10. Under attack

Racism as riot: 1919

Lynch mobs in Liverpool and Cardiff

When armistice was signalled on 11 November 1918, the war-time boom for black labour fizzled out as quickly as it had begun. Once again shipping companies chose to sign on white foreign seamen rather than black British seamen. The National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union and National Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks, Butchers and Bakers, the two forerunners of the National Union of Seamen, were implacably opposed to the employment of black seamen when white crews were available. Seven weeks after the end of the war William P. Samuels from British Guiana, a seaman stranded in Cardiff, wrote to the Colonial Office:

We kindly beg to appeal to you for justice. We are seafaring men that has served this Country faithfully in her past difficulties either in the services of His Britanic Majesty or in Merchantile Marine. The Places of our birth are surely British Possessions or Protectorates and here in Great Britain which is the Capital of the British Empire we are badly treated by the British People. We do not want any favour all we want is fair play. Every morning we go down to shipping offices to find our selves work so as to make an honest bread and are bluntly refused on account of our colour. Whereas, foreigners of all nationality get the preference. This is not only in Cardiff but throughout the United Kingdom. What is the British Motto? are we not men and brothers whom Christ died for? . . . Why take such filthy advantages of men who have done you no wrong? . . . Is it Because we have no one to fight our cause? Why treat us as mere brute? Is it because we are mere dogs which neither Bark nor bite? No sir, we are men, men that gives the British Empire little or no trouble . . . We kindly ask to step before foreigners on any British Ship.1

By the following spring over 130 black British seamen were on the beach in Glasgow, and hundreds more elsewhere.2 It was these men who were cheated when the Ministry of Labour’s Employment Department sent secret instructions to labour exchange managers that unemployed black seamen of British nationality should be left in ignorance of their rights: ‘The majority of these are eligible for out-of-work donation, but they have apparently not realised this, and it is not considered desirable to take any further steps to acquaint them of the position.’³

The first of the so-called race riots in British ports took place on Tyneside. Arab and Somali seamen are said to have settled in South Shields in the 1860s, and there were some West African and West Indian seamen in North Shields before the First World War. The war increased the area’s black population fourfold.⁴ In February 1919 some Arab seamen, all British subjects, having just paid £2 each to clear their union books, which had to be up to date before they could ship out, were then refused work. An official of the stewards’ and cooks’ union, J.B.Fye, incited a crowd of foreign white seamen against them; he was later convicted of using language likely to cause a breach of the peace. Fye hit one of the Arabs, who hit him back. The crowd chased the Arabs to Holborn, the district of South Shields where they lived. Here they were joined by some compatriots armed with revolvers, who fired warning shots over the heads of the attackers. The Arabs then turned the tables by chasing the crowd back to the shipping office, wrecking it pretty thoroughly, and beating up Fye and another union official. Army and navy patrols were called in and 12 Arabs were arrested. At Durham assizes, where the judge expressed some sympathy for them, three were acquitted, 12 were sentenced to three months’, and two to one month’s, hard labour.⁵

Demobilization had increased Liverpool’s black population to a figure variously estimated at 2,000 and 5,000, of whom a large proportion was out of work. In one week alone, in the spring of 1919, about 120 black workers employed for years in the big Liverpool sugar refineries and oilcake mills were sacked because white workers now refused to work with them. Unemployed black workers, living on credit from day to day, were being turned out of their lodgings.⁶

On 13 May the secretary of the Liverpool Ethiopian Association, the merchant D.T.Aleifasakure Toummavah, went to see the lord mayor. He told him that between 500 and 600 black men, mostly discharged British soldiers and sailors, were out of work and stranded in the area and anxious to go home. Some were ‘practically starving, work having been refused to them on account of their colour’. He suggested that the Colonial Office repatriate them and give each man a bounty of £5, since most had pawned their clothes to buy food. Some, he added, ‘have been wounded, and lost limbs and eyes fighting for the Empire’. The mayor also received a deputation claiming to represent 5,000 jobless white ex-servicemen and complaining of the presence of black workers in the city competing for jobs. ‘Only the other night’, the lord mayor told the Colonial Office, ‘there was a fight between the two races, and matters are not likely to improve in this direction as the position develops and probably grows worse.’7 (Initial reaction of one official at the Colonial Office to the £5 bounty suggestion was that ‘the Lord Mayor should be given a hint that if Liverpool wants to get rid of men on these terms it is up to that city to find the £5’.)⁸ Liverpool police did little to lessen the tension when, in the same month, they fought a battle with black men alleged to be running an illegal gaming house.⁹

By the second half of May black men peacefully walking the Liverpool streets were being ‘attacked again and again’.¹⁰ On 4 June two Scandinavians stabbed a West Indian, John Johnson, when he refused to give them a cigarette. Johnson was severely wounded in the face, and the news spread quickly. Next evening eight of his friends went to the pub the Scandinavians used, threw beer over a group of them, then attacked them with sticks, knives, razors, and pieces of iron taken from lamp-posts, knocking unconscious a policeman who tried to stop them. Five Scandinavians were taken to hospital, but only one was detained.

In an effort to arrest those involved, police raided boarding-houses used by black seamen. The seamen defended themselves, one with a poker, others with revolvers, knives, and razors. One policeman was shot in the mouth, another in the neck, a third was slashed on face and neck, and a fourth had his wrist broken. At one of the raided houses, 18 Upper Pitt Street, lived Charles Wotten, a 24-year-old ship’s fireman, variously described as a Bermudan and a Trinidadian, who had been discharged from the navy in the previous March. Wotten ran from the house, closely pursued by two policemen – and by a crowd of between 200 and 300 hurling missiles. The police caught him at the edge of Queen’s Dock, but the lynch mob tore him from them and threw him into the water. Shouting ‘Let him drown!’, they pelted him with stones as he swam around. Soon he died, and his corpse was dragged from the dock. No arrests were made.¹¹

For the next few days an anti-black reign of terror raged in Liverpool. On 8 June three West Africans were stabbed in the street. On 9 and 10 June mobs of youths and young men in ‘well organised’ gangs, their total strength varying from 2,000 to 10,000, roamed the streets ‘savagely attacking, beating and stabbing every negro they could find’.12 So said a confidential police report to the Colonial Office, which was naturally anxious about possible repercussions in the West Indies. ‘Whenever a negro was seen he was chased, and if caught, severely beaten’, reported The Times. When they were able to make a stand, in their own dwellings, black people did so, defending themselves as best they could. Hunted down in the streets as individuals all they could do was flee from their pursuers – some of whom took their belts off and lashed their quarries’ heads and shoulders with the buckle ends as they fled. ‘Quite inoffensive’ people were attacked in the streets, including an ex-serviceman who held three decorations for war service. A black man ‘holding a good position on one of the Liverpool liners’ was dragged from a car, beaten up, and robbed of £175. On the evening of 10 June Toxteth Park was reported to be ‘in a wild state of excitement, thousands of people filling the thoroughfares’.¹³

Hysteria grew as house after house occupied by black people was wrecked, looted, and set on fire. In Jackson Street, a crowd of 2,000 wrecked a lodging-house, breaking up chairs to use the legs as bludgeons. A boarding-house on the corner of Chester and Dexter Streets had its windows and doors smashed with sticks and stones, the coping-stones and rails in front of the house torn down. The Elder Dempster shipping line’s hostel for black seamen, accommodating between 300 and 400, was wrecked. The David Lewis hostel for black ratings was attacked and its windows were smashed. A house in Stanhope Street was set on fire. In Mill Street, the furniture was carried from a house, piled up outside, and set on fire; then the house itself went up in flames. In Beaufort Street the mob tore down a house’s shutters for battering-rams, smashed doors and windows to splinters, dragged out furniture and bedding and made a bonfire of them. Houses in Parliament Street and Chester Street were wrecked. Five white youths were seen on a roof, stripping off the slates and throwing them down on the occupants’ heads.

‘There is a feeling of terror among the coloured people of the city’, reported a local newspaper. All night long until sunrise, it added, ‘black men could be seen in companies hastening along unfrequented thoroughfares to the nearest police station’. Seventy people who left their homes to shelter in the Ethiopian Hall, the Ethiopian Association’s social club, were transferred to the Cheapside bridewell in police vans for their protection. By 10 June, 700 men, women, and children had taken refuge in the bridewells and more were arriving hourly. Others sought sanctuary in fire stations.14

At the height of the rioting, the Liverpool Courier poured oil on the flames with a feature article headed ‘Where East Meets West’ and an editorial headed ‘Black and White’. The former told how, on a visit to St James Place,

You glimpse black figures beneath the gas lamps, and somehow you think of pimps, and bullies, and women, and birds of ill-omen generally, as now and again you notice a certain watchful callousness that seems to hint of nefarious trades and drunkenness in dark rooms . . .

    Behind the smashed glass of the upstairs rooms negroes hide in the darkness, protected from violence by a cordon of police. An ambulance goes past, and the howl of the mob dies away on a delighted note when the word goes about that ‘another bloomin’ nigger has been laid out’.

The editorial, demanding ‘the stern punishment of black scoundrels’, was more inflammatory still:

One of the chief reasons of popular anger behind the present disturbances lies in the fact that the average negro is nearer the animal than is the average white man, and that there are women in Liverpool who have no self-respect . . . The white man . . . regards [the black man] as part child, part animal, and part savage . . .

    It is quite true that many of the blacks in Liverpool are of a low type, that they insult and threaten respectable women in the street, and that they are invariably unpleasant and provocative.¹⁵

An ‘experienced’ police officer took a slightly different view. Attributing much of the trouble to outsiders, he told the Manchester Guardian: ‘The people here understand the negroes . . . They know that most of them are only big children who when they get money like to make a show . . . The negroes would not have been touched but for their relations with white women. This has caused the entire trouble.’¹⁶

It was left to a local magistrate to say that it was the white mobs which were ‘making the name of Liverpool an abomination and disgrace to the rest of the country’.17

That was not however the feeling in south Wales, which was experiencing at the same time ‘one of the most vicious outbreaks of racial violence that has yet occurred in Britain’. During a week of anti-black rioting, three men were killed and dozens injured, and the damage caused to property cost Cardiff council over £3,000 to repair. The rioting ‘left a scar on the race relations of the city which took more than a generation to heal’.¹⁸

The trouble began in Newport. On 6 June 1919 a crowd collected when a black man was alleged to have made an offensive remark to a white woman. One account said he put his arm round her and was attacked by a soldier. There was a fight in which many people were hurt, crowds started smashing the windows of black people’s homes, and the occupants defended themselves with pokers and staves and fired warning shots over their assailants’ heads. Two houses in George Street were wrecked and ransacked by a mob of several thousands that smashed every window, tore out the window-frames, threw bedding and furniture, including a ‘valuable piano’, into a nearby railway siding, and set fire to them. In Dolphin Street, Chinese laundries and a Greek-owned lodging-house were wrecked, as were black people’s houses in Ruperra Street and a restaurant in Commercial Road owned by a black man named Delgrada. Twenty black and two white men were arrested. Plain-clothes and mounted police were drafted into the town, but it took a baton charge to disperse crowds making fresh attacks on George Street boarding-houses. ‘We are all one in Newport and mean to clear these niggers out’, one rioter told a reporter. The scene in Newport, said the South Wales Argus, looked like the aftermath of an air raid: ‘Windows are smashed, furniture in the front rooms has been wrecked, blood-stains are visible.’¹⁹

On 11 June, at Cadoxton near Barry, a 30-year-old demobilized white soldier named Frederick Henry Longman, a dock labourer by trade, accosted a 45-year-old seaman from the French West Indies named Charles Emanuel with the words ‘Why don’t you go into your own street?’ then punched him on the forehead. Three other white men joined in, one of whom began hitting Emanuel on the back with a poker. Emanuel took out a clasp-knife and stabbed Longman, killing him instantly. Emanuel was chased by a large crowd and arrested with the knife still in his hand; he was later found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. After his arrest crowds gathered outside the police station, smashed the windows of black people’s homes, and ‘paraded the streets of Cadoxton looking for coloured men’ until the early hours of the morning. Next day, though extra police had been drafted in, there were attempts to wreck black people’s homes.20

Cardiff’s black population had increased from about 700 on the eve of the war to about 3,000 in April 1919. About 1,200 of these were unemployed seamen. There were at least as many demobilized white soldiers in the city, most of them unskilled. On 11 June a brake containing black men and their white wives, returning from an excursion, attracted a large and hostile crowd. Soon a crowd of whites and a crowd of blacks were lined up on opposite sides of Canal Parade bridge. A reporter saw ‘a howling mob of young fellows and girls facing the blacks at about 100 yards distance’. With shouts of ‘Come on and set about them!’ the whites made a rush from the north side throwing stones, whereupon revolver shots came from the black crowd and a white soldier was wounded in the thigh. The whites pressed forward in an attempt to reach Bute Town, the narrow cluster of streets between the Glamorganshire Canal and the Taff Vale Railway where a large number of Cardiff’s black citizens had their homes, but police managed to stop most of them.

The chief constable’s report, issued a month later, blamed whites for the original incident. ‘If the crowd had overpowered the police and got through’, he wrote, ‘the result would have been disastrous, as the black population would probably have fought with desperation and inflicted great loss of life.’

Some attackers did get into Bute Street, where they smashed the doors and windows of Arab-owned lodging-houses with sticks – one shop front was ‘smashed to matchwood’ – and where a woman was arrested for flourishing a razor and ‘vowing vengeance on “niggers”’. A house in Homfray Street was set on fire and gutted, and in Caroline Street a white man died after his throat was cut – by a black man, it was alleged, though no eyewitness ever came forward, no black man was found in the vicinity, and no one was ever charged with the crime. A house owned by black people at the corner of Morgan Street and Adam Street was ransacked. Police broke into a house in Hope Street and dragged out a black man with blood streaming from his head: ‘He was greeted by a howl from the crowd, and several kicks and punches were aimed at him.’ A second soon appeared, ‘in much the same condition as his compatriot’. Last to be brought out was ‘a white girl, whose mouth was bleeding’. A black man called Norman Roberts was admitted to hospital with a severe knife wound in the abdomen. The disturbances went on until around midnight.21

This was only the prelude to a much more determined and organized attack on Cardiff’s black community over the next few days. The whole of the city’s police force was concentrated in the cordoned-off area that The Times called ‘nigger town’; a company of the Welsh Regiment was secretly drafted into Cardiff and held in readiness; and the stipendiary magistrate was preparing to read the Riot Act. Contemporary reports make it clear that ‘Colonial soldiers’ (i.e. Australians) armed with rifles placed themselves at the head of the lynch mobs. ‘The methods adopted by the soldiers’, said one report, ‘were those of active service, and the men, after firing from the prone position upon the blacks, crawled back to safety.’ Some of these riflemen were in khaki or blue uniforms, others in mufti with medal ribbons. The Western Mail gave a vivid account of an attack on the former Princess Royal hotel in Millicent Street:

Several Colonial soldiers present constituted themselves the ringleaders of the besieging party, which was largely made up of discharged soldiers . . .

    The door of the house was attacked and it was quickly burst in. Men crowded into the narrow hall and began to ascend the stairs . . .

    A revolver shot rang out, and with it the exclamation, ‘My God, I am hit!’ Five other shots quickly followed.

The attackers dropped flat on their faces, crawling back and telling those behind to do the same. They held up a table as a shield, and the defenders backed to the wall of the room. ‘Once at close quarters, each of the surviving attackers took his man, and soon desperate struggles were in progress around the room.’ Meanwhile ‘others of the raiding party were . . . busily engaged in ransacking the premises. Kit-bags containing clothing were hastily abstracted, and there were willing “receivers” outside.’ After it had been looted the house was set on fire. It was in Millicent Street that 40-year-old John Donovan, wearing his Mons ribbon, was shot through the heart by a cornered Arab.²²

Ibrahim Ismaa’il, a Somali seaman and poet who was living in Cardiff at this time, refers to the Millicent Street fighting in his remarkable autobiography, completed in 1928 and recently discovered by Dr Richard Pankhurst. A Warsangeli, from the eastern part of what was then the British Somaliland protectorate, Ismaa’il was between 18 and 23 years old and worked as a ship’s fireman. He and some companions had only just come to Cardiff:

Shortly after our arrival the black people in Cardiff were attacked by crowds of white people . . .

    A Warsangeli named ‘Abdi Langara had a boarding house in Millicent Street, right in the European part of the town. It is there that I used to have my dinner every day. ‘Abdi acted as a sort of agent for the Warsangeli, who left their money with him when they went to sea, and also had their letters sent to his place. As soon as the fight started, all the Warsangeli who were in Cardiff went to Millicent Street to defend ‘Abdi’s house in case it was attacked. But to me and to my best friend – who has since died in Mecca – they said: ‘You are too young to come, and you have never faced difficulties of this kind.’ We insisted, for we could not bear to stay away when our brothers were in danger of being killed, but our plea was of no avail . . . So we went to the Somali boarding house of Haadzi ‘Aali and there we waited, ready for an attack, as we expected that a crowd of white people might break in at any moment.

    In Millicent Street, the fight started at about 7:30 p.m. and lasted a fairly long time. Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end, the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived. One of them was left for dead in the front room and was later carried to the hospital where he recovered; some escaped through a neighbouring house and came to tell us the story of what had happened, the others gave themselves up to the police, and we did not see them for a long time.23

Crowds led by soldiers were surging from street to street wherever the cry of ‘blacks’ went up. One victim had a crowd of about 1,000 after him. The newspaper accounts are eloquent: ‘Always “the black man” was their quarry, and whenever one was rooted out by the police . . . the mob rushed upon him, and he got away with difficulty’ – amid cries of ‘Kill him!’ A black man spotted near the Wharf bridge was

first insulted and then attacked by three whites, one of whom blew a whistle. This seemed to be an expected signal, because hundreds of persons rushed up from the neighbouring streets, including many women and girls, who had sticks and stones, and flung them at the unfortunate coloured man as they chased him along the street.

Two men dragged out of their Bute Street house ‘fought desperately with frying pans and pokers’. A Somali priest, Hadji Mahomet, was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him to hide so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof, ‘and with true Eastern stoicism watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton’. A Malayan boarding-house in Bute Terrace was wrecked and the occupants, fleeing to the roof, were pelted with stones. In Homfray Street an Arab named Ali Abdul fired a revolver at his assailants; when he was arrested there were shouts of ‘Now we’ve got him!’ and ‘Lynch him!’ (Charged later with attempted murder, he ‘had some difficulty in walking into court owing to an injured leg, and he also bore evidence on his forehead of having received injuries’.) An Arab ‘caught and maltreated’ in Tredegar Street lay unconscious for a long time.

