.
This was at a time when cricket was run by the colonial masters, the English, and here was a descendant of slaves showing everybody that equality was possible. Manley summed it up rather well, I thought, with this: ‘Headley became the focus for the longing of an entire people for proof – proof of their own self-worth and their own capacity.’ That role model theme again – people need to lift themselves.
The teams that Headley was a part of, as well as the ones before and the ones after, were seen as entertainers rather than winners. They could be brilliant one day, and awful for the next four. This was how the term ‘calypso cricket’ was coined. West Indies were not winners. This made them extremely popular with spectators in Australia and England because it reinforced the supremacy. The West Indies’ collective performances were a reminder to Black and white that the status quo remained. When the West Indies eventually won their first Test match on English soil in 1950, it was a source of inspiration for all West Indians. That they went on to win the series meant unadulterated joy.
My first tour as a West Indies player was to Australia in 1975/76. And it was a wake-up call. We were abused on and off the field but, I repeat, I heard nothing derogatory from the cricketers themselves. I want to keep making this point clear. We were given a terrible beating (5-1 in a six-game series) by the Australians.
I had been taken aback by the hostility of the Australian team. Maybe it was just my naivety. They did not give an inch. They had two terrifying fast bowlers in Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, who peppered our batsmen with bullets to the body, leaving them bruised and broken. Not that we complained about that. It was part of the game. ‘Lillee! Lillee! Lillee! Kill-kill-kill,’ the crowd would chant. That wasn’t a white versus Black thing. The Aussies would shout that at their grandmother if she was batting. But there was racist abuse, too, on the field of play. Some of my team-mates have since said that the colour of their skin was brought into it. Gordon Greenidge said he felt humiliated by the abuse. Viv Richards was targeted from the stands, too. ‘Fans’ would shout at him, ‘You Black bastard!’ Viv said, matter-of-factly, ‘I’m not a bastard.’ It was a degrading experience as a human being and a cricketer.
The abuse aside, that defeat by Australia sowed the seed for the rising of the greatest team. It was the fast bowlers who had done the damage. Our captain, Clive Lloyd, knew that and thought, How would Australia fare it we had fast bowlers of our own? So he set about building a fast-bowling unit as lethal and as terrifying. I was one of them. My nickname was ‘Whispering Death’. This was because I was light on my feet and the umpire, who always had his back turned to me, of course, as I ran in to bowl, could not hear me coming. The ‘Death’ bit? Well, I could kill at the speed that I bowled, at least that’s what Dickie Bird, the very good and famous umpire, thought anyway. At speeds upwards of 90mph, a blow to the head from a cricket ball could be fatal. Andy Roberts was called ‘The Hitman’. Colin Croft was the ‘Smiling Assassin’. Both were as fast as me.
We also had our own George Headley. Viv Richards was one of the all-time great batsmen. But he was an extraordinary man, too. He lived and breathed the Black man’s heritage. He knew where we had come from, where we were going and, more importantly, how we were going to get there. On the field of play he was aggressive. He would swagger to the wicket with his head held high. He stared down the bowlers and the fielders. He chewed gum in defiance. He refused to wear a helmet to protect his head and at all times wore his wool maroon West Indies cap. It was a deliberate performance, a show. He personified Black power without uttering a word. ‘Aggression meets aggression,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to fight me, I’m gonna fight back. We were as good as anyone. Equal, for that matter.’
The combination of terrific fast bowlers and a talismanic Viv dovetailed with a movement in the Caribbean. We came together as young men at a time when the Caribbean islands were growing up, too. It was the time of independence. Many of us had been born on colonial islands but we were becoming men on independent nations. It was a get up, stand up moment all over the region (no pun intended referencing the great Bob Marley song). For us as cricketers and our supporters back home, cricket became an expression of Black rebellion. Previously it had been about imparting British values and a way of disciplining the Black man or keeping him in his place, such as having no Black captain or, years before, not being allowed to bat. We were restoring a dignity that had been taken.
Some of the guys I played with lived and breathed that every single day. Gordon Greenidge had moved to England at the age of fourteen. He was called a ‘wog’ in the street. The anger of those experiences came out in the way he played. I think Viv was like that. As he said years later, he ‘felt the pain of the brothers and sisters’ during the civil rights movement in America. He saw cricket as a way that we could have a true level playing field. And every match he would wear a wristband of green, gold and red. Green for the colour of the African plains, gold for what was stolen and red for the blood that was spilled. In Viv’s pomp, they used to sell those wristbands to kids in English sports shops. I wonder how many mums and dads would have bought them if they’d known what they symbolised?
