12. The new generation
By the mid-1970s, two out of every five black people in Britain were born here. What has it been like to be born black in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century? Many white people complacently assume that black people born, brought up, and educated in Britain receive equal treatment to white British people in every respect. They are mistaken. In the key areas of employment, housing, and education, those born in Britain of Asian and West Indian parents face – as their parents have faced since arriving here – ‘a very substantial amount of unfair discrimination’.1
The nature and extent of this discrimination were described at length in four Political and Economic Planning reports published in 1974-6 and usefully summarized in David J. Smith’s Racial Disadvantage in Britain (1977). It should perhaps be pointed out that these reports were neither superficial in treatment nor propagandist in tone. They were based on the most thorough and searching interviews with a total of 3,292 Asians and West Indians, as well as other inquiries. And their conclusions were set forth in the coldly objective language of the statistician and the scholar. The plain fact is that the two million black people in Britain’s population of 57,000,000 ‘show up in highly disproportionate terms in all unfavourable social statistics’.2
Black people find it much harder to get work than white people, and employers’ discrimination against them ‘is based mainly on colour prejudice’. Moreover ‘it is quite clear . . . that, in most cases where an Asian or West Indian job applicant is rejected because of unfair discrimination’, he or she ‘is not told the real reason’ for this rejection. Such discrimination operates more strongly against applicants for unskilled jobs than applicants for skilled ones.3 But black people who do succeed in finding work tend to be given jobs well below the level of their qualifications and experience; many of these are jobs in marginal and service industries, with low wages, unattractive conditions, and no prospects. It is hardly surprising that the younger generation have tended to refuse, when available, the kinds of low-status jobs that their parents were shunted into.
The present economic crisis has borne most heavily on young black workers. Between 1973 and 1976 the unemployment rate went up twice as steeply for black people as it did for the population as a whole.4 To find work, if you are a black school-leaver, you have to be more than talented: you have to be lucky. The mass of black youth, like a growing number of their white contemporaries, ‘know, viscerally, that there will be no work for them, ever, no call for their labour . . . They are not the unemployed, but the never employed.’5 This is how David J. Smith summarizes racial disadvantage in employment:
The minority groups are more vulnerable to unemployment than whites; they are concentrated within the lower job levels in a way that cannot be explained by lower academic or job qualifications; within broad categories of jobs they have lower earnings than whites, particularly at the higher end of the job scale; they tend to shiftwork, which is generally thought to be undesirable, but shiftwork premiums do not raise their earnings above those of whites, because the jobs are intrinsically badly paid; they are concentrated within certain plants, and they have to make about twice as many applications as whites before finding a job.6
When it comes to housing, black people in Britain are again substantially worse off than white people. To be sure, the once ubiquitous ‘no coloured’ tag is no longer seen in landlords’ advertisements; but black people are still far more likely than white people to suffer overcrowding and the lack of various housing amenities that even the poorest whites tend to take for granted. The PEP reports show that in south-eastern England black households were five times as likely as white households to be occupying shared dwellings; elsewhere the disproportion was still more glaring. Compared with white households, four times as many Asian and three times as many West Indian households were living at a density of two or more persons per bedroom. Or, to put it another way, almost 40 per cent of black people, compared with only 11 per cent of white people, were overcrowded. Over half of the Pakistanis in Britain, compared with some 17 per cent of white people, had neither their own bath, nor their own hot water, nor their own inside lavatory.7 The long-term effects of such conditions on children’s health and welfare, and the problems thereby caused for mothers – especially mothers of babies and young children – scarcely need emphasis. Nor can it be claimed that this pattern of racial disadvantage in housing has changed since the PEP surveys were conducted.