One whom the lynch mob did succeed in killing, a young Arab named Mahommed Abdullah, died in hospital of a fractured skull after being savagely beaten in an attack on an Arab restaurant and boarding-house, used chiefly by Somalis, at 264 Bute Street. The mob charged down the street, threw stones into the building from both sides, and smashed the windows. Shots were fired from upstairs. The mob surged in, and police arrived soon afterwards. The inquest on Abdullah could not decide whether he had been hit on the head with a chair leg or a police truncheon. Hundreds of black people attended his funeral. Murder charges against six white men were dropped for lack of evidence.24

Some former members of the British West Indies Regiment were daring enough to go about the streets with their uniforms on, which afforded them some protection. But not much. One black ex-serviceman, described in a local paper as ‘a well-set-up young fellow’, ‘proved to be a brave man, and in perfect English appealed to the crowd not to molest him, but this did not prevent him receiving several blows’ before police escorted him away.²⁵

For the most part however, in the words of the Western Mail, ‘the efforts of the police were confined to keeping the white men from damaging property’. Property being more important than people, the community under siege had two choices. They could leave the city; or they could turn their ghetto into a fortress. A few did leave, on the afternoon of 13 June: a sad little procession of seamen with kit-bags on their backs and sticks in their hands, escorted by police and followed by jeering crowds.26 The majority chose to stay and, if need be, fight.

As crowds gathered again that evening in St Mary Street, Custom House Street, The Hayes, and the top end of Bute Road, the black citizens of Loudoun Square, Maria Street, Sophia Street, and Angelina Street ‘established quietly determined means of self-protection’.²⁷ They posted sentries, loaded their guns, and left no one in doubt of their mood, as a South Wales News reporter who got through the police cordon testified:

The coloured men, while calm and collected, were well prepared for any attack, and had the mob from the city broken through the police cordon there would have been bloodshed on a big scale, and the attacking force would have suffered heavily . . . Hundreds of negroes were collected, but these were very peaceful, and were amicably discussing the situation among themselves. Nevertheless, they were in a determined mood, and ready to defend ‘our quarter of the city’ at all costs. They had posted sentries at each entrance to give notice of the approach of any hostile crowd . . . An old resident of Loudoun-square told me that he and his wife had watched the negroes loading revolvers. They made no secret of it . . . As my informant put it, ‘There is enough arms and ammunition among them to stock an arsenal.’ Long-term black residents said: ‘It will be hell let loose . . . if the mob comes into our streets . . . If we are unprotected from hooligan rioters who can blame us for trying to protect ourselves?’²⁸

An outstanding leader of Cardif’s black community had emerged in the shape of Dr Rufus Leicester Fennell. A West Indian medically trained in the United States, he had survived 314 days of trench warfare and had been wounded three times while serving in Mesopotamia, where he had attended thousands of British troops. Lacking British medical qualifications, he had been practising as a dentist in Pontypridd. When the rioting started in Cardiff he went there. Neil Evans, interviewing old people in Cardiff a few years ago, found that Fennell was remembered for his courage and intelligence: ‘During the riots he was said to have walked boldly into the centre of the town, despite warnings of the possible dire consequences of this action.’²⁹ Aged 31, about six feet tall, well dressed and highly articulate, Fennell acted as the community’s spokesman in negotiations with the authorities; pressed the claims of those who wanted to be repatriated; told reporters ‘that it is absolutely necessary to grip the evil, and not to play with it’; and told one of several protest meetings held at the docks by West Indians, Somalis, Arabs, Egyptians, and ‘Portuguese subjects’ that it was their duty to stay within the law, but ‘if they did not protect their homes after remaining within the law they would be cowards, not men’.30

By mid-September 600 black men had been repatriated.³¹ But not everyone involved wanted to be, and part of Cardiff’s black population indignantly rejected the offer. What the chief constable, in a confidential report to Scotland Yard, called the ‘militant section’ insisted on their right as British subjects to get fair treatment and stay in the United Kingdom. And some of the militants, the chief constable added, ‘expressed their willingness to be repatriated but openly stated that it would only be for the object of creating racial feeling against members of the white race domiciled in their country’.³²

Two hundred of those who did want to be repatriated – Egyptians, Somalis, and Arabs – were sent to Plymouth by train, and Fennell went with them. It may have been Fennell who told the weekly paper John Bull how shamefully they were treated. They were penniless, but the tiny gratuity promised them was never paid. They were hungry, but were given nothing to eat on the journey. And when they went on board ship the staff were all off duty, the captain was asleep, and there was no food at all for them. ‘These coloured Britons had all done first-class war work’, commented John Bull, ‘yet they were treated worse than repatriated enemy aliens.’³³

Soon afterwards Fennell was in London, complaining to MPs and the Home Office about the flaws in the repatriation process. Some had been sent home before they were paid compensation for losses suffered in the riots; others, before receiving the back pay due to them. Fennell accused the Cardiff police of prejudice against black people and asked that police cease to supervise the departures.³⁴ But the officials were unsympathetic. Soon after leaving the Home Office Fennell found himself under arrest on a trumped-up fraud charge. After being kept in custody in London for a while he came up in court in Cardiff on 22 July, accused of obtaining £2 by false pretences from Ahmed Ben Ahmed Demary, a boarding-house master. Fennell’s solicitor told the court that there was ‘a great deal at the back of the case’ and that ‘certain men were anxious to keep the accused in prison because of the way he had watched the interests of the coloured men’. The magistrate dismissed the charge.35

London was not spared sporadic outbreaks of anti-black – and anti-Chinese – rioting. On 16 April there was a ‘serious riot’ in Cable Street, Stepney. Shots were fired, a violent street fight took place, and several black seamen were injured.³⁶ On 29 May a seaman named William Samuel, described by a Colonial Office civil servant as ‘a burly negro, with an aggressive manner’, wrote from the Sailors’ Home in St Anne Street, Limehouse, to the colonial secretary, complaining of attacks on black men in the London streets: ‘a sargeant of police said to us last night, why; We want you niggers out of our country this is a white man’s country and not yours.’³⁷ That same evening large crowds gathered outside the Strangers’ Home in West India Dock Road, cat-calling and insulting every black person who appeared and trying to force their way in. There were similar scenes outside lodging-houses used by black seamen. Outside the St Anne Street sailors’ hostel 29-year-old John Martin, a Jamaican on four weeks’ leave from the Royal Navy, was seized by the head from behind, knocked down by men armed with sticks, and kicked in the mouth. Alleged to have fired a revolver towards the crowd, Martin was arrested with injuries to head and face, and charged with wounding a ship’s fireman. He was found not guilty.³⁸ On 16 June a coffee-shop in Cable Street used by black people was stormed by a crowd that seized one of the customers and beat him.³⁹ Next day there were disturbances in Poplar, where a gang attacked a house occupied by a Chinese family, cleared out the furniture, stacked it in the middle of the street, and set fire to it, causing a ‘huge blaze’ that gutted the house.⁴⁰

During that hot summer of 1919 black people in Britain were not only being attacked physically, in their homes and in the streets. They were attacked also with the pen by those who excused the aggressors by blaming their victims. The Manchester Guardian, for instance, blamed black people for daring to defend themselves against lynch mobs: ‘The quiet, apparently inoffensive, nigger becomes a demon when armed with revolver or razor.’⁴¹ Above all, black men were blamed, as that Liverpool policeman had blamed them, for associating with white women. This explanation for the riots was advanced by a former British colonial administrator, Sir Ralph Williams, who had served in Bechuanaland and Barbados and had been governor of the Windward Islands in 1906-9. His recreation was ‘ceaseless travelling to far-away countries’,⁴² and when the riots reached their climax he wrote a letter to The Times summing up what he had learnt on his travels:

To almost every white man and woman who has lived a life among coloured races, intimate association between black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror . . . It is an instinctive certainty that sexual relations between white women and coloured men revolt our very nature . . . What blame . . . to those white men who, seeing these conditions and loathing them, resort to violence? . . .

    We cannot forcibly repatriate British subjects of good character, but we can take such steps as will prevent the employment of an unusually large number of men of colour in our great shipping centres.43

Five days later The Times printed a stinging reply, drawing attention to the existence of hundreds of thousands of persons of mixed race in South Africa and the West Indies, where ‘young girls of 13 and 14 years of age are used to gratify the base lust of white seducers’. These girls were left with children of mixed race on their hands ‘to mourn the “honour” of the civilized white man’. The writer went on:

I do not believe that any excuse can be made for white men who take the law into their own hands because they say they believe that the association between the men of my race and white women is degrading.

    Sir Ralph Williams and those who think like him should remember that writing in this way gives a stimulus to these racial riots and can only have one ultimate result, the downfall of the British Empire . . .

    If Sir Ralph Williams thinks that the problem can be solved by sending every black or coloured unit forthwith back to his own country, then we should be compelled to see that every white man is sent back to England from Africa and from the West India islands in order that the honour of our sisters and daughters there may be kept intact.⁴⁴

The writer of this letter was Felix Eugene Michael Hercules, for a brief but key period one of the inspirers and leaders of the national liberation movement in the British West Indies.

Felix Hercules and the lessons of 1919

To understand the anti-black riots in Britain – and the black community’s response – we have to see them in the context of social unrest both in Britain and in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. The end of the First World War ushered in ‘the most troublous and stormy age of profound social crisis ever known by this country and that overwhelming majority of its people who toil to live’.45 In 1919 a strikers’ demonstration in Glasgow was attacked by police and its leaders were mercilessly beaten; miners and railway and transport workers were in highly militant mood; there was a lightning police strike; there were mutinies in army camps and depots, and thousands of Army Service Corps men commandeered lorries and poured into London to lay their grievances before the government.

The divisive role of racism in Liverpool and Cardiff that year is obvious. White workers in bitter economic competition with black workers were mobilized into lynch mobs led by armed groups. This was very far from the revolution that Britain’s rulers feared and Glasgow’s strike leaders admitted afterwards they should have been aiming for. But the social unrest of 1919 was not limited to the heart of the British Empire – and that was what gave Hercules’ reply to Williams considerably more political bite than either, perhaps, could have realized when it was printed. A ‘rising tide of colour’ was bringing ‘serious race riots in the United States, constitutional agitation in India, and economic and political unrest in several British African colonies, in South Africa, and the Belgian Congo . . . It was believed that this new race-consciousness was a direct result of the Great War’.⁴⁶ Events in Liverpool and Cardiff could not but stimulate the growth of black consciousness in Britain’s colonies. In particular, they ‘hastened the growth of anti-colonialism in the British West Indies’⁴⁷

In a memorandum on ‘Repatriation of Coloured Men’, the colonial secretary, Lord Milner, pointed out that many of the black men attacked in the riots had served in the army, navy, and merchant service during the war and bitterly resented the ingratitude shown in the attacks. He feared the effect their return to the colonies would have on attitudes to white minorities there.⁴⁸ His fears were soon justified.

By mid-July some of the Trinidadians who had experienced the Cardiff riots were back home, and within days of their return there was fighting in the streets against sailors from HMS Dartmouth. Four months later the Trinidad workers’ fury erupted in a dock strike that brought British colonialism to its knees within days, when the governor persuaded the shipping agents to grant the strikers’ demand for a 25 per cent wage increase.⁴⁹ Soldiers demobilized from the British West Indies Regiment began an insurrection in Belize in July, and people were heard shouting: ‘This is our country and we want to get the white man out. The white man has no right here.’50 In the same month five or six seamen from HMS Constance were wounded in hand-to-hand fighting in Kingston, Jamaica, and the captain landed an armed party to put down the outbreak – which Jamaica’s acting governor attributed to ‘the treatment which had been received by coloured sailors at Cardiff and Liverpool’.⁵¹ Another repercussion of the British riots was a mutiny in the September on board the SS Ocra, carrying black seamen for repatriation and military prisoners.⁵² Protests about the British riots from such groups as the St Kitts Universal Benevolent Association also caused concern at the Colonial Office.⁵³

By the October of that year the upsurge of black consciousness in the West Indies, the growing labour troubles there, and the start of the national liberation struggle had so alarmed the British government that it sent the State Department a confidential report on ‘Unrest among the Negroes’, a copy of which came to light in the United States National Archives in the 1960s. Britain’s rulers feared that black radicalism in the USA might infect, and inflame, their black subjects in the Caribbean. They were pretty scared of Marcus Garvey’s militant paper, the Negro World. And the activities of Felix Hercules also caused them much concern.⁵⁴

Born in Venezuela in 1888, Felix Eugene Michael Hercules grew up in Trinidad, where his father was a civil servant. While still at school he launched the colony’s first Young Men’s Coloured Association. He graduated from Queen’s Royal College, taught at a college in San Fernando, married, and fathered several children. During the First World War he came to Britain and took a BA degree at London University. Towards the end of 1918 the Sierra Leonean businessman and journalist John Eldred Taylor offered him the editorship of the African Telegraph, published in London.* He also became general secretary of the Society of Peoples of African Origin and associate secretary of the African Progress Union. Scotland Yard’s director of intelligence, Sir Basil Thomson, an eager consumer of police spies’ gossip, was soon speculating about alleged disharmony between Hercules and the Union’s elderly secretary, Robert Broadhurst.57 (The Society and the Union were merged in July 1919, the new organization being called the Society of African Peoples,⁵⁸ but the amalgamation seems to have been short-lived.)

Towards the end of June 1919 Hercules began a tour of the West Indies, with the dual aim of investigating conditions and recruiting for the Society of Peoples of African Origin. He spent two months in Jamaica and a few weeks in Trinidad, then went to British Guiana. Three months later he tried to get back into Trinidad, but the governor would not let him land. In the West Indies as in Britain, police kept close watch on him and reported every word he said. ‘He is a very learned man’, said one police report.⁵⁹ But they could not pin anything on him. There is an air of frustration about Sir Basil Thomson’s comment in December 1919: ‘Though Hercules is careful what he says in public, in private he is inciting the negroes to take matters into their own hands.’⁶⁰ Eleven days later Major-General Sir Newton James Moore, MP, former premier of Western Australia, was assuring the Commons that Hercules’ activities had ‘a great deal to do with the unrest in the West Indies’.⁶¹

After 1920 we lose sight of Hercules; but early in 1921, in an intelligence summary of economic and social conditions in the West Indies, Rear-Admiral Sir Allan Everett reported that ‘agitators of the Hercules and Marcus Garvey type, who thunder against white rule and preach the doctrine of self determination in countries where blacks greatly preponderate, are growing factors to be reckoned with as regards potential unrest’.⁶²

Hercules’ published statements make it clear that he ‘thundered’ in the Pan-Africanist tradition. He told readers of the African Telegraph that he had originally been an internationalist. But ‘England, with its barriers and its prejudices, its caste system . . . Western civilisation with . . . its deification of Money and Force where one hoped to find Christ, these things it is that have driven me to the refuge of my own people’. Yet he still believed, he added, ‘that the day will surely come when men of every nationality and of every race will look back of colour . . . and see clearly the brotherhood in man’.⁶³ Toasting ‘The African Race’ at the African Progress Union’s inaugural dinner in 1918, he declared: ‘I believe in the destiny of the Race to which we have the honour to belong.’⁶⁴ When he spoke in Jamaica in 1919 on ‘Unity of the Coloured Race’, stressing the need for race pride and consciousness, and for co-operation among the black people of Africa, the West Indies, and the United States, he was not reported in the island’s press, ‘on a hint from Government’. His telegrams were scrutinized and he himself was ‘carefully watched.’65

Hercules showed his mettle and his political acumen above all in his reaction to the anti-black riots in Britain. He was not a member of the deputation, led by Archer as president of the African Progress Union, that went to see Liverpool’s deputy lord mayor on 16 June 1919. (The deputation also included the Gold Coast merchant Alfred S. Cann and the Revd E.A.Egesa-Osora, chaplain to the African Hostel and pastor to Liverpool’s black community.)⁶⁶ But Hercules was one of the speakers at a protest meeting in Hyde Park, convened by the Society of Peoples of African Origin. And, as the society’s general secretary, he wrote to the colonial secretary asking whether the government intended ‘to take adequate measures for the protection of British subjects in this country’ and calling for an inquiry – which never took place – into the death of Charles Wotten. His letter went on:

Hundreds of Africans and West Indians have for years been living as law-abiding citizens in Liverpool, at Cardiff and in other large towns, some of them have married British Women and settled down, and the records of the Police will show, even better than we can profess to, what has been the incidence of law-breaking amongst them.

    My Society has, however, learned with horror and regret that large numbers of Africans and West Indians who came here either as seamen or in a military capacity to help the Mother Country during a critical period have been ‘signed off and left stranded at various ports.⁶⁷

Lord Milner’s bland reply promised that black British seamen, and black men from the colonies who had served in the Forces during the war, would be granted a resettlement allowance of £5 and a voyage allowance, provided that they applied within two months.⁶⁸

For Hercules, as for the entire black community in Britain, the final straw came a month after the riots, when it was decided not to allow any black troops to take part in London’s victory celebrations: the much-trumpeted Peace March on 19 July 1919. In an African Telegraph editorial written on the eve of his departure for the West Indies, Hercules put into words what every black person in the country was feeling about British ingratitude, injury, and insult – and went on to draw the necessary political conclusions:

Every ounce of strength was put into the struggle by the black man . . . He fought with the white man to save the white man’s home . . . and the war was won . . . Black men all the world over are asking to-day: What have we got? What are we going to get out of it all? The answer, in effect, comes clear, convincing, and conclusive: ‘Get back to your kennel, you damned dog of a nigger!’ . . .

    Residences of black men were demolished; black men were pounded in the streets, drowned, butchered in cold blood and terribly maltreated and maimed, with the Imperial Cabinet looking on without a clear statement of policy on the subject. No black troops were allowed to take part in the Peace March . . .