We were one people. One nation. For me, I wasn’t thinking every single minute of the match that ‘we must have equality’ or ‘Black power’ as I knocked over a batsman. That was emotional and it couldn’t get in the way of me doing my job. I felt that I had to be in control and to be rational if I was going to get batsmen out. If I roared in as an angry Black guy, I wouldn’t have done so well. So, was it a motivation for me? Absolutely, but I think the impression that as a team we were obsessing about an ideal was off the mark. Our intensity didn’t alter whether we played against cricketers of colour or white cricketers. Most of us were trying to do ourselves and our families justice.
And we did that. As I said, we beat everyone. And when we were beating everyone it sure got interesting. A bunch of Black guys coming together and dominating was unprecedented. And the old colonial powers didn’t like it. The status quo was under threat. We attacked teams with sheer pace. A battery of fast bowlers that had never been seen before – and rarely since. We scared teams. Once you have that capability to hurt someone, the batsman is preoccupied with self-preservation.
Despite the fact that the Aussies and the Lillee–Thomson axis gave Clive Lloyd the idea, the authorities, the scared and the weak tried to use it against us. We were terrorists. We were bringing the game into disrepute. There was even the ludicrous assertion in the press corps that, if the rules were not changed, ten batsman would be killed in one English summer. When we went back to Australia and gave them a taste of their own medicine, the same crowds that chanted ‘Kill!’ booed when one of their players got hit.
The press, all over the world, parroted the angst of the establishment. And often in a racist way. ‘Stop this mayhem!’, ‘Clamp down on bullies’, ‘The Hate Brigade’, ‘All bouncers and bongos’, ‘Coconuts!’ were just some of the headlines. What these people wanted was a return to the old West Indies teams, the entertainers or the calypso cricketers. They were happy with us winning every now and again but we weren’t meant to dominate. They wanted us to lose with a smile and say, ‘Thank you for the opportunity.’ No way. Nothing could stop us. So many ideas were being bandied about to try to limit our success. There was talk of drawing a line across the middle of the pitch and calling no-balls for any deliveries pitching short of that line. They couldn’t whip us or ‘put us in our place’ any more, so they had to find a way to stop us. Maybe they didn’t realise what they were doing and that it was their deep-seated subconscious screaming, ‘You are superior, this cannot happen.’
Let me pause here for a minute, though, to make it absolutely clear that at no point did I think that attitude was universal. I am well aware of the fact that many white folks enjoyed and loved our cricket. We made great friends on and off the field in Australia and England. You see, just like today, there is a difference between the ordinary man and woman on the street and those in authority.
And while we’re on the topic of how the game should be played, let’s cast our minds back to the 2005 Ashes series. It was one of the best Test series I was fortunate enough to commentate on. England won with four outstanding fast bowlers in their line-up. When Steve Harmison hit Australian captain Ricky Ponting on the cheek at Lord’s, drawing blood, the crowd bellowed approval and cheered. There was not a word about intimidatory bowling or too many bouncers.
One of West Indies cricket’s fiercest critics was David Frith, editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly (WCM). Before the West Indies tour of England in 1991 he wrote this: ‘Another invasion is upon us by a West Indian team that is the most fearsome, the most successful and the most unpopular in the world. Their game is founded on vengeance and violence and is fringed by arrogance. The only mercy is that they’re not bringing their umpires with them… these matches have long since become manifestations of the racial tensions that exist in the world outside the cricket gates.’
Four years later with West Indies in England again, Mr Frith got himself into trouble for publishing views on those racial tensions. He was sacked as the editor of WCM after he published an article by a writer called Robert Henderson entitled ‘Is it in the blood?’ It was a racist analysis of supposed ‘foreigners’ playing cricket for England and there was an outcry, even making front-page news.
Henderson wrote: ‘An Asian or negro raised in England will, according to the liberal, feel exactly the same pride and identification with the place as the white man. The reality is somewhat different. It is even possible that part of a coloured England-qualified player feels satisfaction (perhaps subconsciously) at seeing England humiliated because of post-imperial myths of oppression and exploitation.’