And what of the black child when she reaches the age of five and goes to school? From the start, writes Sivanandan,
West Indian children were consistently and right through the schooling system treated as uneducable and as having ‘unrealistic aspirations’ together with a low IQ. Consequently, they were ‘banded’ into classes for backward children or dumped in ESN (educationally subnormal) schools and forgotten. The fight against categorisation of their children as under-achieving, and therefore fit only to be an under-class, begun in Haringey (London) in the 1960s . . . spread to other areas and became incorporated in the programmes of black political organisations.8
An American scholar, David L. Kirp, has shown that children of West Indian parents are three to four times as likely as white children to be classed as educationally subnormal; that proportionately few black children continue their studies beyond secondary school; that the Department of Education and Science has pursued, on issues of race and schooling, a policy of ‘inexplicitness’; that black voices have seldom been heard in discussions on the proper place of race in educational policy. Above all, ‘there is a marked and growing recognition on the part of minority organizations’ that black children ‘are getting a “raw deal” in the schools’.9 According to Michael Marland, the chief problem that black children face in British schools is not hostility, open or hidden, on the part of those who teach them, but ‘a well-meaning low expectation’:
At its worst this approach can be summed up in the ‘steel bands and basketball’ approach of some teachers to their black children of West Indian origin, expecting little by way of learning, but passing such failures off as inevitable for children who ‘have got so much rhythm’! This is disenabling and belittling.10
Much of the discrimination experienced by black pupils stems, indeed, from a prejudice that is not merely unverbalized but unconscious. An east London 15-year-old told of a reading teacher who let her white pupils read aloud for long periods but stopped each of her black pupils after a short time:
That woman never knew she was doing it, man. You would have asked her, maybe she’d tell you she treats us all the same but for some reason the white kids just do better than the black kids. Can’t tell you why that is, but they do. Maybe it’s their home life, you know. That woman never once saw what she was doing, and I’m not sure the white kids did either. But the black kids did.11
This chapter began with the question: what is it like to be born black in Britain? The answer, until just now, has taken the form of impersonal facts and figures. We have been outside looking in. But hidden behind those statistics there are individual human beings. Let’s consult another of them. His name is Chris Mullard, and his answer to our question was published as Black Britain. This was no dry statistical survey, but a passionate human document. It was, however, honest, realistic, and clear-sighted:
We are different from our parents in many ways. The only home we know is Britain . . . All the statutory and voluntary white agencies have now adopted the white race experts’ label – ‘second generation immigrants’ – for black Britons. By the use of such labelling devices the vicious circle of racial discrimination becomes institutionalized and perpetuated. Merely because of the colour of their skin, black children become second-class citizens, doomed to a life of ostracism, exploitation, difference . . .
We will not put up with racist behaviour. Rather than acquiesce we will react. Through our understanding of the British way of life we will be better equipped than our parents to organize constructive rebellion . . .
We are now heading towards a complete breakdown in communication between white and black society. This process began in the early sixties and gathered momentum . . . with the emergence of Powellism and the country’s expressed wish to tighten up controls and ostracize (and possibly later on repatriate) black immigrants and Black Britons alike. We cannot help but feel that white society is knifing us in the back . . . Most of us have withdrawn our co-operation from the official agencies and have organized resistance to race relations policy and the meddling of whites in our affairs. This resistance has been passive in the tradition of civil disobedience . . . But as the breakdown in communication becomes more and more absolute, passive resistance could give way to more violent forms of behaviour.
This could happen in the next decade when the majority of black people living in Britain will be like me – Black British . . . Unless steps are taken immediately, we shall be filled with more hatred and bitterness than our black American brothers. Enoch Powell has predicted race riots in this country by 1986. For completely different reasons I see violent expressions of our position in and disgust with white society some years before then.12
These sombre and prescient words were published in 1973, just as Mullard’s generation was beginning to emerge in the vanguard of black struggle in Britain. Similar analyses and warnings could be found in the black press of the period. And it was clear that the most troubled and potentially explosive area was the relation between black people, especially young people, and the police. ‘Police relations with the black communities’, wrote Mullard, ‘will never be improved while the police are seen by blacks as the agents of a white racist society, while blacks are not treated as fully fledged members of British Society and accorded the same rights, equalities, and opportunities.’13
Little notice was taken outside the black communities of accusations that, in their attitude and behaviour towards black people, the police were not so impartial as they claimed to be.