    The supineness of the Imperial Government during the race riots drives home the fact they approve of them, that they are in line with Imperial policy.69

Four years after the riots of 1919 they had been expunged from white memories. The author of an article on ‘Britain’s Negro Problem’ in the Atlantic Review could assure his American readers that ‘up to the present time, Great Britain has been spared the odium of race riots’.⁷⁰ Black memories, however, were not so conveniently short. For Britain’s black community, 1919 illuminated reality like a flash of lightning. The lessons of the riots were etched into the consciousness of an entire generation. Through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s black people in Britain, struggling against the hidden and open attacks on them that went by the name of ‘colour bar’, knew very well what their fate would be if they failed to struggle. All they had to sustain them in this struggle against racism was a pride and militancy that owed much to the work of ‘agitators’ like Felix Hercules.

Claude McKay and the ‘Horror on the Rhine’

Racist propaganda attacks on black people were not the prerogative of right-wingers. One such attack came in 1920 from the pen of the prominent left-winger E.D.Morel, secretary and part-founder of the Union of Democratic Control and editor of its journal Foreign Affairs. Morel, whose father was French and whose real name was Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel-de-Ville, had founded the Congo Reform Association in 1904 and was ‘more than any other individual . . . responsible for terminating King Leopold’s infamous regime in the Congo’.1 A member of the Independent Labour Party and later a Labour MP, Morel was ‘the most powerful driving force in the U.D.C.’ and suffered ‘agonies of sympathy with his beloved black man’.² These agonies, exquisite though they may have been, did not stop his attacking the object of his affections as an oversexed, syphilitic rapist. The attack was made in the Daily Herald, then Britain’s leading left-wing daily and, with a circulation of 329,000, ‘probably at the height of its power’.³

Morel was protesting against France’s use of black troops in occupied Germany. His article was printed under front-page banner headlines that proclaimed: ‘BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPE: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine’.

According to Morel, France was ‘thrusting her black savages . . . into the heart of Germany’. ‘Primitive African barbarians’, spreaders of syphilis, had become a ‘terror and a horror unimaginable’ to the German countryside and an ‘abominable outrage upon womanhood’. The ‘barely restrainable bestiality of the black troops’ had led to many rapes, a particularly serious problem since Africans were ‘the most developed sexually of any’ race and ‘for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white women by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results’. The corpses of young women had been found under manure heaps. German local authorities were forced to provide brothels for these oversexed blacks – otherwise ‘German women, girls, “and boys” would pay the penalty’. And the Herald warned that whereas today, with British connivance, the French were using black troops against the Germans, tomorrow they might use African mercenaries against white workers elsewhere.⁴

Morel repeated and elaborated his attack in a pamphlet called The Horror on the Rhine, in which he claimed that black troops ‘must be satisfied upon the bodies of white women’.⁵ The first two editions each sold out in less than a month, and by April 1921 eight editions had appeared. A free copy was presented to every delegate attending the 1920 Trades Union Congress and, according to one of Morel’s colleagues, it left delegates with ‘a feeling of physical and spiritual revulsion’.⁶ Sober journals joined in the chorus. The Commonweal referred to ‘a horde of Senegalese savages’ and ‘the lust of a black soldiery’,⁷ The Nation to ‘these savages’, ‘black terrorists’, and the ‘horrible excesses’ of African troops.8 The Contemporary Review complained about the ‘sexual excesses of these Africans’.⁹ At least one public protest meeting was staged. To Morel, as to ‘most of the British intellectual world of 1920, the African was an inferior and he was viewed not as a real person but as a “native” – a stereotype. There is no evidence that Morel actually knew a single Negro except on a master–servant level’. Moreover ‘the British left were part of a . . . milieu in which a cutting analysis and scathing criticism of . . . imperialism (including attacks on the colour bar in the colonies) did not exclude racialist attitudes’.¹⁰

Morel’s campaign did not go unanswered. The person who came forward to challenge him was the young Jamaican poet, novelist, and socialist Claude McKay, who lived in London from the end of 1919 to the beginning of 1921. The first black socialist to write for a British periodical – Britain’s first black reporter, in fact – McKay was the youngest son of hard-working and relatively prosperous peasants. He was born in 1890. Two years in the United States had taught him ‘how completely his race was being exploited’,¹¹ and he had won sudden fame for his sonnet ‘If We Must Die’, written for Max Eastman’s magazine The Liberator under the impact of the 1919 anti-black riots in the United States. A few days after Morel’s article appeared in the Daily Herald the editor, George Lansbury, received an indignant letter from McKay. Lansbury sent it back with the excuse that it was too long for publication and the assurance that he personally was not prejudiced against black people. So McKay published his letter in a revolutionary socialist paper with a much smaller circulation than the Herald: the Workers’ Dreadnought, run by Sylvia Pankhurst, who had led the left wing of the women’s suffrage movement before the war.

‘Why’, asked McKay, ‘all this obscene, maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?’ Black men were no more oversexed than white men; when the latter went among coloured races they did not take their women with them – hence the children of mixed race in the West Indies. If black troops had syphilis, they had been contaminated by the white world. As for German women, they were selling themselves to anyone because of their economic plight. McKay added:

I do not protest because I happen to be a negro . . . I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race, boycotted economically and socially, who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European War.12

‘Maybe I was not civilized enough’, McKay commented ironically 17 years later, ‘to understand why the sex of the black race should be put on exhibition to persuade the English people to decide which white gang should control the coal and iron of the Ruhr’.¹³

For McKay, Britain had been a spiritual homeland. He left it totally disenchanted, as his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), makes clear. When a collection of his poems, Spring in New Hampshire, was published in London in 1920 the Spectator reviewer wrote:

Perhaps the ordinary reader’s first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American negro is to inquire into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness.¹⁴

Even Bernard Shaw, the person McKay had most wanted to meet in London, saw fit to ask him why he had not become a boxer instead of a poet. McKay reflected later that he did not think he could have survived ‘the ordeal of more than a year’s residence in London’ if he had not belonged to two clubs, each with overwhelmingly foreign membership.¹⁵ One, in a Drury Lane basement, was a club for black soldiers, provided for them by the British government (according to a letter McKay wrote to Trotsky in 1922) and patronized by troops from all parts of Africa and America.

They had all been disillusioned with the European war, because they kept on having frightful clashes with English and American soldiers, besides the fact that the authorities treated them completely differently from the white soldiers. They were deeply aroused by the propaganda of the policy of ‘Back to Africa’ which came from New York. In place of their former pride because they were wearing khaki uniforms put on for ‘the defense of civilization’, they had become disillusioned, had begun to look at things critically, and were imbued with race consciousness.

    I was working at that time in London in a communist group. Our group provided the club of Negro soldiers with revolutionary newspapers and literature, which had nothing in common with the daily papers that are steeped in race prejudice. Moreover, we invited some of the more sophisticated soldiers to lectures at the socialist club.16

The socialist club, otherwise known as the International Club, had premises in East Road, Shoreditch, and McKay described it as ‘full of excitement, with its dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-bigunionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets’.¹⁷ Here McKay met a cross-section of the far left: Walton Newbold and Shapurji Saklatvala, soon to be communist MPs; A.J.Cook, the miners’ leader; Guy Aldred, the anarchist editor; Arthur MacManus and William Gallacher, the Clydeside strike leaders. Here Polish, Russian, and German Jews rubbed shoulders with Czech, Italian, and Irish nationalists.

With very few exceptions, McKay’s experience of the English convinced him that prejudice against black people had become ‘almost congenital among them’.¹⁸ From the lowest to the highest, he found, the English could not think of a black man as being anything but an entertainer, a boxer, a Baptist preacher, or a menial.¹⁹ One exception was Sylvia Pankhurst, who ‘was always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of the smug and slack labor leaders’²⁰ and who, after printing his letter in reply to Morel, invited McKay to do some reporting for the Workers’ Dreadnought. While he was active in Sylvia Pankhurst’s tiny Workers’ Socialist Federation he did his share of ‘standing on street corners and selling red literature in London’,²¹ and narrowly escaped involvement when police raided the Dreadnought office. The paper had carried a pseudonymous article about unrest in the navy, written by a young sailor called David Springhall (who was dismissed from the navy, became a Communist Party organizer, and was to be convicted in 1943 of spying for the Russians).²² When the police came, McKay had the original:

Quickly I folded it and stuck it in my sock. Going down, I met a detective coming up. They had turned Pankhurst’s office upside down and descended to the press-room, without finding what they were looking for.

    ‘And what are you?’ the detective asked.

    ‘Nothing, Sir’, I said, with a big black grin. Chuckling, he let me pass. (I learned afterwards that he was the ace of Scotland Yard.) I walked out of that building and into another, and entering a water closet I tore up the original article, dropped it in, and pulled the chain. When I got home to the Bow Road that evening I found another detective waiting for me. He was very polite and I was more so. With alacrity I showed him all my papers, but he found nothing but lyrics.23

Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for the offending issue of the Workers’ Dreadnought.

As a communist reporter, McKay did not always see eye to eye with his editor. During a strike of sawmill workers he found out that non-union men employed in a sawmill owned by none other than George Lansbury were scabbing. But Sylvia Pankhurst refused to print this scoop because she owed Lansbury £20 and had borrowed newsprint from the Daily Herald. Yet when McKay covered the 1920 Trades Union Congress and gave the Scottish miners’ leader Bob Smillie a favourable write-up she was angry at his uncritical attitude to a labour leader.²⁴

McKay went back to the United States to become a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance, the race-conscious poetry, prose, and song of a new generation of black writers to whom his fourth volume of verse, Harlem Shadows (1922), was a powerful stimulus. He visited Russia in 1922-3 and spoke on the ‘Negro question’ at the Comintern’s fourth congress, but later broke with communism and turned to Catholicism. He wrote several novels, in two of which – Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) – there are references to the anti-black riots in Britain.²⁵ He died in Chicago in 1948, and was posthumously honoured by his native Jamaica.

Defence and counter-attack

Pan-African congresses in the 1920s

Unlike the Pan-African Conference of 1900, the first Pan-African Congress did not meet in London. Organized by W.E.B.DuBois, the American champion of black rights, it was held in Paris on 19, 20, and 21 February 1919. There were 57 delegates, including Africans abroad, representing 15 countries. J.R.Archer and the Guyanese E.F.Fredericks were present. But the British Caribbean colonies were not represented, which may help to explain why the congress’s demands were so moderate. It petitioned the peace conference then meeting in Paris to administer the former German territories in Africa as a condominium on behalf of the Africans who lived there; and it demanded that Africans be allowed to take part in governing their countries ‘as fast as their development permits’ until, in the fullness of time, ‘Africa is ruled by consent of the Africans’.1

Two years later the second Pan-African Congress went much further. It met in several sessions, in London, Brussels, and Paris. Preceded by discussions with Beatrice Webb, Leonard Woolf, and other Labour Party notables interested in international affairs, the London sessions were held at the Central Hall, Westminster, on 27 and 29 August 1921. There were 113 delegates. Three veterans of the 1900 Pan-African Conference took the chair in turn: DuBois; Dr John Alcindor, now president of the African Progress Union; and his predecessor in that post, J.R.Archer, who, as we have seen, introduced the Indian revolutionary Shapurji Saklatvala to the congress. Coleridge-Taylor’s widow was present, as was the American singer Roland Hayes.

Alcindor started the proceedings with a plea for ‘restraint and circumspection’ in the discussions. The public conscience was waking up to the fact that all was not well with Africa and the Africans. It was the delegates’ duty to speed up that awakening and galvanize it into activity by means of wise propaganda. They should fight for their cause with all their might, but always with clean weapons. Other speakers at the London sessions included the Ghanaian W.F.Hutchison, who had worked on Dusé Mohamed Ali’s African Times and Orient Review; John Eldred Taylor; and Albert Marry-show from Grenada, who vigorously attacked the domination of that colony by an all-powerful British governor and added that some black workers in Grenada, with wives and children, were paid as little as a halfpenny a day; this was an impossible situation, for which British capitalism must take a large share of the blame.

The historian J. Ayodele Langley has called the London portion of the 1921 Pan-African Congress ‘perhaps the most radical’ of all the 1920s congresses: ‘Most of the speakers openly criticized aspects of colonial policy and of life in America, and the resolutions . . . were soberly presented but remarkably outspoken in their condemnation of imperialism and racism.’ Unanimously adopted was a document afterwards known as the Declaration to the World or the London Manifesto, which demanded ‘the recognition of civilised men as civilised despite their race and colour’ and upheld ‘the ancient common ownership of the Land and its natural fruits and defence against the unrestrained greed of invested capital’. There was forthright criticism of British colonial rule:

England, with all her Pax Britannica, her courts of justice, established commerce, and a certain apparent recognition of Native law and customs, has nevertheless systematically fostered ignorance among the Natives, has enslaved them, and is still enslaving some of them, has usually declined even to try to train black and brown men in real self-government, to recognize civilized black folk as civilized, or to grant to coloured Colonies those rights of self-government which it freely gives to white men.

The basic maladjustment in the distribution of wealth, claimed the Declaration, lay in ‘the outrageously unjust distribution of world income between the dominant and suppressed peoples’.

At the Brussels sessions the radical tone of this document greatly alarmed Blaise Diagne, who had chaired the 1919 congress and who represented Senegal in the French Chamber of Deputies. He called the phrase about land ownership ‘Bolshevist’ and refused to put the Declaration to the vote. Instead he declared carried a milk-and-water compromise text calling for joint efforts by blacks and whites to develop Africa – despite the protests of the English-speaking delegates who constituted the majority of the congress and had not voted in favour of this text. Diagne was soon to abandon Pan-Africanism. The Paris sessions of the 1921 congress were, however, as outspoken in their condemnation of colonialism as the London sessions had been, and the resolutions adopted in Paris were much on the lines of those adopted in London.2

The third congress met in London and Lisbon. The London sessions were held at Denison House, Vauxhall Bridge Road, on 7 and 8 November 1923. Thirteen countries were represented, including the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone; but French-speaking African groups, having sent delegates to London, decided at the last minute to withdraw – ‘a sudden and unexpected defection’, DuBois called it. Other speakers included Dr Alcindor and Harold Laski of the London School of Economics, who gave a critical analysis of the hypocritical mandates system, whereby Germany’s former colonies in Africa were governed as ‘a sacred trust of civilization’. H.G.Wells, Gilbert Murray, Sir Sydney Olivier, former governor of Jamaica, and the historian R.H.Tawney attended as guests.

In terms of attendance and enthusiasm this third congress, convened, as DuBois put it, ‘without proper notice or preparation’, was markedly less successful than its predecessors. It demanded on behalf of peoples of African descent ‘a voice in their own Government’, ‘the right of access to the land and its resources’, and ‘the development of Africa for the benefit of Africans, and not merely for the profit of Europeans’. ‘Home rule and responsible government’ were demanded for British West Africa and the British West Indies. For Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa, the Congress demanded ‘the abolition of the pretension of a white minority to dominate a black majority, and even to prevent their appeal to the civilized world’. There was a call for suppression of lynching and mob law in the United States. The congress summed up its demands thus: ‘We ask in all the world that black folk be treated as men. We can see no other road to Peace and Progress.’ These demands were endorsed at the Lisbon sessions on 1 and 2 December, attended by delegates from 11 countries, seven of them Portuguese colonies.3

Ladipo Solanke and the West African Students’ Union

The first African students’ union in Britain ‘of more than local scope’⁴ was formed in March 1917. Its first president was E.S. Beoku Betts, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Born in Sierra Leone in 1895, he came to London in 1914 and joined the Middle Temple, was called to the bar in June 1917, and went back to West Africa four months later. The Union’s other officers in that year were the Ghanaians K.A.Keisah (secretary), T.Mensah-Annan (assistant secretary), and S.F. Edduh Atakora (treasurer), and the Sierra Leonean C. Awooner Renner (financial secretary).⁵ Initially the organization was called the African Students’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland, but the name was changed to Union for Students of African Descent when a number of West Indian students joined. It had 25 members in 1921 and 120 in 1924.⁶

There was also a Gold Coast Students’ Union in the early 1920s, and in 1924 a Nigerian Progress Union was formed, largely through the efforts of a Yoruba law student named Ladipo Solanke, who came to Britain in 1922 and was called to the bar in 1926. Solanke was outraged by the wholly degrading way in which Africans were presented as curiosities at the British Empire Exhibition staged at Wembley in 1924 and felt ‘personally involved in every discrimination experienced by other West African students in London’.⁷ He set his heart on building an organization that could speak for all West African students in Britain.

Such an organization was formed on 7 August 1925, at a meeting attended by 21 law students who afterwards became famous in West Africa as judges, magistrates, barristers, and politicians. It was called the West African Students’ Union, and for the next quarter of a century it provided a social and political centre for its members, articulating their criticisms of British colonial rule and the discrimination they suffered in Britain, and reflecting their aspirations for West Africa’s future. Not least, it functioned as a training ground for leaders of the West African nationalist movement.

In 1928 the Union moved into a house put at its disposal for a year by Marcus Garvey. When the lease expired it sent Solanke on two fund-raising tours of West Africa. He came back from his three years’ mission with about £1,500. Another result of his work in West Africa was the creation of WASU branches, known as ‘fraternities’, in the four British colonies. In this way the Union became one of the channels through which West African intellectuals expressed their views and exchanged ideas. And when national liberation movements developed in West Africa ‘it was often exmembers of the Union who became their leaders’.8

Soon after Solanke’s return to Britain WASU obtained a house in Camden Road, London, for use as a centre and hostel, and this was opened in January 1933. But the funds brought back by Solanke were only enough to cover a few months’ expenses, even when eked out with contributions sent from West Africa. When WASU approached the Colonial Office for help, conditions were imposed which would have brought the hostel under government control. So WASU, already suspicious of Colonial Office attempts to keep all colonial students under close surveillance,⁹ rejected this offer, whereupon the Colonial Office opened its own hostel for colonial students. WASU accused the government of seeking ‘a plan whereby it might exercise the same control over those studying in England’ as it did over its subjects in the colonies. And it called on ‘all Africans, students or otherwise, to wash their hands of this scheme . . . which would destroy their individuality’.¹⁰

Relations with the Colonial Office improved when WASU demonstrated that, with the backing of relatively prosperous black well-wishers, it could be self-supporting. Paul Robeson, for instance, became a patron and gave financial help. In 1938 WASU moved into new headquarters in Camden Square which was ‘not only a social centre but also a hive of intellectual and political activity’ and ‘a market-place of ideas’.¹¹

Influenced by such events as the Italian attack on Ethiopia, WASU took an increasingly anti-imperialist position in the 1930s. During the Second World War a WASU Parliamentary Committee was formed which met twice a month with MPs interested in African problems; with the co-operation of the Fabian Society’s Colonial Bureau this committee became ‘a channel for bringing African grievances before Parliament’.12 WASU’s 1942 conference on West African problems demanded immediate self-government and independence within five years of the end of the war,¹³ and the Union played an active part in the fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945 (see pp. 347-51 below).

