No discussion of the British left in the 1980s would be complete without an account of the Race Today Collective. Simply put, the collective was the most influential group of black radicals in the UK, ‘the centre, in England, of black liberation’.1 From its foundation in the mid-1970s to its dissolution in 1991, the collective coalesced around the magazine Race Today. It was the embodiment of C. L. R. James's vision of a small organisation. Consequently, members saw their role in the following ways. First, they were a repository of strategic expertise who would help with the complexities of organising grass-roots campaigns. Second, they aimed to use the magazine to record the struggle of the ‘black’ British working class.2 Finally, having established the collective, they were determined to influence mainstream debate and British institutions from a position of strength.
The Race Today Collective went through three main stages. First, from its foundation in the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, it was primarily concerned with helping to organise grass-roots campaigns. Second, from the mid-1980s, there was a change in emphasis and the collective threw its considerable weight behind the encouragement of black art and literature. Finally, having broken into the mainstream media, it dissolved in April 1991.
Farrukh Dhondy, one of the first people to write for Race Today under Darcus Howe's editorship, argues that the collective grew out of the most progressive politics of the British Black Panther movement.3 The Panthers had been founded as a nationalist and Leninist organisation by Nigerian playwright Obi B. Egbuna in 1968.4 Following Egbuna's trial for conspiracy to murder police officers, Althea Jones-Lecointe, a doctoral candidate in biochemistry at the University of London and recent migrant from Trinidad, became the leading figure in the Panthers.5 According to Neil Kenlock, the Panthers’ official photographer, ‘Althea never called herself the leader, but she led us’.6
Under Jones-Lecointe the Panthers became transformed from a small group of ‘Hyde-Park revolutionaries’, intent on catching the headlines, to a low-profile but genuinely effective grass-roots organisation boasting 3,000 members, including its Youth League.7 Jones-Lecointe also took the Panthers in a new ideological direction. She developed a library for the Panthers, introducing them to the work of Marx, Lenin and C. L. R. James and to E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.8 In this period the Panthers played a leading role in the trial of the Mangrove Nine, a court case which ended in December 1971 and which enabled black radicals, including Jones-Lecointe and Howe, to force the first judicial acknowledgement that there was ‘evidence of racial hatred’ in the Metropolitan Police.9
However, by 1973 the Panthers had split. A group of radicals including Howe and Dhondy walked away, believing that the group was moving in a reactionary direction.10 Soon after, Howe was appointed editor of Race Today, a radical monthly magazine published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). Initially, Howe worked with Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the leading figure in the IRR. However, there was a fundamental disagreement between the two. Leila Hassan, Information Officer in the IRR's library and later editor of Race Today, argues that, for Sivanandan, ‘it had to be about white racism, racism that had formed us and deformed us, that was our fight’.11 Howe, by contrast, believed that black people were playing the leading role not only in the struggle against racism in Britain but also in the struggles of the British working class.
Against this background, a break with the IRR was inevitable. After eight months of working with Sivanandan at the IRR's offices in Kings Cross, Howe, Hassan and the Race Today team set up on their own. They decided to move their base of operations to Brixton and to root the magazine in the centre of London's biggest working-class black community. With the aid of Olive Morris, a former Panther who had turned squatting into a science, the magazine relocated, squatting at 74 Shakespeare Road.12
The collective, which took shape in 1974, was an eclectic mix. It included Farrukh Dhondy and Mala Sen, intellectuals and former members of the Panthers’ Central Core; Leila Hassan and Jean Ambrose, who were part of the Black Unity and Freedom Party; Patricia Dick, a one-time member of the IRR; Barbara Beese, one of the Mangrove Nine and a former employee of Release; and Linton Kwesi Johnson, a member of the Panther Youth League, who became Race Today's resident poet. By the mid-1970s the radicals who formed part of the collective had become an essential part of Brixton's black working-class community.
In 1980 the members of the collective broke through a wall connecting their house on Shakespeare Road with a house on Railton Road, in order to establish a second squat. The house on Railton Road later became the offices of Race Today. During the 1980s, the basement of 165 Railton Road was used for ‘Basement Sessions’ (discussed below); the ground floor was where Race Today's production team was based, the first floor comprised editorial offices, and the top floor housed James.
The collective's influence was felt far outside London. Through contacts with Ali Hussein, Gus John and Max Farrar, and through developing a reputation as the authentic voice of the black community, it became the centre of the fight for black rights in Britain.