When the British West Indian Association complained in 1963 that police brutality against black people had been on the increase since the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in the previous year, there was no great stir. Following a spate of anti-black operations by the Brixton police, who called what they were doing ‘nigger-hunting’, Joseph A. Hunte’s report to the West Indian Standing Conference on police brutality was published in 1966 as Nigger-hunting in England? But there was little public reaction. In 1970 and 1971 the police ‘task force’ in Liverpool became ‘a hated and dreaded unit as stories of their seizures, beatings up and plantings went the rounds’. Community relations, in Derek Humphry’s words, ‘were strained to near breaking point’ and ‘observers close to the scene were surprised that the city got through the summer [of 1971] without rioting’.1 But that was in Liverpool’s forgotten inner city, and few people elsewhere either heard or wanted to hear of such tensions.
In 1971, at Leeds assizes, a police sergeant named Kenneth Kitching was sentenced to 27 months’ imprisonment, and a former police inspector named Geoffrey Ellerker to three years’ imprisonment, for assaulting a Nigerian vagrant, David Oluwale. On the judge’s direction, they were acquitted of manslaughter charges. Again there was little commotion, perhaps because the evidence in the case was so revolting that few cared to dwell on it. Oluwale’s battered body had been found floating in a river, and witnesses told the court how the two police officers had ruthlessly kicked the tramp, how Sergeant Kitching had pissed on him as he lay in a shop doorway, how the two guardians of law and order had dumped him in the countryside outside Leeds.2
In 1972 a select parliamentary committee on relations between black people and the police was surprised to receive from the West Indian Standing Conference a memorandum that sought to expose what was going on and to warn of the consequences if police racism were allowed to continue unchecked. Their surprise, amounting to disbelief, was manifested in the chairman’s first remark to Clifford Lynch, public relations officer of the WISC, who attended as a witness: ‘The memorandum which you have submitted to us does present a case almost akin to civil war between the West Indians and the police.’3
Hardly anybody outside the black communities was prepared to listen, let alone believe. Magistrates and judges, with negligible exceptions, believed police witnesses and disbelieved black witnesses; they displayed open partiality towards the police, ‘with little regard for the course of justice’.4 Nor was much attention paid when the sociologist Maureen Cain, in her book Society and the Policeman’s Role (1973), showed how racism had become a key component of policemen’s occupational culture. She found that policemen generally believed that ‘niggers’, or ‘nigs’, were ‘in the main . . . pimps and layabouts, living off what we pay in taxes’. At a police station where she did some of her field work, over an hour was spent in trying to find the address of a party an American air force officer wanted to go to, but a homeless black man was turned away three times in one night without any advice as to where he could find somewhere to stay. Black people were ‘by definition permanently in the area of suspicion’. One police officer reminisced to her:
There was this enormous negro and we kept batting him over the head with our sticks and he didn’t even seem to feel it . . . I hit him hard where it hurts most and in the stomach and as I went past – just happened to knock against him with my foot, and he went down like a light . . . We had to take him [to court] for assault on police or we could never have accounted for all those knocks.
After all, black people were ‘different, separate, incomprehensible. There was, therefore, no good reason for not being violent if the occasion arose.’5
In 1979 a further, comprehensive, account of police–black relations also fell on largely deaf ears. This was the evidence submitted by the Institute of Race Relations to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, published under the title Police against Black People. It was largely based on evidence from lawyers’ case files, legal and advisory centres, black self-help groups, and personal interviews. The police, it was claimed, no longer merely reflected or reinforced popular morality: ‘they re-create it – through stereotyping the black section of society as muggers and criminals and illegal immigrants’. Criminal procedure was being used to harass a whole community. The police refused to protect a community under constant attack from sections of the white population; and black people’s efforts to defend themselves gave rise to police reprisals.