The historical significance of Ladipo Solanke, who died in London in 1958, and of the West African Students’ Union is summed up by James S. Coleman: ‘Solanke and WASU influenced a critical segment of a whole generation, from which many of Nigeria’s most militant post-World War II leaders emerged. From a historical standpoint Solanke was an outstanding figure in the nationalist awakening in Nigeria.’¹⁴

Dr Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples

Unlike most of those African students in Britain between the wars, Harold Moody was ‘not . . . a transient . . ., perfecting his skills prior to returning home to the anti-imperial struggle, but . . . one who had made the commitment to a lifetime’s residence in England and as such was primarily concerned with the welfare of his people in an alien land’.¹⁵ And for the last 16 years of his life he led the first effective black pressure group in this country, the League of Coloured Peoples.

Harold Arundel Moody was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 8 October 1882, the eldest child of a prosperous retail chemist and strict Congregationalist. Young Harold came to London in 1904 to study medicine at King’s College. He was totally unprepared for the colour bar in Edwardian London. He found it hard to get lodgings; after winning many prizes and qualifying in 1910 he was denied a hospital house appointment because the matron ‘refused to have a coloured doctor working at the hospital’; though the best-qualified applicant, he was rejected for the post of medical officer to Camberwell Board of Guardians since ‘the poor people would not have “a nigger to attend them’”.¹⁶ In February 1913 he started his own practice in Peckham and, though his first week’s earnings came to no more than £1, he made a success of it. Later that year he married the English nurse whom he had met and courted as a medical student. It was to be a life-long happy marriage.

An impressive public speaker who took enormous pains over each lecture – he would pray before the meeting and offer his manuscript to God – Moody was elected to the chair of the Colonial Missionary Society’s board of directors in 1921 and president of the London Christian Endeavour Federation ten years later. In these and other religious and philanthropic bodies he had wide and valuable contacts. Increasingly he found himself using these contacts to give practical help to the stream of black people who came to him in distress, having experienced at first hand some specially degrading or humiliating or frustrating aspect of the colour bar. Worst of all, they found it hard to get lodgings, almost impossible to get work. Moody had trudged down the same road, and no one appealed to him in vain.

He carried the battle into the enemy’s camp. Careful to hide his anger, he would confront employers and plead powerfully on behalf of those victimized because their skins were not the right colour. Before long other relatively successful middle-class black people joined him in this battle – professional people who shared both his anger at the handicaps imposed on their brothers and sisters and his determination to give them practical help. Little by little, the work took on the dimensions of a crusade. At last the time was ripe to form an organization. With the help and encouragement of Dr Charles Wesley, an Afro-American history professor visiting Britain, the League of Coloured Peoples was born at a meeting in the Central YMCA, Tottenham Court Road, London, on 13 March 1931. One of the League’s foundation members, Stella Thomas, was called to the bar in 1933 and became the first woman barrister, and later the first woman magistrate, in West Africa. Members of the original executive included Dr Belfield Clark from Barbados; Sgt George Roberts from Trinidad; Samson Morris from Grenada; Robert Adams from British Guiana; and the Communist Party member Desmond Buckle from the Gold Coast. From the League’s inauguration until his death in 1947 Moody served as its president: ‘the League was his life and . . . he was the life of the League’.17

At first the League had four aims, printed in each issue of its quarterly journal The Keys: ‘To promote and protect the Social, Educational, Economic and Political Interests of its members’; ‘To interest members in the Welfare of Coloured Peoples in all parts of the World’; ‘To improve relations between the Races’; and ‘To co-operate and affiliate with organizations sympathetic to Coloured People’.¹⁸ In 1937 a fifth aim was added: ‘To render such financial assistance to coloured people in distress as lies within our capacity’.¹⁹

A balanced view of the League of Coloured Peoples and its achievements must take into account the criticisms levelled at it by the younger, more militant generation of black activists in London in the 1930s. As early as March 1932 the Negro Worker, an English-language marxist periodical published first in Hamburg, later in Copenhagen, later still in Paris, and mainly distributed by black seamen, appealed to black students in London ‘to break with the sycophantic leadership of Dr. Harold Moody, a typical “Uncle Tom”, whose coat strings are so tied up with the Colonial Office that he is out to have every self-respecting Negro kow-towing before his arrogant imperialist masters’.20 Moody was attacked (with justice) for not accepting Asians as League members and (with somewhat less force, since the Gold Coast students also broke ranks) for failing to support WASU in its boycott of the students’ hostel opened by the Colonial Office.

But the League was not, and never pretended to be, a radical campaigning organization – although, as will be seen later, it made strenuous efforts in the mid-1930s on behalf of the shamefully mistreated black seamen of Cardiff, and became steadily more active and effective politically, especially after the start of the Second World War. Its nature is well summed up by one of the closest students of its history: ‘social club, housing bureau, pressure group, investigative agency and employment agency’ – in short, ‘Humanitarianism, Pan-African Style’.²¹ And, despite the various national, class, and political cleavages and rivalries that frustrated Moody’s efforts for unity, and despite his League’s small membership – 262 in 1936, of whom 178 were in Cardiff, 34 were in Liverpool, and 99 were white²² – it ‘eventually became a powerful advocate and exerted some influence on public affairs’.²³ Some of the fiercest contemporary critics of Moody and the League have since paid tribute to their achievements. In his fascinating memoirs, Pan-Africanism from Within (1973), the Guyanan Ras Makonnen, who lived in Britain from 1937 to 1956, acknowledges that the League ‘had quite a hold over the loyalties of the blacks who had settled in Britain’. The militants’ relationship with it was ‘one of convenience. We recognized it as a powerful organization amongst the liberals . . . Our only hesitation was that it tended to divert from a more radical line.’²⁴ And the Trinidadian C.L.R.James acknowledges that Dr Moody’s efforts – lobbying of MPs, letters in the press – ‘mattered because there were too few black people around, and here was somebody who wasn’t an insignificant person, who was a well-established medical practitioner’.²⁵

Looking back after 50 years, one cannot doubt that there was plenty of scope both for Moody’s kind of struggle and for the more aggressive political assertion of black people’s rights favoured by his critics. And in practice, as is wholly consistent with the Pan-Africanist tradition, there was often a high degree of cooperation between Moody and the radicals. James, for instance, served on the League’s executive for a time and contributed to The Keys;26 a resolution on the Scottsboro case* passed by a League meeting in 1933 was proposed by the Barbadian Arnold Ward, who chaired the left-wing Negro Welfare Association and was a frequent contributor to the Negro Worker;²⁷ and another Barbadian leader of the Negro Welfare Association, Peter Blackman, was editor of The Keys in 1938-9 and wrote some of its most powerful and far-sighted editorials. Blackman had come to Britain, early in the decade, to study theology. His first posting was to West Africa, and when he found racist attitudes within the Church of England establishment he left the church and turned to marxism. On the eve of the Second World War, in his last editorial before the The Keys ceased publication, he wrote of the isolation of the British people from the peoples of the empire, ‘to whom they remain alien in thought and for all matters of practical politics’. The British people were ‘ignorant of what obtains in the Empire’; did not realize how much their fortunes were bound up with those of the millions in the colonies controlled in their name from Downing Street; and must in their own interests dissociate themselves from ‘those forces which shape the policy of Greater Britain, and which by their control of the strength of Empire can hamper or deflect any movement for peace and progress in the world’.²⁸

In fact, from Mussolini’s 1935 attack on Ethiopia onwards, despite the ‘ideological and philosophical differences’ that separated the League of Coloured Peoples from other black organizations in Britain, ‘a series of issues provided them with a common ground for either joint or parallel action’.29 One such issue, of burning importance to every West Indian in Britain, was the working-class struggle in the Caribbean that culminated in the Trinidad oilfield riots of June 1937 and the strikes in Jamaica in the following summer. Writing in The Keys, the brilliant young economist from St Lucia, W. Arthur Lewis, flayed the proemployers report of the commission of inquiry into the Trinidad disturbances.³⁰ On the Jamaican strikes – during which police and troops attacked the strikers and 11 people were killed and many wounded – Moody had three letters published in The Times in a fortnight.³¹ He presided at a protest meeting in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street; the speakers included Blackman and Lewis, and a radical resolution was carried, demanding for the British West Indies redistribution of the land, universal free education, ‘the same civil liberties as are enjoyed by the people of Britain, including universal adult suffrage’, and ‘Federation of the West Indies with complete self-government’.³² It was to a great extent as a result of League pressure that the government appointed a royal commission, under the chairmanship of the future colonial secretary Lord Moyne (Walter Edward Guinness), to investigate social and economic conditions in the West Indies. The League of Coloured Peoples, the Negro Welfare Association, and the radical International African Service Bureau (see pp. 345-6 below) submitted a joint memorandum to this commission.³³

After the war started, collaboration between the League and the radicals continued on the vexed question of the colour bar in the British armed forces and, in particular, the question of commissions for black servicemen and women. Following private and public representations by Moody, the Colonial Office declared on 19 October 1939 that ‘British subjects from the colonies and British protected persons in this country, including those who are not of European descent, are now eligible for emergency commissions in His Majesty’s Forces’.³⁴ ‘We are thankful for this,’ wrote Moody, ‘but we are not satisfied. We do not want it only for the duration of the war. We want it for all time. If the principle is accepted now, surely it must be acceptable all the time.’³⁵ Moody’s own family took immediate advantage of the concession. His children Arundel, Ronald, Garth, Harold, and Christine all received army or RAF commissions, the latter two as doctors, and Arundel and Harold both rose to the rank of major. And their father shouldered his full share of civil defence work in Peckham, was called to the New Cross rocket explosion in which nearly 200 were killed and hundreds were injured, and often worked night and day amid the falling bombs.36*

Moody’s fatherly care extended to all the children born into Britain’s black community. Each year he took coachloads of them on a summer outing to Epsom; each year he gave them a Christmas party. And the welfare of the black children among the evacuees at the start of the war caused him as much anxiety as it did their own parents. An item in the League’s News Letter for November 1939, sent by a correspondent in Blackpool, is eloquent:

Among a large party of children which came to our district were two little coloured boys. Nobody wanted them. House after house refused to have them. Finally a very poor old lady of 70 years volunteered to care for them. She gave them a good supper, bathed them and put them to bed. As she folded their clothes she discovered two letters addressed to the person who adopted them. Each letter contained a five pound note.³⁸

Moody found time to reprove the BBC when one of its announcers, speaking about some records, used the word ‘nigger’. The last public use of this word, by Prime Minister Baldwin in the late 1920s, had aroused some comment, and educated white people were beginning to avoid it. ‘This’, wrote Moody with his usual precision, ‘is one of the unfortunate relics of the days of slavery, vexatious to present day Africans and West Indians, and an evidence of incivility on the part of its user.’ In those Reithian times the BBC took only two days to make honourable amends:

I find that our announcer was at fault. The point raised in your letter is fully appreciated, and is one which the B.B.C. is at pains to keep constantly in mind. It was unfortunately overlooked on this occasion, and a reminder on the subject is being given to all announcers.

    I hope that your Committee will accept the B.B.C.’s apology for this slip, which is sincerely regretted.39

The war, in Roderick J. Macdonald’s words, gave ‘a fresh relevance and sense of mission to the League’.⁴⁰ Membership and revenues increased rapidly. The increased support was partly due to the entry into British factories of skilled workers recruited in the West Indies. They were followed to Britain by large numbers of black troops, first from the West Indies, then from the United States. And the humiliating fall of Singapore brought ‘a newfound receptivity’⁴¹ to the League’s message.

By 1943 the League of Coloured Peoples had reached the peak of its influence as a pressure group. After a long, hard fight it had persuaded the Colonial Office to modify its recruitment regulations – but only in part. When the League published the entire correspondence that passed between Moody and the colonial secretary, Lord Moyne, on this issue, Arthur Lewis added a tart postscript:

On the one hand it is denied that there ever has been any barrier to the appointment of coloured people, while on the other it is admitted that advertisements have been published stating that applicants must be of pure European descent. It is admitted that the regulations might well be ‘simplified so as to make their meaning clearer’ to those who think that prohibitions against non-Europeans mean what they say, yet the Secretary of State sees no reason why the new regulations should not continue to divide British subjects into (a) those of European descent and (b) those who are not. We are accustomed to some hypocrisy in official circles, but this correspondence, we submit, is a masterpiece. Discussion between the public and its servants should not be conducted as if it were a boxing performance . . .

    Whatever may be said of the French, in their Empire a man may rise to the highest posts merited by his intelligence; the appointment of a Negro Governor is taken as a matter of course. In the British Empire there can be no Negro Governor because the maintenance of white prestige is considered to be an essential pillar of the imperial regime, and Negroes are not allowed, except when it cannot be helped, into administrative posts of distinction and responsibility.42

Deputy Prime Minister Attlee gave a public assurance to a group of West African students that ‘we fight this war . . . for all peoples’ and that ‘I look for an ever-increasing measure of self-government in Africa’ – an assurance promptly contradicted by Churchill as prime minister.⁴³ Moody then used what has been called a ‘double-barrelled strategy’, combining ‘an appeal to the Liberal-humanitarian sacred sanctions’ with ‘the spectre of Communist influence on the colonies if reforms were not made’.⁴⁴ And inch by inch, grudgingly, lumberingly, the Colonial Office began its slow retreat. It set up, for one thing, an advisory committee on the welfare of ‘Empire Colonials’; as a member of this committee Moody was partly responsible for the opening of hostels (‘Colonial Centres’) in different parts of the country.

The League’s twelfth annual general meeting, in March 1943, was held in Liverpool. The 39 delegates from 12 UK centres, hailing from 13 different countries, were officially welcomed by the lord mayor, and the League staged a public meeting attended by over 500 people and addressed by the bishop of Liverpool, on the theme of ‘A Charter for Colonial Freedom’. The situation in Liverpool had been causing Moody much concern. Fighting had broken out at a dance hall where a white American forcibly separated a Jamaican technician from his white dancing partner, then pulled a dagger on him. After this incident, black patrons were barred from the hall.⁴⁵ These technicians, Moody pointed out, were volunteers who had come at tremendous sacrifice to help Britain’s war effort. Liverpool’s large resident black population had been treated between the wars as outcasts, had been despised and looked down on.⁴⁶ To hold the League’s conference in that city was a gesture of solidarity both with them and with the West Indian technicians in the area.

In July 1944 the League organized a three-day conference in London to draw up a ‘Charter for Coloured Peoples’ that in many ways foreshadowed the resolutions of the fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in the following year. Arthur Creech Jones, soon to be the Labour government’s colonial secretary, helped in the drafting of this charter, which demanded ‘full self-government’ for colonial peoples ‘at the earliest possible opportunity’ and insisted that: ‘The same economic, educational, legal and political rights shall be enjoyed by all persons, male and female, whatever their colour. All discrimination in employment, in places of public entertainment and refreshment, or in other public places, shall be illegal and shall be punished.’47

Moody was a sick man when he came back from a strenuous five-month visit to the West Indies and the United States in the winter of 1946-7. He died on 24 April 1947, ten days after his return. The league he founded survived him by four years.

Precise and lucid in his writings and speeches, passionate in his emotions but controlled in their expression, tireless in his devotion to his life’s work, Moody was thought too cautious, patient, and conservative by the younger generation of radicals. He did not share their conviction that the gale of black rebellion in the colonies would soon blow away the old order. In many ways, events after his death proved them right and him wrong. For all that, he was nobody’s ‘Uncle Tom’; in his own way, he struck blow after well-aimed blow in the struggle against racism.

The Pan-Africanist radicals

Who were the leaders of this younger generation of black radicals, and what did they achieve? We look first at the careers of five remarkable men who, in Britain and elsewhere, did much to bring about the end of colonialism in Africa and the West Indies: George Padmore, C.L.R.James, Ras Makonnen, Jomo Kenyatta, and I.T.A.Wallace-Johnson.

Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, later known as George Padmore, was born in Arouca, Trinidad, in 1902 or 1903. His father was a schoolteacher and his grandfather was a Barbadian small farmer who had been born a slave. He always claimed to be a nephew of Henry Sylvester Williams. After working as a reporter he went to the United States in 1924 to study sociology and political science. He joined the Communist Party and wrote for the New York Daily Worker under the cover name George Padmore, which he had adopted by 1928. In 1929 he went to Moscow, where, despite his lack of Russian, he became a token member of the local soviet and, much more important, was appointed head of the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern) and helped to organize the first International Conference of Negro Workers (1930). In his first year as an official of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers he wrote six pamphlets; based in Hamburg in 1931 as editor of the Negro Worker, he is said to have had about 4,000 contacts in various colonial countries.

But in August 1933 the Communist International, seeking no doubt to improve relations between the Soviet Union and France, suddenly dissolved the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. Padmore immediately resigned in disgust from all his positions and was expelled from the Comintern as a ‘petty-bourgeois nationalist’ a few months later. He told his nephew afterwards how he had been sent a series of directives from Moscow instructing him to stop attacking French imperialism, then British imperialism, then American imperialism, till he was left with the Japanese – and, as he observed with some asperity, they were not the ones that had their boots across the black man’s neck.

In 1935 Padmore settled in London, making a living by private teaching and journalism. He often wrote for the Independent Labour Party’s weekly, the New Leader, and for other independent, non-stalinist, left-wing publications: Controversy, Left, Socialist Leader, and Tribune. In 1936 he published How Britain Rules Africa, a detailed and outspoken indictment; Africa and World Peace followed in 1937. Though Padmore never joined the ILP he became its colonial expert, collaborating closely with Fenner Brockway and with Reginald Reynolds of the No More War Movement.