Phil DeFreitas, an England player at the time, who had moved to the country at the age of ten from Dominica, and Devon Malcolm, the Jamaican-born England fast bowler, successfully sued. Chris Lewis, an all-rounder who played eighty-five times for England and was born in Guyana, received damages. I note that David Graveney, CEO of the Professional Cricketers’ Association, suggested DeFreitas and Malcolm should not sue. Graveney led a rebel cricket tour to apartheid South Africa in 1989/90.
It is also worth noting, with Frith’s ‘racial tensions’ comment in mind, that the English summer of 1995 was a period when Black people in England were once again being victimised, abused and killed, as I was reminded by a friend who sent the following passage from a book by Mike Marqusee, an American author, called Anyone But England:
In May, Brian Douglas, a Black man, died after being struck on the head by police using new US-style batons in Kennington, not far from The Oval. In June, Asian youths in the Manningham district of Bradford took to the streets for three days following the wrongful arrest of teenagers playing a noisy game of football. An enquiry later blamed the riot on the ‘arrogance and ignorance’ of local police. In July, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police singled out Black youths as ‘muggers’, relying on statistical evidence nearly as spurious as Henderson’s [the author of the Wisden article], and launched Operation Eagle Eye – a police sweep explicitly aimed at a particular section of the community, defined by colour. The Tory Government announced yet another crackdown on illegal immigrants and launched their Asylum and Immigration Bill, which sought to deny welfare benefits to asylum seekers. According to the British Crime Survey, there had been a 50% increase in racial incidents over the previous five years. A TUC report revealed that Blacks with university degrees remained twice as likely to be unemployed as whites with the same qualifications, and that 66% of Black employees were being paid a lower hourly rate than white workers doing similar jobs. Another report showed that Black children were being excluded from state schools at a rate six times that of whites. Meanwhile, Childline, the children’s charity, revealed that racial abuse was a common experience for children from ethnic minority backgrounds, and a major cause of mental illness.
During that summer of 1995, the West Indies bowlers were called ‘savage’ and ‘muggers’ in British newspapers. That use of language was deliberately derogatory and used to reinforce the stereotype that people with Black skin should be feared. On a purely sporting level that was okay for us. We wanted the batsman to be frightened. But, unfortunately, the inference was not limited to sports.
That West Indies team had the opposition in a psychological vice, I guess. We had them every which way. Given what had come before in history and what was happening in the world at the time with apartheid and West Indians being treated as second-class citizens in Britain, me and my team-mates were their worst nightmares realised. Black people showing that they were equal in mind, body and spirit. So it was no wonder that West Indians in England and other foreign lands who felt oppressed drew strength from the performances of our team and started to demand equality in day-to-day life.
But we were the lucky ones. We had strength in numbers. Many of the Black sportspeople who were doing it on their own, who had come years before, are only now being recognised. And it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t spend some time paying homage to a guy I read about, and was wowed by, during Black History Month. His name was Fritz Pollard. He was a pioneer for Black sport. And, hopefully only until now, had been largely forgotten. Pollard was the American football player who took the sport by storm at a time when his fellow African-Americans were being lynched in alarming numbers.
American football is a sport that I love because of the nuances of the game and its complex tactical strategies. And it is one where Black athletes are given their dues. They are equal and leading the way. Pollard was way ahead of his time. He was the best player for the champions in 1920, the first Black coach in 1921 and the first Black quarterback in 1923. A Black coach telling white players what to do in the US in 1921! It blows the mind. Likewise, Pollard being a quarterback, the most coveted position in the team and, since him, until only recently, the domain of the white college superstar.
Pollard’s story gives another insight into what life was like for a Black man in America in that period. He was born in 1894 and named after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He earned the nickname ‘Fritz’ because he grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago, where there was a strong German community. His family had moved from Oklahoma. They wanted to get away from the South and the oppressive laws of segregation.
What’s interesting about Pollard’s early life is that he actually wanted to be a baseball player. But Blacks were banned from that sport. So he adapted. He launched himself into American football instead. His brothers all played. They had adapted. And he would have to do the same. Keep quiet. Don’t retaliate. Bite your lip. Pollard did more than that.
After earning a scholarship to Brown University – an Ivy League college – Pollard sought out the football trials. Well, surprise, surprise, the white kids didn’t want a Black guy in the team. So they set out to make his life a misery. The racist abuse was nothing new to him but the brutality was. It wasn’t just one guy who’d tackle him, but five or six. Pollard laughed. He smiled. The racists were the ones who quit in the end in their quest to break him. They also soon realised he was their best player, their fastest player, their cleverest player. He had a low centre of gravity so he was incredibly hard to stop. He played in the Rose Bowl in 1916, the ultimate for a college footballer.