These allegations were scrupulously documented, with evidence of police overmanning of black events (e.g. the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival); the harassment of black people in their meeting-places (e.g. raids on black youth clubs); police concentration on predominantly black localities all over Britain; the use of the Special Patrol Group and the Illegal Immigration Intelligence Unit to harass black people; police refusal to give black people any protection against racial violence, unwillingness to prosecute attackers, misguided advice to victims, hostility to complainants, and treatment of victims as if they were the aggressors; bias in police evidence; the treatment of black self-protection against racial violence as if it were criminal activity; the arbitrary arrest of black people; the use of unnecessary violence in arresting black people; the harassment of juveniles; the arrest of black people merely for asserting their rights; the harassment of witnesses to police malpractices; repeated arrests of individuals on frivolous grounds; the entry of black homes and premises at will; and, inside police stations, the flouting of Judge’s Rules, the use of brutality and intimidation, the forcing of confessions, the medical neglect of detained suspects, and the use of pressure or force to obtain photographs and fingerprints.6 To the black communities the police had become, in effect, an army of occupation charged with the task of keeping black people in their place.
It was this political aspect of police–black relations which came to dominate discussions of the problem within the embattled black communities, and helped to shape their response. We have been witnessing a large-scale attempt at ‘social control’, with black political activists the central focus of police interest and attack. This was clear by 1970, when the Special Branch, Britain’s political police, ‘started to harass the political activists in the black community in a systematic way’.7 When a demonstration took place in August of that year against repeated police raids on the Mangrove restaurant in north Kensington, a meeting-place of black radicals, the police unhesitatingly picked out the organizers and arrested them. And when the home secretary called for a report on black political activity, the Guardian revealed: ‘He will have a complete dossier within 48 hours. The Special Branch has had the movement under observation for more than a year . . . Police now regard Black Power as, at least, worthy of extremely tight surveillance.’8 In the event, the ‘Mangrove 9’ were acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1971, having skilfully used their rights to challenge jurors – and, as Ian McDonald has pointed out, it was largely because of these acquittals that the defence rights they used so vigorously were subsequently ‘modernized’ out of existence.9 Further attacks on black political activists followed – attacks that were scrupulously documented, case by case, in the columns of Race Today, launched by a collective of black activists. For instance, the ‘Oval 4’ – members of a south London black organization known as the Fasimbas – were pounced on by plain-clothes detectives at the Oval tube station, beaten up inside the police station, forced to sign confessions, found guilty of attempted theft and of assault on the police, and sentenced, the youngest to Borstal, the others to two years’ imprisonment each.10 There has indeed been, as the British Black Panthers warned in October 1970, a deliberate campaign ‘to “pick off” Black militants’ and to ‘intimidate, harass and imprison black people prepared to go out on the streets and demonstrate’.11
Unfortunately for the police, black political organization is too flexible and resilient to be easily monitored. This indeed is one of the fatal weaknesses at the heart of the ‘ “crisis management” which has operated since the early seventies’ and has chosen ‘the option of control and containment of forms of black resistance against racial domination’.12 The police have almost entirely failed to find informers within the black communities.13 They have failed to drive a wedge between black youth and their parents. They have failed to ‘pick off’ activists in any significant numbers. On the other hand, their own activities have hugely contributed to the ‘mass politicization of youth cultures’, so that ‘the resistance and oppositional symbols provided by Afro-Caribbean political culture’ have become ‘central reference-points for the struggles of other young people’.14 After an entire decade of police harassment, aimed at suppressing black resistance, black and white youth together, in the summer of 1981, set Britain’s inner cities ablaze.
To those blind to what had been happening all through the 1970s, and deaf to the many protests and warnings, the 1981 events came as a severe shock. Those in shock included government and MPs. Their mood, wrote the Guardian on 7 July 1981, ‘was overwhelmingly one of bafflement . . . Suddenly, forces appear to have been unleashed which nobody knows how to control.’ And next day: ‘The ruling class in Britain has lost its competence and its confidence.’1 ‘Riot’, being a four-letter word, is excellent for headlines; but its use to describe what were in fact uprisings by entire inner-city populations, black and white together, served to obscure the true nature and causes of these events.
Right through the 1970s, Britain’s black communities had been under attack from fascists and police. They had been forced to defend themselves, since nobody else could or would defend them. The rebellion of black youth in the inner cities was the logical and, as is now clear, inevitable response to racist attacks. It was the culmination of years of harassment. Its message was simply: ‘We have had enough.’