Padmore’s political and intellectual heritage, training, and experience, and the use he made of them, are summed up by Imanuel Geiss:

His career extended to all the terminal points of the classical ‘triangle’ of Pan-Africanism . . . The memory of his direct descent from slavery was combined with a middle-class education and studies at Afro-American universities; his temporary proximity to Garveyism was combined with work for the Communist party on a national as well as an international level, in both the trade-union and the purely political arena. [He had] great veneration for Blyden . . . and . . . respect for Du Bois . . . He established a link with the francophone wing of Pan-Africanism. In England he came into contact with the humanitarian liberal and socialist element of the British left . . .

    With his dynamism and his insistence on intellectual precision and political action he exerted a strong influence upon the young African and Afro-West Indian intelligentsia between 1935 and 1958 – by the strength of his personality, and by means of articles and several books, lectures, contributions to discussions and a wide circle of personal contacts . . .

    With his wholly modern rational approach he came closest to the trend of which Horton is the . . . representative in Pan-Africanism and in African nationalism.48

Padmore, who died in 1959, was Kwame Nkrumah’s personal representative in London during the struggle for Ghanaian independence and spent his last two years as Nkrumah’s personal political adviser on Pan-African questions in Ghana. He was ‘the originator of the movement to achieve the political independence of the African countries and people of African descent. That is why he is increasingly known as the Father of African Emancipation.’⁴⁹ This was written of him by his lifelong friend and fellow-radical C.L.R.James, to whose life we now turn.

In her hilarious novel Comrade O Comrade (1947), Ethel Mannin portrays ‘an eminent Trotskyist’ – ‘an extremely handsome young Negro’ who comes to tea accompanied by two white friends. They ‘arrived punctually at four and they left punctually at five’; and in those 60 minutes their hostess utters exactly 12 words. For the ‘eminent Trotskyist’, pausing only to sip his tea, soliloquizes nonstop on political matters in his ‘dark rich beautiful voice’, ‘one fine hand beating in another as he emphasised his points’.⁵⁰

This caricature of Cyril Lionel Robert James in his, and the century’s, thirties is as good a way as any to begin a sketch of a man whose stature simply bursts any category a writer tries to squeeze him into. ‘What an extraordinary man he is!’ wrote E.P.Thompson on James’s eightieth birthday:

It is not a question of whether one agrees with everything he has said or done; but everything has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible, sensitive and deeply cultured intelligence. That intelligence has always been matched by a warm and outgoing personality. He has always conveyed, not a rigid doctrine, but a delight and curiosity in all the manifestations of life. I’m afraid that American theorists will not understand this, but the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket.⁵¹

In truth, one can no more catch and label the essence of C.L.R.James than one can cage a cloud. But here are the bare facts from which some idea can be gained of this uncommon man and his life’s work.

He was born in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, in 1901, the son of a schoolteacher, the grandson, on one side, of a pan-boiler on a sugar estate, on the other, of an engine-driver. At the age of six he was reading Shakespeare. A boyhood friend of George Padmore, he won a scholarship to Trinidad’s main government secondary school. In the 1920s he taught at the same school, played club cricket, and began writing – fiction, a history of West Indian cricket, and a biography of the Trinidadian labour leader Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani. James came to Britain in March 1932 at the suggestion of the cricketer Learie Constantine, with whom he stayed for a while in Nelson, Lancashire. He made a living by reporting cricket matches for the Manchester Guardian and the Glasgow Herald, joined the Independent Labour Party, chaired its Finchley branch, wrote for the New Leader and Controversy, refused to join the Communist Party, left the ILP with a marxist group that took the name Revolutionary Socialist League, edited its paper Fight, wrote a play on the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint-Louverture, himself acted in it, alongside Paul Robeson, at the Westminster Theatre, wrote an account of a West Indies childhood in the form of a novel (Minty Alley, 1936), wrote a classic history of ‘the rise and fall of the Communist International’ (World Revolution 1917-1936, 1937) which, in its publisher’s words, became ‘a kind of Bible of Trotskyism’52 and was shamelessly plundered by a succession of lesser experts, wrote a classic study of the Haitian revolution (The Black Jacobins, 1938), translated into English Boris Souvarine’s massive Staline, and was one of the two British delegates to the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938. All this before his fortieth birthday.

In October 1938 James went to lecture in the United States and stayed there illegally for 15 years, an active participant in the working-class movement. In his writings he extended and enriched the versatile pattern begun in London. It was he who, long before ‘black power’ was ever heard of, ‘pioneered the idea of an autonomous black movement which would be socialist but not subject to control by the leaderships of white-majority parties and trade unions’.⁵³ His Notes on Dialectics (1948) was the most ‘hegelian’ – and most original and creative – contribution to marxist philosophy since Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. His State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950) completed his break with ‘orthodox’ trotskyism. Facing Reality (1958) drew lessons from both the workers’ councils that sprang up in the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the rank-and-file workers’ movements in Britain and the United States. Beyond a Boundary (1963) is partly a classic book on cricket, partly a kind of autobiography. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977) records ‘a sequence of political responses to an extreme political situation, the African situation, as it has developed during the last thirty years’.54 In his ninth decade, James has been belatedly discovered by the media.

Such are the bare facts, or enough of them to place C.L.R.James in his time. But they are inadequate to explain the fertilizing and inspiring effect this scholar-revolutionary’s thought and life have had, especially on the younger generation of activists that has emerged since the end of the 1960s. James’s achievement, it is said, ‘staggers the mind simply in the recounting of it’. Merely in the six and a half years he spent in Britain in the 1930s – the period of his life that chiefly concerns us – he ‘added significantly to the emancipation and understanding of the human condition’.⁵⁵

If James was a wizard with words and ideas, another Pan-Africanist radical active in Britain in the 1930s – and 1940s – was a financial wizard, a fund-raiser extraordinary. He was born George Thomas Nathaniel Griffith in the small British Guiana village of Buxton at the beginning of the century. As he became more deeply involved in the Ethiopian cause following the Italian invasion he took the name Ras Tefari Makonnen, and it was under the name Ras Makonnen that his autobiography, Pan-Africanism from Within, was published in 1973. After staying in the United States from 1927 to 1934, latterly studying agriculture and animal husbandry at Cornell University, he spent a couple of years in Copenhagen. He was expelled from Denmark when he not only found out that the Danish government was manufacturing mustard gas but was incautious enough to publish his discovery. Early in 1937 he settled in Britain. He shared a flat with George Padmore, plunged into daily political activity, and moved to Manchester in 1939. He lectured for the Co-operative Union, read history at Manchester University, and showed his resource and financial skill by starting a chain of restaurants. First there was the Ethiopian Teashop, then a bigger and better place called the Cosmopolitan. Renovated at a cost of about £3,000, this became a social centre for the many black American troops stationed within reach of Manchester. A third restaurant, the Orient, a club called the Forum, and a place called the Belle Etoile followed.

Besides providing a much-needed social base for Afro-Americans, West Indians, and Africans in the black-out gloom of wartime Lancashire, Makonnen’s restaurants provided also the funds for political activity, and in the first place for ‘a whole range of defence operations for blacks at home and abroad’.56 These operations included the largely successful defence of 120 black seamen charged with mutiny, and the wholly successful legal defence of Donald Gerald Newton Beard, a Jamaican in the RAF who, after a street fight in which one of the attackers was stabbed, was charged with murder. Makonnen raised the money to bring over the renowned Jamaican barrister Norman Manley:

The man was so methodical. The first person he wanted to see was the meteorologist to know what had been the snowfall on that particular night and what had been the visibility. Finally when he got to court, he made asses of the police; on the one hand he showed that they really believed all niggers looked alike; yet individual police were claiming that they had identified Beard at a distance of forty yards. That night the visibility had of course been less than ten yards. Well, the judge had to stop the case.⁵⁷

As we shall see, Makonnen’s profits were also used to organize the fifth and by far the most important Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945 – and to finance a publishing house, a bookshop, and a monthly journal.

Makonnen, like Padmore, was close to Nkrumah, and he went to settle in Ghana shortly before independence in 1957. After Nkrumah’s overthrow he was imprisoned for several months, was freed when Jomo Kenyatta intervened on his behalf, and went to live in Kenya, whose citizen he became in 1969.

Kenya’s president was an old friend of Makonnen. Kenyatta, in fact, had been another of the Pan-Africanist radicals active in Britain in the 1930s, and Makonnen later described him as ‘much more obviously marked for leadership than many of the others in England at that time’.⁵⁸ Born into a Kikuyu peasant family about the year 1897, Jomo Kenyatta was educated at a mission school. He joined the Young Kikuyu Association in 1922, became an official of the Kikuyu Central Association in 1925, took up full-time political work three years later, and came to London in March 1929 armed with a petition signed by 30 members of the association asking for the release of its chairman and listing Kikuyu grievances. Kenya’s governor, Sir Edward Grigg, who was in London at the time, saw Kenyatta and reacted to his visitor by ‘putting the police Special Branch on to . . . [him] and circulating their report’.59 The police spies asserted that Kenyatta was ‘a representative of the “Universal Negro Improvement Association”’ who had ‘come to this country to obtain justice for people of his race in Kenya’. While in London he had been in the company of ‘prominent Communists’ – Shapurji Saklatvala was one of them – and of the secretary of the British section of the League against Imperialism.⁶⁰ He also got in touch with Fenner Brockway and Kingsley Martin (soon to become editor of the New Statesman), went to Russia for a brief visit and, when he came back, gave an interview to the communist Sunday Worker and wrote two articles for the new-born Daily Worker.⁶¹ More influential, perhaps, was a carefully argued letter to The Times and the Manchester Guardian outlining the objects of the Kikuyu Central Association and correctly forecasting a ‘dangerous explosion’ if local views were repressed by legislative measures.⁶² Kenyatta went back to Kenya in September 1930 to find that a song in praise of him had been banned by the governor as seditious.⁶³

Kenyatta’s second stay in Europe lasted much longer: from 1931 to 1946. He came first to London then, under George Padmore’s auspices, made a second visit to Moscow in the winter of 1932-3. Back in London, he studied anthropology under the celebrated Malinowski and lived a life of extreme poverty. Often he was so poor that he went hungry until the mail from Kenya came; then he could sell the stamps and buy a penny bun. He picked up a little money by acting as one of the 250 black extras in Alexander Korda’s Sanders of the River, thus beginning a deep friendship with Paul Robeson, who starred in the film. Meanwhile he was working on his book Facing Mount Kenya (1938): studies in Kikuyu life and customs based on the papers he had written for Malinowski’s seminars, and the first inside account of an African community by an anthropologist who had been born into it and brought up in it.

Kenyatta’s activities in the Pan-Africanist movement in Britain in the second half of the 1930s inevitably led the Colonial Office to reopen their files on him. The new dossier was entitled ‘Jomo Kenyatta: Libellous statements made to the Workers’ Educational Association’, and it noted that he was making ‘mischievous allegations’ about British rule in Kenya: ‘The difficulty is, however, that he is spreading his poison by word of mouth at relatively obscure meetings (organised by a perfectly reputable organisation)’.⁶⁴ During the Second World War Kenyatta worked on a Sussex farm, helped with the preparations for the Manchester Congress, and wrote a pamphlet called Kenya: The Land of Conflict (1945), which stated plainly: ‘There is not one of the boasted blessings of white civilization which has yet been made generally available to the Kenya Africans.’65 In 1946 he went back to Kenya. His subsequent career during and after the ‘Mau Mau’ crisis – his arrest, trial, and long, cruel imprisonment, followed by his triumphant emergence as president of independent Kenya: all this belongs to a different, and tolerably well-known, history.

Padmore, James, Makonnen, and Kenyatta are all, indeed, fairly well known. There was another Pan-Africanist radical in Britain in the 1930s who is much less so. Admittedly, his stay here was brief: from March 1937 to April 1938. Yet I.T.A.Wallace-Johnson was highly influential. He was the only one of the five with direct experience of the West African trade union movement. In 1931 he organized the first trade union in Nigeria; and in 1938-9 he organized no fewer than eight trade unions in his native Sierra Leone, a feat which greatly alarmed that colony’s British rulers. In fact he did more ‘to introduce Marxist ideas and mass-oriented politics to West Africa than any other person in the years between the two world wars’, and ‘became a major force in colonial politics in English-speaking West Africa, both hated and feared by British colonial authorities’.⁶⁶

Isaac Theophilus Akuna Wallace-Johnson was born of poor parents in Wilberforce village, near Freetown, in 1894 or 1895. His father was a small farmer, his mother a fishmonger. He entered government service at the age of 18 as an outdoor officer in the Sierra Leone Customs, and was dismissed when he brought his fellow-workers out on strike for better pay. During the First World War he served as army records clerk in the Cameroons, east Africa, and the Middle East. Demobilized in 1920, he became chief clerk in the Freetown waterworks department, and was sacked for organizing his colleagues to demand higher pay and better working conditions. For the next five years he roamed the world as a seaman.

In 1930 he represented Sierra Leonean railwaymen at the first International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, and in the following year he visited Moscow. An associate editor of the Negro Worker, he edited the Nigerian Daily Telegraph until he was deported from Nigeria for trade union activities. In the Gold Coast, he founded the West African Youth League and wrote for the Gold Coast Spectator and the African Morning Post. In 1934, when a tunnel collapsed in the Prestea mines, killing 41 men, he disguised himself as a miner and went down the mines to gather first-hand information. In 1936 he was arrested, along with his friend Nnamdi Azikiwe (‘Zik’), later to be Nigeria’s first president, and charged with seditious libel for an article in the African Morning Post expressing his reaction to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia:

I believe the European has a God in whom he believes and whom he is representing in his churches all over Africa. He believes in the god whose name is spelt Deceit. He believes in the god whose law is ‘Ye strong, you must weaken the weak.’ Ye ‘Civilised’ Europeans, you must ‘civilise’ the ‘barbarous’ Africans with machine guns. Ye ‘Christian’ Europeans, you must ‘Christianise’ the ‘pagan’ Africans with bombs, poison gases, etc.67

Fined £50 by the Gold Coast Supreme Court, Wallace-Johnson appealed finally to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which disagreed with the sedition charge but upheld the conviction on the ground that under the Gold Coast criminal code such an attack on religion reflected adversely on the colony’s government.

While in Britain for the hearing of this appeal Wallace-Johnson worked closely with Padmore, James, Makonnen, and Kenyatta. With them he helped to found the International African Service Bureau, becoming its general secretary and editing its bulletin Africa and the World. This soon developed into the African Sentinel, 2,000 copies of which, containing an article by Kenyatta, were seized from Wallace-Johnson by the Freetown Customs when he went back to Sierra Leone in April 1938. ‘It is most undesirable’, the governor wrote to the colonial secretary, ‘that such nonsense should be circulated among the population of Sierra Leone.’⁶⁸

Within a year of his return Wallace-Johnson had formed the highly successful Sierra Leone branch of the West African Youth League, had launched its newspaper, the African Standard, and had succeeded over and over again in making the government look silly – notably by publishing accurate details of the governor’s confidential and secret dispatches, both to the Colonial Office and to his subordinates. One dispatch declared that an African workman and his wife could subsist on 15s. a month, and that there was little difficulty in getting labour at about 9d. per day.⁶⁹ It was hardly surprising that the Youth League candidates swept the board in the November 1938 municipal elections in Freetown. (One Youth League candidate, Constance Agatha Cummings-John, became the first woman to hold elective office in British West Africa.) It was even less surprising that Wallace-Johnson was arrested, detained, charged with criminal libel (for an article on the death of an African who had been tied to a post and flogged by order of a British district commissioner), sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and finally exiled. Released from detention in 1944, he represented Sierra Leone at the World Trade Union Congress in London in February 1945 and helped organize the Manchester Congress later that year. Killed in a car accident in Ghana in May 1965, Wallace-Johnson was buried in Freetown. His funeral attracted the greatest crowd of mourners in Sierra Leone’s history. His old friend Ras Makonnen spoke movingly at the graveside.70

These five men made up a powerful team. Even without James and Wallace-Johnson, Britain still had, from 1938 on, a Pan-Africanist centre linked by a thousand threads to the anti-imperialist mass movement in Africa and the West Indies. And this is the really significant difference between these radicals and Harold Moody. It was not that they were on the left and he was on the right. His self-appointed task was to save his people in Britain, so far as he could, from suffering from the tree’s poisoned fruit; theirs was to chop the tree down. And they and the millions of Africans and West Indians they spoke for did what they set out to do. They won independence. The conventional political spectrum is not very helpful here. More important than ‘left’ and ‘right’ labels – and clearly Moody cannot be placed anywhere on the British political spectrum – is that none of the black activists in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s let himself be used by white politicians. Even when they joined a white political organization they did so to further the cause of black freedom. Some of them found out the hard way that the Communist International could not be trusted, since in the interests of Soviet foreign policy it could dissolve overnight a black organization it had itself created. The black activists in Britain certainly found white allies and helpers. But they took good care to keep control of their own organizations. So that the MPs, for instance, who asked questions about colonial matters in the Commons were being skilfully fed material and guided by this ‘small’ – but, in the long run, both influential and successful – ‘group of West Indian and African intellectuals and agitators’.⁷¹

This, then, was the group that in 1936 began ‘to formulate a new ideology of colonial liberation designed to challenge existing ideological systems, including Communism’.⁷² And the chief stimulus was the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which touched a highly sensitive nerve. Ethiopia and Liberia were, in the whole of Africa, the only territories not under European control. A young Ghanaian on his way to study in the United States – his name was Kwame Nkrumah – suddenly saw in London a newspaper placard announcing ‘MUSSOLINI INVADES ETHIOPIA’ and felt

almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally. For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face wondering if those people could possibly realise the wickedness of colonialism, and praying that the day might come when I could play my part in bringing about the downfall of such a system.73

Africans and people of African descent now saw, if they had not seen it before, that ‘black men had no rights which white men felt bound to respect if they stood in the way of their imperialist interests’.⁷⁴ Not only did Britain and France fail to respond to Ethiopia’s appeal to the League of Nations; they cynically sold oil to the fascist dictator whose troops were gassing defenceless Ethiopians. In The Keys, C.L.R.James rammed home the implications:

Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been poisoned by British Imperialist education, needed a lesson. They have got it. Every succeeding day shows exactly the real motives which move Imperialism in its contact with Africa, shows the incredible savagery and duplicity of European Imperialism in its quest for markets and raw materials. Let the lesson sink in deep.⁷⁵