Not that he was treated the same way. He had to be smuggled into the stadium for fear of verbal and physical assaults. The hotel the team were staying at in Los Angeles initially refused to give him a room, until his team-mates, the same ones who had abused and targeted him, said they would walk out if he was not treated the same. Brown became the first team to beat Harvard and Yale in the same season. And Pollard, with his lightning feet and brain, did it almost on his own. He was selected for the all-America team.
His professional career began in 1919, the year of terrible race riots. He played for Akron Pros. He was abused by his team’s supporters. He was abused by other players of colour. Jim Thorpe, a Native American who had excelled in football and won gold in the 1912 Olympics at decathlon and pentathlon, called him ‘nigger’.
Akron won the first ever championship, going the entire season undefeated. When the team was awarded the trophy, Pollard was not allowed to attend. Remember, this was an era when a Black person couldn’t eat in the same restaurant or sit in the same train carriage as white people. The following year Pollard was player-coach. There wouldn’t be another Black coach in the NFL (the competition changed its name in 1922) until 1985. In 1923 he became the first Black quarterback when he played for Hammond Pros. It would be almost fifty years before another Black man played the same role for a team.
A certainty for the NFL’s revered Hall of Fame, then? Of course not. This was believed to be largely the work of George Preston Marshall. Marshall was the owner of the Washington team, which he nicknamed with a racist slur – Redskins. Marshall was instrumental in the Black player ban because in the Great Depression he said it wasn’t right to pay Black footballers. In July 2019, the Redskins revoked the name and a statue of Marshall outside their stadium was taken down.
After retiring from football Pollard founded the first Black investment fund in America. He started the first Black tabloid newspaper. He became a theatrical agent for Black talent, demanding equality for his clients. He died in 1986, aged ninety-two. It took another nineteen years for Pollard to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. When his family began a campaign, those who made the decisions about who was recognised said, ‘We can find no record of his achievements.’ They were looking in the white-owned newspapers and periodicals of the time.
Pollard’s story is moving and hopeful. It neatly encapsulates so many of the themes of this book. Without people like him, Black sportspeople and Black teams would have been set back decades from their rightful path to a level playing field in their own sports. But we can also say that if his accomplishments had been highlighted at the time, that playing field could have been levelled a bit earlier. That role model theme once again.
There are many others like him, of course. Jack Johnson, a Black boxer, endured such abuse and anger for the seven years that he held the world championship title from 1908 that he had to escape America. Johnson is the reason the phrase ‘great white hope’ exists. The supremacists were desperate to find one of their own to beat him and reclaim superiority. In the end they settled for a trumped-up criminal charge. He was convicted of ‘transporting a white woman across state lines’ in 1913. For many years this was what he was reminded of, instead of his ‘first’ – the first Black heavyweight champion. He wasn’t pardoned until seventy-two years after his death. Donald Trump signed the declaration. His family must surely hope Jack Johnson’s pardon is not compared with and lumped into the same category as some of the disgraceful pardons given by this president.
Then there is Althea Gibson, the first Black female winner of a tennis Grand Slam title in 1956, winning the French Open, crossing the colour lines to do so. In 1957 and 1958 she did the double – Wimbledon and the US Open. The great Venus Williams said: ‘I am honoured to have followed in such great footsteps. Her accomplishments set the stage for my success, and through players like myself and Serena and many others to come, her legacy will live on.’ Need I say it again? Role models!
Venus Williams and her sister Serena are household names the world over. But Althea Gibson isn’t. And, of course, Learie Constantine and George Headley. Truly the Black stars that followed her, Constantine, Headley, Johnson, Pollard and the many others, stand on the shoulders of giants.
What all the achievers listed and discussed in this chapter proved is that people of colour can be accepted and they can be equal. They destroyed the stereotypes. We’re not lazy, stupid, incompetent, weak. We are as good as anyone. All the rubbish that was spouted by those pseudo-scientists, who classed people by colour, or the great brains like Voltaire who argued we were lesser beings? Those athletes put it in the trash can. So we take a knee to remember the history of dehumanisation and to raise awareness that it is still happening. But these folks, and what they did, allow us to get up. They have inspired so many heroes of the present day and in their stories and experiences we can learn how more of us can rise.