Between 1976 and 1981, 31 black people in Britain had been murdered by racists. They included Gurdip Singh Chaggar, aged 18, stabbed to death in Southall by a gang of white youths; Altab Ali and Ishaque Ali, murdered in Brick Lane; Michael Ferreira, murdered in Hackney; Akhtar Ali Baig, murdered in Newham; Mohammad Arif and Malcolm Chambers, murdered in Swindon; Sewa Singh Sunder, murdered in Windsor; Fenton Ogbogbo, murdered in south London; Famous Mgutshini, a Zimbabwean student, stabbed to death outside Liverpool Street station; a young boy in Manchester, stabbed to death by a motorist at whose car he had idly flicked an apple core. Besides the knife, the racists also used fire: by 1981, arson attacks on black people’s homes had become commonplace. In Chapeltown, Leeds, a disabled Sikh woman was burnt to death when a petrol bomb was thrown into her house. In Leamington Spa, an elderly Asian woman died after racists poured petrol over her and set fire to her sari. In Walthamstow, Mrs Parveen Khan and her three children were burnt to death when petrol was poured through their letter-box and set alight at three in the morning. And for every black person murdered, scores of others were attacked, beaten, kicked unconscious.
Black places of worship, black shops, black centres are targets for brutal attack, vandalism and fascist daubings. Nor is there safety inside the house – bricks may be thrown through windows and burning petrol-soaked rags pushed through letter-boxes. Day in, day out black people, young and old, men and women, are subjected to abuse and assault. Yet, by and large, this violence, even arson and murder, goes unreported, except at the local level – and not always then.2
And in almost every case, in the teeth of the evidence, the police denied that there had been, that there could have been, any racist motive. Sometimes they went further, by arresting the victims and letting the attackers go free. That was what happened in the notorious case of the Virk brothers, in April 1977.
These four Asians, repairing their car outside their east London house, were attacked by a gang of white youths. One brother went to call the police; the others defended themselves as best they could. When the police arrived, it was the Virk brothers who found themselves under arrest. Their attackers were not arrested. The judge accepted the police witnesses’ evidence; said it was ‘irrelevant’ for the defence to speak of race prejudice; and reprimanded the defence for asking whether the attackers were members of the National Front.
When judges unquestioningly accept police versions of events, turn a blind eye to the racial dimensions of a case and even accuse black defendants of introducing racial issues where there are none, justice is not only not done, but is no longer seen to be done.
In the face of such a massive onslaught from the fascists, the police, the politicians, the press, the judges and the law, the black community must perforce defend itself.3
But when second-class citizens dared to defend themselves, the police turned out in overwhelming numbers in an effort to crush their resistance and give the fascists the freedom of the streets. That was what happened in Southall on 23 April 1979. To protect a handful of National Front supporters, 2,756 police, including paramilitary Special Patrol Group units, horses, dogs, vans, and a helicopter, poured into the area. The police violently broke up a crowd of 5,000 protesters, drove their vans into the crowd, bludgeoned people at random as they scattered and ran, vandalized the premises of Peoples Unite, a black meeting centre, arrested 342 people, injured hundreds – and beat Blair Peach to death with unauthorized weapons. ‘If you keep off the streets in London and behave yourselves, you won’t have the SPG to worry about’, were the reassuring words of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner afterwards.
By now officials in the health service and the employment, education, housing, and welfare services were more and more insisting that before black citizens could be given their rights, they must produce their passports and submit to identity checks:
Since, in British thinking, all black people are immigrants and some of them are illegal, the only thing to do is suspect the lot. What this means in practice is that black people may be called on at any time to prove their right to be in Britain . . . The new Nationality Act . . . embodies, regularises and codifies the discriminatory essence of all the Immigration Acts from 1962 to 1971. It becomes the discriminatory mechanism par excellence. In sum, what we are left with is an Immigration Act masquerading as a Nationality Act; an Immigration Act which, because of that masquerade, has jurisdiction not only over the right of black people to enter Britain, but over the rights of black people resident in Britain.4
But here is a future prime minister explaining it all on television: ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ Decoded, this means ‘people with a different colour’. She goes on: ‘The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.’5
Meeting-places are essential for democracy, and any ‘law’ that stamps them out is oppressive and unjust. In April 1980, after years of harassing Bristol’s black community, police raided one of the few meeting-places black youth had left to them. The resistance was tougher than they had bargained for, and they withdrew after two hours’ fighting. In fact, they ran away, and for four hours St Pauls was a ‘no go’ area. Bristol became a symbol of resistance.