In 1934 black radicals in London had formed an ad hoc committee to help two delegates from the Gold Coast, S.R.Wood and Tufuhin Moore, who had come to protest against certain laws – one of which gave the government power to confiscate literature deemed seditious – and to demand constitutional reform in the colony.⁷⁶ (The Colonial Office granted the delegates an interview but conceded none of their demands. When it was pointed out in the Commons that the delegates had been in Britain for almost two years without receiving a sympathetic hearing from the government, the colonial secretary, J.H.Thomas, remarked: ‘African gentlemen being in this country for 21 months only indicates what a good country it is.’)⁷⁷ Early in 1935 Arnold Ward, who chaired the Negro Welfare Association, was suggesting ‘a permanent secretariat of Negroes in London to represent colonial interests and to co-ordinate opposition in the Empire.’⁷⁸ When Mussolini’s troops marched, the ad hoc committee was revived as the International African Friends of Abyssinia, whose main purpose was to arouse the British public’s sympathy and support for the victim of fascist aggression and ‘to assist by all means in their power in the maintenance of the Territorial integrity and political independence of Abyssinia’.79 When the defeated emperor Haile Selassie came to London in 1936 the IAFA organized a reception for him at Waterloo station. James chaired the IAFA; its secretary was Kenyatta, who wrote an article for the communist Labour Monthly entitled ‘Hands off Abyssinia!’, declaring that ‘to support Ethiopia is to fight Fascism’;⁸⁰ its treasurer was Mrs Amy Ashwood Garvey, former wife of Marcus Garvey. Padmore, Sam Manning from Trinidad, and Mohamed Said from Somaliland were on the executive committee, and other officials were two respected senior members of Britain’s black community: Albert Marryshow from Grenada, who had spoken at the 1921 Pan-African Congress, and Dr Peter McDonald Milliard, president of the Negro Welfare Association in Manchester. Born in British Guiana in 1882, Milliard graduated MD from Howard University in 1910, practised among the West Indian emigrant workers in Panama for many years, helped them to form a trade union, obtained his British MD from Edinburgh University in 1923, and settled in Manchester. Described by Pad-more as ‘a man of considerable charm and striking presence’, Milliard was ‘a life-long democrat and socialist’ and ‘a passionate internationalist’.⁸¹

In March 1937 the IAFA was replaced by the International African Service Bureau, with Wallace-Johnson as general secretary, Padmore in the chair, James as editorial director, and Makonnen as treasurer and fund-raiser. The executive committee included Chris Jones (otherwise Chris Braithwaite), leader of the Colonial Seamen’s Union, and Africans from the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and French West Africa. Though it had several white patrons, including the future Labour colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones, Nancy Cunard, Victor Gollancz, Sylvia Pankhurst, D.N.Pritt, and Dorothy Woodman, the Bureau insisted that it owed ‘no affiliation or allegiance to any political party, organization or group in Europe’. Its members saw Pan-Africanism as ‘an independent political expression of Negro aspirations for complete national independence from white domination – Capitalist or Communist’.⁸² As Makonnen put it many years later, ‘We were simply not prepared to compromise, we were not going to have any European leadership’.⁸³ One of the Bureau’s chief functions was ‘to help enlighten public opinion . . . as to the true conditions in the various colonies’,84 and it did so by producing and distributing literature and sending speakers on the colonial question to Labour Party and trade union branches, co-operative guilds, and the like.

When Wallace-Johnson went back to Sierra Leone the African Sentinel was succeeded by a monthly journal called International African Opinion, edited by James, sold at IASB meetings in Hyde Park, and ‘sent everywhere to every address we could find’.⁸⁵ The new journal’s motto was ‘Educate, Co-operate, Emancipate: Neutral in nothing affecting the African Peoples’. It was to be a journal for activists, not a literary paper giving advice from ivory towers; and it sought, not to dominate other black organizations, but to co-ordinate and centralize their activities so as ‘to bring them into closer fraternal relation’.⁸⁶ In his memoirs, Makonnen tells how the IASB co-operated with, amongst others, ‘the most radical caucus of the Sinhalese students’ and with ‘a little group around the Burmese students attached to the London School of Economics’.⁸⁷

When war broke out in 1939 the IASB was necessarily much less active for some years. There were disagreements over financial matters which led to a breakaway by Wallace-Johnson’s successor as general secretary, the Nigerian Edward Sigismund (otherwise Babalola Wilkey), who launched a small organization called the Negro Cultural Association. The chief interest of this development lies in the close watch kept on both organizations by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. This reported that the new body was being infiltrated by the Communist Party, which was said to be planning an anti-colonial conference, carefully packed so that the communists could ‘damp down the notorious Trotskyite tendencies of many colonials’. The Special Branch observed, however, that the communist Sigismund was unlikely to carry much weight and that ‘the policy of the International African Service Bureau will remain in the hands of the Trotskyist, George Padmore’.⁸⁸

Towards the end of 1944 the IASB joined with a number of other black organizations in Britain, and with representatives in Britain of various colonial organizations, to form a ‘loose umbrella association’⁸⁹ called the Pan-African Federation. Support came from the Negro Welfare Centre, Negro Association (Manchester), Coloured Workers’ Association (London), Coloured People’s Association (Edinburgh), United Committee of Coloured and Colonial People’s Association (Cardiff), African Union (Glasgow University), Association of Students of African Descent (Dublin), Kikuyu Central Association, African Progressive Association (London), Sierra Leone section of the West African Youth League, and Friends of African Freedom Society (Gold Coast).90 Milliard was president of the federation; J.E.Taylor of Liverpool was treasurer; and Makonnen was general secretary. The new grouping had four objects:

1.	To promote the well-being and unity of African peoples and peoples of African descent throughout the world.
2.	To demand self-determination and independence of African peoples, and other subject races from the domination of powers claiming sovereignty and trusteeship over them.
3.	To secure equality of civil rights for African peoples and the total abolition of all forms of racial discrimination.
4.	To strive to co-operate between African peoples and others who share our aspirations.91

It was a piece of luck for the Pan-Africanist movement to have a man like Makonnen in Manchester when that city became a magnet for black American servicemen stationed in the north of England. His restaurants were a brilliant stroke, and the black GIs came in droves.⁹² This success enabled the movement to set up a publishing company, issue a stream of pamphlets on specific colonial problems, launch a monthly periodical, Pan-Africa (described as a journal of African life, history and thought, and soon declared a seditious publication and banned by several colonial governments), open a bookshop – and organize the most important and influential of all the Pan-African congresses, which issued, from Manchester, some 20 weeks after VE Day, a clarion call for colonial freedom.

The Manchester Congress (1945)

Why Manchester? First, because Makonnen had established himself in business there, knew the lord mayor, and had good contacts inside the local Labour Party, of which he was a member. All this made it easier to book halls and find accommodation for delegates. Second, ‘Manchester had become quite a point of contact with the coloured proletariat in Britain, and we had made a name for ourselves in fighting various areas of discrimination’; the congress was ‘not only concerned with international issues’ but also ‘a protest against increasing discrimination in Britain’. And, third,

you could say that we coloured people had a right there, because of the age-old connections between cotton, slavery and the building up of cities in England . . . Manchester gave us an important opportunity to express and expose the contradictions, the fallacies and the pretensions that were at the very centre of the empire.93

Why 1945? Unlike the DuBoisian congresses of the 1920s, Manchester was not an isolated event but ‘a natural outgrowth of a ferment of pan-African activity’,⁹⁴ of an upsurge of black consciousness stimulated by the Second World War. In a letter to DuBois, written just after the end of the war, Padmore described the militant mood of black people from the colonies whom he was meeting in Britain:

Living under alien rule, their first manifestation of political consciousness naturally assumes the form of national liberation, self-determination, self-government – call it what you may. They want to be able to rule their own country, free from the fetters of alien domination. On this all are agreed, from even the most conservative to the most radical elements . . . This does not mean that there are no individual Negroes who subscribe to political philosophies . . . But these are more in the nature of personal idiosyncracies than practical politics. In brief, even those who call themselves Communists are nationalist.⁹⁵

The Manchester Congress was timed to coincide with the second conference of the newly formed World Federation of Trade Unions, held in Paris in September and October 1945; and it was preceded by an Anti-Colonial Peoples’ Conference held in London on 10 June 1945. The latter was organized jointly by the Pan-African Federation, WASU, the Federation of Indian Organizations in Britain, the Ceylon Students’ Association, and the Burma Association, and it called for an end to imperialism; the application of the Atlantic Charter to the colonies; the formation of a World Colonial Council, with representatives from the colonies, to formulate policy, supervise elections, and generally oversee the devolution of imperial control; an end to the colour bar everywhere; and guarantees that Italian- and Japanese-controlled territories would not revert to colonial status.⁹⁶

Though French-speaking African and Caribbean colonies were unrepresented, the Manchester gathering was in most other respects far and away the most representative of all the Pan-African congresses. There were 90 delegates and 11 fraternal delegates and observers. Twenty delegates represented 15 organizations in West Africa; 6 represented organizations in east Africa and South Africa; 33 represented the West Indies; and 35 represented various organizations in Britain, including WASU. There were fraternal delegates or observers from, amongst other bodies, the Somali Society and the Federation of Indian Organizations in Britain. DuBois, now 77, had made a personal appeal to Truman to get a passport at short notice and had flown over from New York to preside over ‘the coming of age of his political child’.97 Kenyatta and Wallace-Johnson were prominent among the delegates. The Nyasaland African Congress was represented by Dr Hastings K. Banda, first student from that colony to graduate in medicine, first president of the Liverpool branch of the League of Coloured Peoples, and afterwards first president of Malawi. The young South African writer Peter Abrahams, whose novel A Wreath for Udomo (1956) would paint a rather one-sided picture of Padmore and his group, was one of two delegates from the African National Congress; he also represented the IASB, along with Mrs Garvey, Makonnen, Nkrumah, and Padmore. Other delegates later to be prominent included three Nigerians: Obafemi Awolowo, a future finance minister; H.O.Davies, a future federal minister; and Ja-Ja Wachuku, a future foreign minister. Assembled in Chorlton Town Hall, in fact, was ‘the future political leadership of British territories in Africa around 1960’.⁹⁸

More important than the big names, however, was what Padmore called the ‘plebeian character’ of the gathering. By contrast with the DuBoisian congresses of the 1920s, which had ‘centred around a small intellectual élite’ Manchester was an expression of ‘a mass movement intimately identified with the under-privileged sections of the coloured colonial populations’.⁹⁹ ‘As compared with the bourgeois notabilities, ministers and academics who attended earlier Pan-African meetings’, writes Geiss, ‘one can now sense a turn towards the masses.’¹⁰⁰ Many trade unions were represented, including the Gold Coast railwaymen’s union, the Sierra Leone teachers’ union, the Trinidad oilfield workers’ union, and the St Lucia seamen’s and waterfront workers’ union. And, for the first time, political parties were represented: the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, founded the year before by Dusé Mohamed Ali, Azikiwe, and the veteran nationalist Herbert Macaulay; the Grenada Labour Party; the People’s National Party of Jamaica; the West Indies National Party of Trinidad; and the Trinidad Labour Party.

Significantly, the whole of the first day’s proceedings of such an internationally strong and representative gathering – representative, at any rate, of British-held colonial territories – was devoted to ‘The Colour Problem in Britain’. The discussion was opened by the Ghanaian Eddie Duplan, who represented the Negro Welfare Centre in Liverpool, where he was working with black seamen; between the wars, he said, most black workers in Britain had lived below the subsistence level. He was supported by a fellow-Ghanaian, E.A.Aki-Emi (Coloured Workers’ Association) and by A.E.Moselle from Cardiff, ‘an area which had the largest coloured population in Great Britain’. Intermarriage had created a community of coloured youths, said Moselle; they found it hard to get work, the labour exchange was not at all anxious to place them, and it had been strongly suggested that – though born in Britain, with mothers and grandparents here – they should be got rid of. Peter Abrahams spoke of the injustices suffered at the hands of the police by black people in London’s East End. For instance, when black men and white men were arrested for gambling together, ‘the white men were dismissed and advised not to associate with coloured men, the latter being sentenced to fines or terms of imprisonment’. Miss Alma La Badie, representing the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Jamaica, raised the problem of unwanted babies fathered by black American troops stationed in Britain and abandoned by their mothers.

Later sessions discussed ‘Imperialism in North and West Africa’, ‘Oppression in South Africa’, ‘The East African Picture’ (Kenyatta led this discussion), ‘Ethiopia and the Black Republics’, and ‘The Problem in the Caribbean’. The multiple oppression of black women was raised by Mrs Garvey, who declared: ‘Very much has been written and spoken of the Negro, but for some reason very little has been said about the black woman. She has been shunted into the social background to be a child-bearer.’

Among the large number of resolutions carried was one on ‘Coloured Seamen in Great Britain’ and one on the ‘Colour Bar Problem in Great Britain’, demanding that discrimination on account of race, creed, or colour be made a criminal offence. The essence of the congress resolutions was summed up in two brief, militant statements. ‘The Challenge to the Colonial Powers’, proclaiming the need for force; as a last resort, in the struggle for freedom, declared:

We are determined to be free . . .

    We are unwilling to starve any longer while doing the world’s drudgery, in order to support by our poverty and ignorance a false aristocracy and a discredited Imperialism.

    We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for private profit alone . . . We shall complain, appeal and arraign. We will make the world listen to the facts of our condition. We will fight in every way we can for freedom, democracy and social betterment.

The ‘Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers and Intellectuals’, drafted by Nkrumah, called on colonial workers to be in the front of the battle against imperialism, assured them that ‘your weapons – the Strike and the Boycott – are invincible’, and called on ‘the educated Colonials’ to play their part in organizing the masses.101

Though all but ignored by the British press, the Manchester Congress was, in Geiss’s words, ‘a landmark . . . in the history . . . of decolonization’, for it ‘served as the pace-maker of decolonization in Africa and in the British West Indies’, and the strategy proclaimed was ‘put into effect with surprising ease’.¹⁰² And the chief reason for this, Makonnen suggests, is that the leaders were closely tied to those they led¹⁰³ – however much that may have ceased to be true for some of them once power had been won.

The Asian radicals

Two Indian revolutionaries who lived in Britain between the wars were active in British politics as well as contributing to the upsurge of Indian national consciousness. They were Shapurji Saklatvala and V.K. Krishna Menon.

Born into a Parsee family in the state of Bombay in 1874, Shapurji Saklatvala came to Britain for medical treatment at the age of 31 and stayed here for the rest of his life. A liberal when he arrived, he moved steadily to the left, joining the Independent Labour Party’s Central London branch in 1910. Six years later he formed the Workers’ Welfare League of India in London, which at first worked among Indian seamen but soon extended its scope to cover the working conditions of all Indians in Britain. In 1921 it became the agent in Britain of the All-India Trade Union Congress, and it was seen by British Intelligence as ‘the first foreign agency to introduce Bolshevik principles into the trade-union movement in India’.¹⁰⁴ After the Russian revolution of 1917 Saklatvala became an active member of the ILP’s marxist wing and, with people like Emile Burns, Helen Crawfurd, R. Palme Dutt, and J.T. Walton Newbold, strongly supported affiliation to the Communist International. When their affiliation motion was turned down by 521 votes to 97 at the ILP’s March 1921 conference, Saklatvala was one of the 200 or so who left the ILP to join the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain.

Saklatvala contested North Battersea in the 1922 general election as a Labour Party candidate after negotiations in which, as we have already seen, J.R.Archer played a leading part. The precise terms on which the Labour Party executive agreed to endorse his candidature were stated thus at the party’s 1922 annual conference:

The candidate should appear before the constituency with the designation of ‘Labour Candidate’ only, independent of all other political parties, and, if elected should join the Parliamentary Labour Party; that at the General Election he should, in his election address and in his campaign give prominence to the issues as defined by the National Executive from the general Party programme; that if elected he should act in harmony with the Constitution and Standing Orders of the Party.105

Saklatvala was elected with a majority of 2,000 but lost the seat in the 1923 election. In 1924 communists were barred from standing as Labour candidates and excluded from Labour Party membership, and in that year’s general election Saklatvala contested North Battersea as a communist. He won back the seat with the support of the local Labour Party and held it until 1929.

Saklatvala’s militancy and outspokenness brought him constantly into the news. In 1921 his house was searched by the police. In 1925, when he was appointed a member of the British delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union Congress in Washington, the American authorities revoked his visa. He was the first person in Britain to be arrested during the 1926 General Strike: he was charged with sedition for a May Day speech in Hyde Park urging soldiers not to fire on workers. Refusing to be bound over – ‘In circumstances such as those existing today’, he told the court, ‘I shall refuse to be silenced except by force majeure’ – he spent two months in Wormwood Scrubs. On his way to a meeting of the League against Imperialism in 1929 he was arrested by the Belgian police and sent back to Britain.

Both inside and outside the House of Commons Saklatvala was a fervent opponent of imperialism and champion of colonial liberation. He said in his first speech:

No Britisher would for a moment tolerate a constitution for Great Britain if it were written outside of Great Britain by people who are not British. In a similar way the constitutions for Ireland and India and Egypt and Mesopotamia should be constitutions written by the men of those countries, in those countries, without interference from outside.106

In 1927 Saklatvala spent three months in India, addressing huge audiences and advocating trade union and peasant organization. After this visit, which was a personal triumph, India was crossed off the list of countries his passport was valid for – and the ban was not lifted when the Labour Party returned to office in 1929.

Though a disciplined communist Saklatvala was no blind follower of the party line, and is said to have been ‘single-minded’ where his own views or, indeed, interests were concerned. He died in 1936, survived by his English wife Sarah and their three sons and two daughters.¹⁰⁷

Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon was born in 1896 on India’s Malabar coast, in what is now Kerala. His mother was an accomplished Sanskrit scholar and musician; his father, a successful small-town lawyer. In 1918 he took his BA degree at the Presidency College, Madras, where he created a stir by hoisting on the college flagpole the red and green flag of Mrs Annie Besant’s Home Rule League. He spent five years at Adyar College – which Mrs Besant had founded – studying, teaching Indian history, and working on the weekly New India. In 1924 Mrs Besant helped him come to Britain; the idea was that he should stay for six months, attend an educational conference, and acquire a law degree. He was to stay for close on a quarter of a century.

After teaching history for a year at a school in Letchworth, Krishna Menon studied political science for two years under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and in 1927 took a first-class BSc in economics. Seven years later he was called to the bar, but his work as a barrister was always subordinated to his political activity. Almost single-handed he revitalized the Commonwealth of India League – founded in 1912, by Mrs Besant, as the Home Rule for India British Auxiliary – and was elected its joint secretary in 1928. Within two years most of the old guard had dropped out, Krishna Menon and his fellow-radicals had won their fight against support for dominion status for India, and the league was calling itself the India League. Its object now was to support India’s claim for self-rule (swaraj).

Right through the 1930s Krishna Menon ‘was reading, writing, thinking, dreaming India’ – and, still more to the point, was talking about India, mostly to British working-class audiences. He talked with a thrilling combination of knowledge and passion. ‘You could almost hear the pounding of his heart’, said one person who heard him speak.108 He would travel 300 miles to speak to a handful of people. No meeting was too small, no venue too remote. It was his willingness to speak to a humble group of Unitarians in an obscure Walthamstow church hall ‘that awakened Reginald Sorensen, MP, to the moral significance of India’s cause’.¹⁰⁹ Gradually Krishna Menon drew into the league’s work a long list of left-wing publicists. Stafford Cripps, Palme Dutt, J.B.S.Haldane, Monica Whately, and Ellen Wilkinson were among the league’s speakers; Bertrand Russell was in the chair; Fenner Brockway, A.A.Purcell, George Hicks, H.N.Brailsford, and J.F.Horrabin supported in various ways. One of the league’s biggest propaganda blows against British rule in India was the fact-finding mission it sent to India in 1932. The members were Whately, Wilkinson, and the former Labour MP Leonard W. Matters; Krishna Menon went with them as secretary. The mission spent 83 days in India, interviewing Indians of every class, caste, and shade of opinion – though they were not allowed to see the nationalist leaders who were in jail – and when they came back published a devastating 534-page report, Condition of India. This was banned in India; according to the British chief of intelligence there, ‘very many of the allegations are or may be true’.¹¹⁰ This report was ‘perhaps the greatest single contribution made by the India League towards a proper appreciation of the Indian case by the British people’,¹¹¹ and it shook the British public.

Back from this mission, Krishna Menon plunged into his work for India with redoubled vigour and dedication. He ate very little (and never ate meat), slept very little, neither smoked nor drank, remained a bachelor, and lived in one room in the utmost austerity. He was regarded with something approaching awe by his fellow-members of South-West St Pancras Labour Party. Though he found time to help Allen Lane launch the Penguin imprint and was the first editor of the Pelican series, he was a legend in St Pancras for the conscientious way he performed his duties as a borough councillor. He served for 14 years, increasing his majority at each successive election. He chaired the libraries committee and launched the local arts and civic council. In the blitz he was one of the borough’s air-raid wardens, wearing a helmet but spurning the uniform. He was on duty every night of the blitz: the first to arrive, the last to leave. He seemed totally without fear; once at the Conway Hall he carried on with his speech while the bombs dropped and all but a dozen of the audience left the hall for the shelters. In January 1941 he resigned from the Labour Party when the national executive withdrew its endorsement of his parliamentary candidature in Dundee on the ground that his ‘first loyalty’ appeared to be to India. He was often called a communist. But his attitude to the Communist Party was dictated solely by its support for the Indian freedom struggle, and he rejoined the Labour Party towards the end of the war.

Having played an important part in the negotiations leading to independence, he was appointed India’s first high commissioner in the United Kingdom. The appointment was not to Attlee’s taste, but Nehru – one of Krishna Menon’s few close friends – insisted, and Krishna Menon held the post from 1947 to 1952. He showed the same unworldly austerity and probity that had marked his life in St Pancras in the 1930s. For the sake of India’s prestige much had to be spent on the trimmings of the High Commission’s offices. But Krishna Menon lived with his usual extreme simplicity in one back room of India House, subsisting, it was said, on tea and biscuits. He was at his desk by half past seven each morning; normally he worked until two the next morning. He never drew any salary, and often found himself without any money in his pockets. And when his niece, a student at Oxford, visited him he would not let her stay at his official residence but put her up at the YWCA. With this fastidious disdain for the perks of office there went, however, a degree of arrogance and irascibility that made many people dislike him. He was a man apart.

Krishna Menon’s career did not end triumphantly. After leading India’s delegation to the United Nations, and playing a large part in the Suez negotiations in 1956, he served India as defence minister from 1957 to 1962. He came in for much of the blame for India’s humiliation in the 1962 war with China, and resigned his post. After living in virtual retirement he died in 1974. The Times obituary called him ‘a lone wolf’ – a ‘remarkable but unlikable man who worked untiringly all his life for his country, yet never received a nation’s gratitude’.112

Racism as colour bar

The racism that poisoned the everyday lives of black people in Britain between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second characteristically did so in the form of what was called ‘colour bar’. In industry the colour bar was virtually total. Only in the early forties, when their labour was needed for the war effort, could black workers get jobs in British factories; and even then there was often resistance from employers and white employees alike. The colour bar also meant ‘the refusal of lodgings, refusal of service in cafés, refusal of admittance to dance halls, etc., shrugs, nods, whispers, comments, etc., in public, in the street, in trams and in buses’: that was how Kenneth Little summed it up in 1943.1 From numerous examples that could be given, four are here selected to show, not only how the colour bar operated in Britain in those years, but also how black people fought back against these racist attacks on their humanity.

The Cardiff seamen

In 1921 there were about 250 West African seamen stranded in British ports. They were living ‘in a state of semi-starvation’ in Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow, and London’s East End, since ‘the unions . . . will not allow a coloured man to sign on for a ship while there is a white applicant for the job’.² The effects of discrimination became particularly harsh after the slump began in 1929. Tramp shipping was hard hit. Shipowners were given government help in the form of a subsidy, and it was made a condition of payment that only British labour might be employed on subsidized ships. Since black seamen registered as aliens were precluded from employment on subsidized ships, hundreds were thus deprived of any chance whatever of work.

By 1935 there were an estimated 3,000 non-European seamen in Cardiff, about two-thirds of whom were Africans or persons of African descent, the rest being mostly Arabs, Lascars and Malays.³ The local police, high-handedly and quite illegally, placed their own interpretation on the Aliens Order 1920 and the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order 1925. In the eyes of the police, these measures automatically made every black seaman in Cardiff an alien, regardless of any documentary evidence a man might produce to prove that he was British. When a black seaman produced a British passport the police would confiscate it without giving any receipt. If a seaman refused to hand over his passport he would be threatened with arrest and imprisonment. The shipping companies, in cahoots with the police, often refused to give black seamen the pay due to them at the end of a voyage until they presented an alien’s certificate of registration.

This state of affairs led Cardiff’s black seamen to form the Coloured Colonial Seamen’s Union and send one of their leaders, Harry O’Connell, to London to seek help from the League of Coloured Peoples. In April 1935 two investigators from the League, George W. Brown and P. Cecil Lewis, spent a week in Cardiff interviewing over 200 seamen and others. They wrote in The Keys:

We found a canvas crowded with strange figures: shipowners, aldermen, police, trade unionists, pulling from various angles a net which has entangled people from all over the British Empire. We lived in a compact community of West Indians, West Africans, Arabs, Malays, Somalis, men from Singapore, East Africa and every land where the Union Jack has planted itself; a settled, orderly community, trying with desperate success to keep respectable homes under depressing conditions . . . We met men as British as any Englishman, forced by fraud to register as aliens, after living here since the war; charges and counter-charges; misleading newspaper reports; men in authority bellowing ‘repatriation’; muttered resentments against British children called ‘half-castes’; and, dominating everything, an imminent danger that deliberate trickery would mean for these men and their families expulsion from British shipping and ultimately from Britain.4

The report of Brown and Lewis established that, in Cardiff, all black men were classified as aliens in spite of indisputable evidence of British nationality. This included men with honourable records of military service. One had fought in the battle of Jutland; two had joined the army in the West Indies and served in campaigns in Africa; two had medals for good conduct and long service; three had been torpedoed and had been awarded compensation for their injuries. All these were now registered as aliens. Nineteen men had resided in Britain for more than ten years – three of them for 30 years or more, and one of these three, a man of 60, had lived in this country for 37 years. All these men had been issued with alien cards. In short, ‘a studied and deliberate policy had been instituted to deprive them of their nationality and the privileges attached thereto’.⁵

As soon as he had the facts in his possession Harold Moody got in touch with the Board of Trade’s unemployment branch and the Unemployment Assistance Board, himself visited Cardiff, and enlisted the aid of Cardiff’s MP, who raised the matter in the Commons. Moody also confronted officials of the National Union of Seamen and the head of the Shipping Subsidy, and sent a devastating memorandum to the British Shipping Federation. As a result of these efforts a large number of Cardiff’s black seamen had their British nationality restored to them.6

But the investigation brought something else to light, too: the shameful conditions in which Cardiff’s black community was condemned to live.

Discrimination, social or economic, has limited the social contacts of these people, has segregated them from the more salubrious quarters of the town; has interfered seriously with the possibilities of the Coloured children, particularly the girls, from obtaining virtually any but the lowest-paid occupations; has led to African families paying higher rents . . . than White families of similar social status.⁷

These rents, be it noted, were paid for dwellings described by an observer in 1937 as

slums . . . the houses are either not well built or are in bad repair . . . The dock area lies low and is damp . . . Five or six families may share a six roomed house, with a common staircase, one lavatory in bad repair and one tap which may even be outside . . . Rooms are often small . . . ventilation is rarely good, and sometimes the walls are verminous.

Those living in such slums for the most part put their children’s needs above their own. The same observer added: ‘It is noteworthy that children of coloured men almost always appear well fed and are warmly dressed in spite of poverty.’⁸

Yet these children, when they left school, could never find work in a factory or an office, no matter what their qualifications.⁹

Jim Crow in England

Black American servicemen started to arrive in Britain in the spring of 1942. By the late summer there were over 10,000 here – at one point, there would be more than ten times as many – and their proximity had aroused strong anxieties in the breast of Mrs Annie Gertrude May, wife of the Revd Frederick May, vicar of Worle, near Weston super Mare. Mrs May called the women of the village together and gave them a little talk in which she suggested the following code of behaviour:

1.	If a local woman keeps a shop and a coloured soldier enters she must serve him, but she must do it as quickly as possible and indicate that she does not desire him to come there again.
2.	If she is in a cinema and notices a coloured soldier next to her, she moves to another seat immediately.
3.	If she is walking on the pavement and a coloured soldier is coming towards her, she crosses to the other pavement.
4.	If she is in a shop and a coloured soldier enters, she leaves as soon as she has made her purchases or before that if she is in a queue.
5.	White women, of course, must have no relationship with coloured troops.
6.	On no account must coloured troops be invited into the homes of white women.

‘The vast majority of people here’, commented the Sunday Pictorial, to which Mrs May’s little talk had been leaked, ‘have nothing but repugnance for the narrow-minded, uninformed prejudices expressed by the vicar’s wife. There is – and will be – no persecution of coloured people in Britain.’10

And yet black American troops were finding their reception in Britain a strange mixture of genuine welcome and genuine discrimination – the latter often instigated (indeed, insisted on) by white American troops. The American army was in those days a Jim Crow army, segregated on racial grounds, ‘and it became clear when the first black troops began to arrive . . . that this policy was to be rigidly applied overseas’.¹¹ It became equally clear that the British government was in a quandary. On the one hand, there were many British people who did not and would not accept the American view; on the other hand, the British government did not want to offend its ally. And in fact the government ‘never squarely faced up to the problem until its hand was forced, and equivocated throughout the war’.¹²

In September 1942 the MP Tom Driberg caused Churchill great embarrassment by asking him in the Commons

whether he is aware that an unfortunate result of the presence here of American Forces has been the introduction in some parts of Britain of discrimination against negro troops; and whether he will make friendly representations to the American military authorities asking them to instruct their men that the colour bar is not a custom in this country and that its non-observance by British troops or civilians should be regarded with equanimity.

‘The Question is certainly unfortunate’, replied Churchill. ‘I am hopeful that without any action on my part the points of view of all concerned will be mutually understood and respected.’ There was no reply when the communist MP William Gallacher said he had received a letter from a number of servicemen ‘informing me that an officer has given them a lecture advising them on the necessity for discrimination in connection with negroes who are in London’.13

A few days later a letter from the manager of an Oxford snack bar was published in The Times. A black American soldier had come in and ‘very diffidently presented me with an open letter from his commanding officer explaining that “Pte. —— is a soldier in the U.S. Army, and it is necessary that he sometimes has a meal, which he has, on occasions, found difficult to obtain. I would be grateful if you would look after him.”’ The manager went on:

Naturally, we ‘looked after’ him to the best of our ability, but I could not help feeling ashamed that in a country where even stray dogs are ‘looked after’ by special societies a citizen of the world, who is fighting the world’s battle for freedom and equality, should have found it necessary to place himself in this humiliating position. Had there been the slightest objection from other customers I should not have had the slightest hesitation in asking them all to leave.¹⁴

After consulting senior American officers in his area, the major-general responsible for administration in Southern Command issued to district commanders and regional commissioners a set of ‘Notes on Relations with Coloured Troops’, a document which a recent writer had described, mildly enough, as a ‘monument to white arrogance’:¹⁵

While there are many coloured men of high mentality and cultural distinction, the generality are of a simple mental outlook. They work hard when they have no money and when they have money prefer to do nothing until it is gone. In short they have not the white man’s ability to think and act to a plan. Their spiritual outlook is well known and their songs give the clue to their nature. They respond to sympathetic treatment. They are natural psychologists in that they can size up a white man’s character and can take advantage of a weakness. Too much freedom, too wide associations with white men tend to make them lose their heads and have on occasions led to civil strife. This occurred after the last war due to too free treatment and associations which they had experienced in France.

Advice was given to British troops on the need to take account of this ‘mental outlook’, to ‘conform to the American attitude’, and to avoid making ‘intimate friends’ with black troops.16 This document, issued without War Office authority, was appended to a memorandum prepared for the Cabinet in September 1942 by Sir James Grigg, secretary of state for war. Largely supported by the Foreign Office, Grigg was proposing to follow the lines of this document and let British officers instruct those under their command, including the women in the ATS, to adopt towards black American soldiers the attitude of the United States army authorities.

The Cabinet discussed the matter at great length and, if Sir Alexander Cadogan’s eyewitness account is to be believed, rather incoherently. Ministers generally agreed that ‘it was desirable that the people of this country should avoid becoming too friendly with coloured troops’ – though the colonial secretary Viscount Cranborne (afterwards Marquess of Salisbury) was not too happy about this, no doubt because of possible repercussions in the colonies. He instanced the case of a black official at the Colonial Office who was now barred from his usual lunch-time restaurant because it was patronized by American officers. ‘That’s all right;’ retorted Churchill, ‘if he takes his banjo with him they’ll think he’s one of the band!’¹⁷ All the Cabinet members were now talking at once, but at length it was decided that Grigg and two leaders of the Labour Party, Sir Stafford Cripps and Herbert Morrison, should prepare confidential guidelines for the services and also approve a suitable article for Current Affairs, published by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. The draft was shown to Eisenhower and endorsed by the Cabinet a week later, and the British press was asked not to refer to the existence of the instructions and not to draw attention to the Current Affairs article when it appeared.¹⁸

Published early in December 1942, the article told members of the services that ‘the average American attitude’ must be respected: the Americans had to ‘exercise a certain measure of control to prevent the mixture of blood which would, at the present stage, benefit neither side’. If the black American was ‘brought into close social contact with English home life or with English women, the situation is so new and unexpected that he may not understand it. Such contacts are not frequently made in his home country and thus great care should be exercised over here’.19

By now there were about 8,000 West Indian troops in Britain, most of them flight mechanics, and they too were falling foul of white American racists. As early as March 1942 two white US marines attacked a West Indian serviceman in a London street. White American soldiers started ordering black British people out of at least one London dance-hall. Dr A. Tuboku Metzer, a West African on the house staff of St Andrew’s Hospital, Billericay, was insulted by two American military policemen in a Brentwood hotel. Before long Colonel P.B.Rogers of the London Command was telling the Commanding General of the Services of Supply for the European theatre of war that ‘in London the negro British nationals are rightly incensed. They undoubtedly have been cursed, made to get off the sidewalk, leave eating places and separated from their white wives in public by American soldiers’.²⁰* A Jamaican called George Roberts, one of the 345 skilled technicians who had come to help the British war effort – he was working as an electrician in a Liverpool factory – had volunteered for the Home Guard and, wearing his Home Guard uniform, found himself refused entry to the Grafton dance-hall in October 1943 on account of his colour. He resigned from the Home Guard, was fined £5 for failing to perform Home Guard duties, and had the fine reduced to a nominal farthing by the recorder of Liverpool.²²

These West Indian servicemen and skilled workers were hurt and disillusioned by the colour bar they found in Britain. For some, the last straw came when WAAFs – members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – told them they had been ordered not to be seen with black troops ‘because of the Americans’; four WAAFs, it was alleged, were posted for refusing to obey this order.23 A Barbadian in the RAF complained in the Manchester Guardian of the ‘silent, subtle and obviously racial prejudice and indecent display of superiority from people of British nationality’.²⁴ What particularly upset many West Indians was that, while the racial discrimination practised in the American army was open and admitted, the colour bar they experienced in Britain was often hypocritically masked by a show of welcome. A Jamaican socialist called Lancelot O.A. DaCosta wrote from an RAF hospital to the League of Coloured Peoples complaining that the British authorities had done nothing about the ‘gross insults’ meted out to black volunteers in the services. ‘I hate this country and these English people’, he added, ‘and I am not an hypocrite to disguise my feelings as they do, in pretending that they welcome you here.’²⁵ Soon after the war ended the weekly John Bull summed up what DaCosta and many like him had experienced during their stay:

Colonial troops came to this country to help us win the war. But they are bitter because the colour bar still exists in Britain. They are shunned at service camps, banned from hotels and called intruders. . ..

    At one R.A.F. station, just before a detachment of West Indian airmen was due to arrive, all the W.A.A.F.s were called together and told that, though they were to be polite to the coloured Colonials, they were on no account to ‘fraternise’.

    There was to be no sharing a table with them in the N.A.A.F.I. or sitting beside them in the camp cinema. The West Indians were, in fact, to be treated as pariahs in the community of the camp. Yet these men had come of their own accord 5,000 miles to a strange land and an unfriendly climate to help us in the war.