In January 1981, 13 young black people perished in a fire at a house in Deptford, an area where other black homes had been attacked and a black community centre had been burnt down. As usual, police discounted the possibility of a racial motive; but the entire community, not just the anguished parents, were convinced that the fire had been started by fascists.
Three months later some 15,000 black people, in the most remarkable demonstration ever mounted by Britain’s black communities, marched the ten miles from Deptford to central London. They demanded justice for black people and an end to racist murders. They protested against police conduct of the Deptford inquiry. And, as they marched through Fleet Street, they protested against media indifference to the mass murder.
Another month, and police in Brixton launched ‘Swamp 81’. This was merely the first local part of a London-wide exercise known as ‘Operation Star’, which many black people saw as a police reply to the Deptford march. Brixton was now well and truly ‘swamped by people with a different culture’ – 120 plain-clothes policemen, who in six days stopped 943 people in the street and arrested 118 of them. ‘It was’, said the head of the local CID, ‘a resounding success.’6 They beat up a man outside a local school, and a parent who tried to remonstrate with them was hit on the head with a truncheon and arrested for obstruction. On 10 April a crowd rescued a black youth from a police car, then stood up to police reinforcements and forced them to withdraw.
Next day, Brixton exploded. In July, the rebellion spread to Southall after an attack on an Asian woman by people from outside the area. The uprising in the Toxteth district of Liverpool lasted four days: young workers, white and black, fought and defeated the police under the leadership of black Liverpudlians described by the local chief constable as ‘the product of liaisons between white prostitutes and African sailors’.7 Under that leadership they succeeded in burning down 150 buildings, including some of symbolic significance, putting 781 policemen out of action, and holding the area until the police returned with CS gas, which they fired at people with cartridges intended for use against walls.
Back to the television screen came Margaret Thatcher. ‘Nothing’, she said, ‘can justify, nothing can excuse and no one can condone the appalling violence we have seen.’ Within hours, the rebellion had spread to Manchester, where 1,000 youths, black and white, besieged Moss Side police station. Then it hit Handsworth in Birmingham, Chapeltown in Leeds, Bolton, Luton, Leicester, Nottingham, Birkenhead, Hackney, Wood Green, Walthamstow, Hull, High Wycombe, Southampton, Halifax, Bedford, Gloucester, Sheffield, Coventry, Portsmouth, Bristol, Edinburgh, Reading, Huddersfield, Blackburn, Preston, Ellesmere Port, Chester, Stoke, Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton, Newcastle, Knaresborough, Derby, Stockport, Maidstone, Aldershot, and dozens of other places, black and white youth together against the police. ‘Copycat riots’? Some cats – and some claws!
With remarkable historical symmetry, this burst of youthful rage began, and proved to be most powerful and sustained, in the very cities which had once been this country’s chief slave ports: Bristol, London, and Liverpool. There, if anywhere, the persistent bullying of black people was bound, sooner or later, to provoke rebellion. The size and scope and ferocity of the rebellion astonished everyone, including the youth themselves. They learnt that, tactically, they could defeat the police; that, strategically, they could hold them to a draw. The police learnt how far, in future, they could goad. On both sides of the barricades many other lessons are no doubt still being digested. Those who at present rule this country, and for whom control of Britain’s black communities has been a major consideration in the turn to ‘hard’ policing, would be ill-advised to underestimate the intelligence, determination, and proud traditions of those they desire to control. And if, as has been suggested, ‘traces of black life have been removed from the British past to ensure that blacks are not part of the British future’,8 the present book is offered as a modest contribution to setting the record straight.