    Rudeness to Colonial Service girls in this country is surprisingly common . . .

    A West Indian girl in the A.T.S. was refused a new issue of shoes by her officer, who added: ‘At home you don’t wear shoes anyway.’ An Army Officer to a West Indian A.T.S.: ‘If I can’t get white women I’ll something well do without.’ . . .

    Colour prejudice . . . still persists in the hearts and minds of many of the people of Britain, and it may increase again as war memories fade.²⁶

The case of Amelia King

Amelia E.King was a young black woman from a Stepney family that had been in Britain for three generations. Her father was in the merchant navy, her brother in the royal navy. But when, in 1943, she volunteered for service with the Women’s Land Army she was rejected by its Essex county committee because she was black. Apparently some farmers had objected to her and some of the local people on whom she might have been billeted had objected, too.

The matter was raised in the Commons, where the minister of agriculture said: ‘Careful inquiry has been made into the possibility of finding employment and a billet for Miss King, but when it became apparent that this was likely to prove extremely difficult, she was advised to volunteer for other war work where her services could be more speedily utilised.’ One MP told the minister that ‘the world listens to matters of this kind, which affect the integrity of the British people’, but the minister made no reply.27

A Mass Observation poll found that ‘even those who did not entirely believe in colour equality were against this particular case of colour prejudice which was regarded as detrimental to the war effort’.²⁸

The Constantine case

Before 1944 it was common for London’s West End hotels to refuse accommodation to black people. In 1941 one such hotel had turned away Sir Hari Singh Gour on account of his colour. A distinguished jurist, poet, and novelist, he was vice-president of Delhi and Nagpur universities, deputy president of the Indian Legislative Assembly, a member of the Simon Commission’s Indian Committee, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Two years later the same thing happened to the Trinidadian Learie Constantine, one of the world’s most distinguished cricketers. Constantine sued the hotel and won his case. As C.L.R.James put it, he revolted ‘against the revolting contrast between his first-class status as a cricketer and his third-class status as a man’.²⁹ His legal victory was a turning-point in the struggle against one of the most pernicious and humiliating forms of colour bar in Britain.

Learie Nicholas Constantine was born in Trinidad in 1902. His father, an overseer on a cocoa estate, was a keen cricketer. At the age of three Learie would be seen outside his home, bat in hand, asking passers-by to bowl to him. His performance in three first-class matches having won him a place on the West Indies team, he first came to Britain in 1923. As batsman, so powerful were his strokes, he was likened to a blacksmith. He was a devastating fast bowler. His fielding was near-perfect: he ‘gave the impression of climbing an invisible ladder to get the ball’30 and the great Bradman ranked him ‘a marvellous fieldsman, no matter where he was stationed’.³¹ His performance at Lord’s in 1928 – he took 100 wickets and made 1,000 runs – led to an invitation, which he accepted, to turn professional and join the Nelson team in the Lancashire League. With his wife Norma – their baby daughter Gloria joined them later – he settled in two-room ‘digs’ in the cotton town of Nelson. Black people were a novelty in the area, and at first the Constantines had to endure rudeness, anonymous letters, and much curiosity. But they stuck it out, winning respect, admiration, and friendship. James, their lodger for a while, helped Constantine write his first book, Cricket and I (1933). And during Constantine’s nine years with the Nelson team it won the League championship seven times.

In 1942 Constantine, now working in a solicitor’s office, was asked by the Ministry of Labour to become a temporary civil servant in its welfare department, with responsibility for the West Indian technicians who had come to Merseyside factories. It was an inspired choice: ‘his organisational ability, personal prestige, experience of Lancashire and racial background made him the ideal person to deal with the absorption of West Indians into the Merseyside industrial and social scene.’³² He had problems with both trade unions and employers; solving them called for both tact and cunning:

Some firms either flatly refused to take on coloured men, or put endless delays in their way hoping to make them seek work elsewhere. I used to get the Ministry to press those firms for most urgent deliveries of orders, and then they found that they must take some coloured workers or get none of any kind. With urgent work to be done, they were forced to give way.³³

In the summer of 1943 Constantine was given four days’ special leave to captain the West Indies team against England at Lord’s. The person who telephoned the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, on his and his family’s behalf asked if there were any objection to them on account of their colour and was told there was not. Two rooms were reserved for the Constantines and their daughter and a deposit of £2 was paid. But when the family arrived it was made clear that they were not welcome. The manager said: ‘You may stop tonight; you cannot stop any longer.’ Constantine’s chief at the Ministry of Labour arrived and was told: ‘We are not going to have all these niggers in our hotel. He can stop the night, but if he does not go tomorrow morning his luggage will be put outside and his door locked.’ Asked why, the manageress replied: ‘Because of the Americans.’ She added, in an indignant tone: ‘Apparently there are three more niggers to come.’ ‘I happen to be one of the niggers’, said a friend of Constantine’s, to which she replied: ‘Well, you don’t look like one.’ The man from the Ministry pointed out that Constantine was a civil servant and a British subject, and the manageress replied: ‘He is a nigger.’ So the family went to another hotel, and Constantine brought an action against the Imperial for breach of contract.

The case was heard by Mr Justice Birkett, who said he accepted without hesitation the evidence of the plaintiff and his witnesses and rejected that given by the defendants. The manageress had been ‘a lamentable figure in the witness-box’. When she could be heard she was vague and incoherent, and he was satisfied that, on the material points, she was not speaking the truth. She was grossly insulting in her reference to Constantine, and her evidence was unworthy of credence. From the outset she made it clear that the plaintiff could not stay in the hotel, and used the word ‘niggers’ and was very offensive. She declined to receive him, and would not listen to reason. In the witness-box, the judge went on, Constantine bore himself with modesty and dignity, dealt with all questions with intelligence and truth, was not concerned to be vindictive or malicious, but was obviously affected by the indignity and humiliation which had been put on him and had occasioned him so much distress and inconvenience, which he naturally resented. Constantine was awarded token damages of £5.34

Though Birkett’s decision was clear-cut, it should not be supposed that the colour bar in British hotels and restaurants was swept away overnight. In 1946, two Sikh VCs were refused admission to a West End restaurant because of their colour.³⁵ In 1948 Tom Boatin, a West African lecturer at London University, was refused service by Rules Restaurant in Maiden Lane. The Ministry of Food intervened, and the management was forced to apologize.³⁶

Constantine became a popular broadcaster, was awarded the MBE in 1945, was called to the Trinidad bar in 1955, and served from 1961 to 1964 as high commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago. He was knighted in 1962 and was created a life peer – Baron Constantine of Maraval and Nelson – in 1969. He died two years later.

In his book Colour Bar (1954) Constantine summed up his experience of Britain and the British in two sentences:

Almost the entire population of Britain really expect the coloured man to live in an inferior area . . . devoted to coloured people . . . Most British people would be quite unwilling for a black man to enter their homes, nor would they wish to work with one as a colleague, nor to stand shoulder to shoulder with one at a factory bench.37

Such was the state of affairs in 1954. By then, black people had been coming to Britain for six years to help solve the country’s peacetime economic problems by their labour, just as their countrymen had helped Britain in two world wars. The new stage in the development of Britain’s black communities that opened in 1948 is the subject of the next chapter. The present one ends, as it began, with anti-black riots in Liverpool.

Racism as riot: 1948

By 1948 there were about 8,000 black people in Liverpool, most of whom had come to Britain during the war to help the war effort. About 30 per cent of the adults were seafarers; another 10 per cent had shore jobs; the rest were chronically unemployed as a result of the colour bar.1

The immediate background to the anti-black riots of 1948 was a determined effort by the National Union of Seamen, since the end of the war, to keep black seamen off British ships. Addressing the union’s 1948 annual conference, its assistant general secretary made it clear that Liverpool and other British ports were to be ‘no go’ areas for black seafarers. ‘In quite a few instances’, he said, ‘we have been successful in changing ships from coloured to white, and in many instances in persuading masters and engineers that white men should be carried in preference to coloured.’ And ‘committees have been set up in the main ports to vet all coloured entrants to the country who claim to be seamen.’²

There was little that black people could do to defend themselves against this attack on their livelihood. When they dared to defend themselves against the physical attacks that NUS policy could not but stimulate and encourage, the Liverpool police retaliated with what one commentator has called ‘a singular lack of discrimination’. Except, of course, racial discrimination: ‘The police took action which they thought would bring the disturbances to a close as quickly as possible – which, in their view, meant removing the coloured minority, rather than attempting to arrest the body of irresponsible whites involved.’3 In fact about 60 blacks and about 10 whites were arrested – and most of the latter were subsequently acquitted. Police raided a seamen’s hostel and a dance-hall, and attacked the black people they found there. Black people were even beaten in their own homes. The police raided a club used by black seamen, batoning many on the head and forcing those they hauled out to run the gauntlet between two lines of police, who kicked their victims as well as belabouring them with truncheons. And they threw a frail Jamaican boy of 15 downstairs so that his head was split open and needed stitches.

The fighting began early in August when a white crowd between 200 and 300 strong gathered outside an Indian restaurant in Park Lane. They set on a West African when he came out, then threw bricks and stones through the windows, damaging tables and chairs. The police were sent for, but took half an hour to arrive. There were skirmishes throughout the South End district.

Next day a crowd estimated at 2,000 attacked Colsea House, a hostel for black seamen in Upper Stanhope Street, and threw bricks through the window. The seamen barricaded themselves in. When the police came they forced their way into the hostel and arrested some of the defenders. One of the few white men to appear later in court had been kicking and hammering at the door of Colsea House and shouting: ‘Come out, you black ——.’ He was foolish enough also to kick a policeman in the stomach, and for that he was arrested and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

On the third day the black community got wind of a plan to attack and vandalize a club known as Wilkie’s, in Upper Parliament Street. They made ready for the threatened attack by pushing crates of bottles near to the club windows and arming themselves with stones, swords, daggers, iron coshes, and axes. At first they were content with a display of strength and a warning: a black radio mechanic was later said in court to have been brandishing a carving knife and shouting: ‘Do not come over to this side of the street!’ White men were seen charging a group of black men and shouting: ‘Come and fight!’ At least one such white group, spoiling for a fight, ‘sensibly took to their heels and ran away because they were hopelessly outnumbered’.

Liverpool’s chief constable had declared that ‘all the resources of the police service in the city will, so far as it is possible, be brought to bear to stamp out once and for all this disorder’. But it was clear to every black person in Liverpool that what the police were really interested in was ‘stamping out’ black people’s capacity to defend themselves. When a large force of police now approached the besieged club, a black defender shouted: ‘Why don’t the police come and get the white —— who are going to break up the club?’ But the police advanced, and it became clear that they meant to force their way into the club as they had forced their way into the hostel. A volley of hundreds of bottles and stones thrown from the windows halted their advance for a time. But when the defenders ran out of ammunition the police burst their way in, breaking down doors, hitting out right and left with their truncheons, and throwing people down the stairs. Inside and outside the club, they brought their resources to bear. One police witness later admitted hitting a black seaman on the head with his baton; another admitted batoning three black men.

Police witnesses for the most part simply said they did not know how the accused came by their injuries. A young man called Hermon McKay had a bruise on his upper lip as big as a hen’s egg, a black eye, and bruises on shoulder and knee. ‘It would not be due to a little baton practice, would it?’ his defending solicitor asked a police witness. ‘Plain clothes officers do not carry batons’, was the reply. Doctors who examined the accused men in Walton jail testified to their injuries, and independent witnesses testified that they had seen police badly knocking black men about. A white woman who saw police beating up black men ‘unmercifully’, and was unwise enough to protest about it, got arrested for her pains; the police tried to destroy her credibility by alleging in court that she had looked as if she had been ‘smoking dope’, and she was fined £2 for ‘disorderly behaviour’.4

Police in search of particular men now went on the rampage, breaking into people’s houses and beating them up – and demanding sometimes to know where they ‘got the money to buy the beautiful furniture’. A great many other allegations of ‘unlawful and vicious behaviour on the part of the police’ were made in the News Letter of the League of Coloured Peoples. It was alleged, for instance, that the police had planted weapons on black people. A 15-year-old Jamaican told how police had pushed a penknife into his pocket. He had been dragged from his room, beaten up, thrown downstairs, and wounded so badly in the head that he needed stitches. While he was in a cell at the police station the police were breaking bottles which were later produced in court as having been taken from some of the arrested men. Another of the accused told how a police sergeant looked through the peep-hole in his cell door and said to a fellow-officer: ‘That one there looks vicious enough; we’ll say he had the knife.’ His colleague thought the other prisoner looked ‘the more vicious of the two’ and would ‘do nicely’. White women involved were ‘called by unprintable epithets’ and warned not to give evidence.5

An account by Mrs Betty Spice, a former member of the research staff at Liverpool University’s Department of Social Sciences, usefully supplements the rather deadpan press reports of the court hearings. She attended the trial of six black men who were acquitted. She found the police witnesses

rather unintelligent and certainly uneasy while giving evidence . . . The police case was rather thin and though they had all evidently been well-rehearsed, several slips were made, and each constable was mauled in turn by the defending solicitor . . . [Police witnesses] ‘could not say’ how the defendants had received injuries described in picturesque detail by the defence . . . All four constables gave identically inaccurate descriptions of the clothing worn by some of the defendants at the time of their arrest.

The defendants, on the other hand,

were so convincing in the witness stand and so unshakeable in their evidence that the four policemen . . . were put to shame.

    All six men gave an excellent account of themselves . . . All told their tales with a quiet confidence which the prosecution found difficult to shake.

    There can be no doubt that these men were handled roughly by the police . . . Violent treatment had been given. Although the arrests were made two weeks before, one defendant still had a badly swollen face, and one boy – a slight, rather delicate lad of 15 – had a scar on the back of his head which we could see quite plainly from several yards away . . . there were several stitches in the scalp.

    He looked rather frail . . . He seemed intelligent and mature far beyond his age . . . He pointed out the policeman who had knocked him about and this gentleman certainly became scarlet in the neck and rather shamefaced at this stage. The boy came from Jamaica quite recently.⁶

In other trials, Peter Dick (24), a Nigerian sailor, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment; another sailor, John Edward Duncan (41), got two months; Hogan Bassey (32) and Charles Brooks (39), a Jamaican factory worker, each went down for one month. But the League of Coloured Peoples noted as ‘an odd and somewhat significant’ feature that, despite the seriousness of some of the charges, most black defendants were merely fined between £3 and £5.7 Some cases – against students who had been arrested while studying in their rooms – were dismissed. Two black women – Rene Martis (24), a pianist, and Ruth Mann (35), a factory worker – were charged with obstructing the police and found not guilty. At the end of the hearings one of the magistrates, Alderman W.A. Robinson, said the police had behaved admirably and deserved great credit.⁸

The leaders of Liverpool’s black community, ‘desirous of bringing an end to the disturbances and restoring harmonious relations between the racial groups’, called a meeting at Stanley House, the black community centre, and invited the police to send a representative. Liverpool’s first-assistant chief constable told his black audience: ‘There isn’t any colour question in Liverpool at this moment. I know a great deal about your particular position . . . I am responsible for law and order, and I am going to get it.’ Also at the meeting was Ras Makonnen, who, on behalf of the Pan-African Federation, demanded a full and impartial investigation into the outbreaks; full compensation to black people for injuries to themselves and damage to their property; and the prosecution of those responsible for the outrages.⁹

Somalis and Arabs in Liverpool, though untouched by the violence, declared their solidarity with the rest of the black community and gave money to the fund that was raised to meet the defence costs. A Somali spokesman was quoted as saying: ‘This is as much our business as the West Africans or anyone else. If it can happen to them it can happen to us.’¹⁰

Present in this overture were all the themes that the next generation of black people in Britain were to know so well in their daily relations with the police. The next generation were the sons and daughters of those who had just seen racism in action on the Liverpool streets – and of the settlers who had just begun to arrive in Britain.

* Taylor, earlier an associate of Dusé Mohamed Ali, was soon to be ordered to pay £400 libel damages to Captain Joseph Fitzpatrick, a British colonial official whom he had accused of ordering the flogging of two women in Nigeria. The captain’s legal costs were secretly paid by the British government.⁵⁵ The jury added a rider that ‘if the flogging is still practised in Northern Nigeria the proper authorities should take steps to stop it’.⁵⁶

* Nine black men were charged with the rape of two white women on a goods train in Alabama. The first trial, held locally in 1931, resulted in death sentences for eight of the men. After a campaign by liberals and radicals who held that the verdict was the result of race prejudice, the US Supreme Court declared that the defendants’ right to counsel had been infringed. Although one of the women recanted, one of the accused was again sentenced to death and the case again came before the Supreme Court, which in 1935 ordered a retrial since the defendants’ constitutional rights had been violated by the illegal exclusion of blacks from jury service. Four of the defendants were later convicted, receiving sentences equivalent to life imprisonment, and rape charges against the other five defendants were dropped.

* Many other black people served in the blitz, as air-raid wardens, auxiliary firefighters, stretcher-bearers, first-aid workers, and helpers with mobile canteens. In St Pancras ARP were the Jamaicans Sam Blake and Granville (‘Chick’) Alexander, a first-aid worker; the Trinidadians E.Gonzalez and Singh; the Sierra Leoneans Charles Allen and A.K.Lewis, a law student; Laryea from the Gold Coast; the Nigerians Ote Johnson and A.Kester; and the Liberian S.Shannon. The Indian V. K Krishna Menon (for whom see pp. 353-5 below) and D.E.Headley, a mining engineer from British Guiana, were St Pancras air-raid wardens, and the South African E.Mahlohella was driver to a stretcher party in the borough. The Trinidadian G.A.Roberts was a leading auxiliary in the New Cross AFS. The Sierra Leonean Billy Williams was an air-raid warden in St Marylebone, and the Nigerian Ita Ekpeyon was a senior air-raid warden in the same borough. The Jamaican boxer ‘Buzz’ Barton was a first-aid worker. Alderman D.A.Miller, son of a Sierra Leonean, was a senior air-raid warden in Plymouth, one of Britain’s worst-blitzed cities.³⁷

* When some of the black American troops joined a London club run by black people and wrote on their application forms that certain British towns were out of bounds to them, Colonel Rogers warned the American authorities that the club was ‘a hotbed of colour-consciousness . . .. They are stirring up the coloured American soldiers’.²¹