The collective was often regarded as something of an enigma. Recalling Darcus Howe and the collective in the mid-1980s, Linda Bellos, leader of Lambeth Council from 1986 to 1988, comments, ‘I could see what he was against, I couldn't see what he was for.’13 Hassan argues that misunderstandings of the collective abounded. The local black community, she recalls, initially mistook them for social workers. White radicals were also perplexed as the collective did not fit easily into any of the mainstream leftist schemas. What the white left found confusing was that while the collective rejected Black Nationalism and separatism, it also refused to embrace the slogan ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’.14
While the collective's ideological and strategic orientation might have perplexed the mainstream left, the collective knew what it was about. Howe set out his vision for Race Today in his first four editorials, published between January and April 1974. First, Howe stressed black self-organisation. His first editorial, ‘From victim to protagonist’, signalled a rejection of ‘liberal’ assumptions that black people were ‘helpless victims’ who needed to be rescued by progressive whites or educated members of the black middle class. The editorial focused on the ‘self-activity’ of the ‘Caribbean and Asian peoples’. Howe wrote:
Our task is to record and recognise the struggles of the emerging forces as manifestations of the revolutionary potential of the black population. We recognise too the release of intellectual energy from within the black community, which always comes to the fore when the masses of the oppressed by their actions create a new social reality. Race Today opens its pages to the tendency which seeks to give theoretical clarification to independent grass roots self-activity with a view to its further development.15
Second, Howe argued that black people had a unique historical role to play in the context of late twentieth-century Britain. The February editorial addressed the energy crisis, the dominant issue in British politics at the time. In the context of the miners’ strike, Howe argued that anti-government feeling existed in black and Asian communities to a much greater extent than it did within the white working class. The roots of this disparity, he argued, were historical: the British working class had been socialised by capitalism for more than 400 years, whereas the mores of the new arrivals were at greater variance with prevailing capitalist values.
Howe's third editorial was on a similar theme. Discussing the relative positions of the white and black working class, ‘Bringing it all back home’ argued that there was ‘an increasing tendency within the white working class to take on the British State’.16 Howe attributed this to a historical change. Traditionally, British capitalism had exported its most repressive side to the colonies, while at home the white male working class had been bought off by paternalism, and latterly by social democracy. However, the policing of recent migrants had brought the horrors of the colonial system to the streets of Brixton, Handsworth and Notting Hill. Moreover, British capitalism refused to extend the niceties of social democracy to black workers or working-class women. As a result, some in the white working class were beginning to see through liberal assumptions about the essential fairness of British society. Consequently, there was a new possibility that black and white workers could draw strength from each other. What was needed, Howe concluded, was an acceleration of black ‘self-organisation, indicating that we too are prepared to take on the British state’.17
For Johnson, the politics of the organisation was crucial to his decision to join:
It was not just the politics of race, it was also the politics of class. The analysis from which we were working was that we were part of a working class struggle. So from an ideological point of view, the fact that it was a class orientated organisation, as opposed to one simply dealing with race meant that I was more likely to join than not.18
The emphasis on self-activity necessitated a rejection of the vanguard party, the Leninist notion of a small group of professional revolutionaries who initiated a revolution on behalf of the wider working class. Rather, the collective conceived of itself as a ‘small organisation’ in the Jamesian sense. The Jamesian influence was self-conscious. ‘We were driven by the small organisation as opposed to the vanguard party,’ Howe recalled.19 Specifically, Howe was inspired by the analysis of the small organisation built around a journal that James had outlined in Facing Reality, a text that Howe had first read with James in the late 1960s:
For thirty years the small organisation knew what it meant by success: success was growing membership and influence … But the organisation of today will go the way of its forerunners if it does not understand that its future does not depend on the constant recruiting and training and disciplining of professional or semi-professional revolutionaries in the Leninist manner. Its task is to recognize and record. It can do this only by plunging into the great mass of the people and meeting the new society that is there.20
Race Today was also inspired by James's conception of a radical journal:
The journal contemplated here … exists so that workers and other ordinary people will tell each other and people like themselves what they are thinking, what they are doing, and what they want to do. In the course of so doing, the intellectuals and advanced workers, both inside and outside the organisation, will have their opportunity to learn. There is no other way.21
This Jamesian approach was evident in Howe's fourth editorial. The centrepiece of the April issue of Race Today was a series of interviews with Asian workers. Evoking the spirit of Marx's A Worker's Enquiry, Howe's editorial argued that the interviews were significant because they revealed ‘the day-to-day struggles of the Asians on their introduction … to factory life, their customs, their values, their ideas, hopes, aspirations and fears as well as their drive toward self-organisation’.22
The strategy of the Race Today Collective was also informed by a shift that was taking place in migrant communities in the 1970s and early 1980s. The members of the collective, like migrant communities more generally, made an important transition from seeing themselves as migrants or children of migrants to identifying themselves as British, in the sense that they had made Britain their home. For Howe, this new orientation was summed up in the phrase which emerged from campaigns for Asian rights in the East End: ‘Come what may we are here to stay’. With this in mind, the collective's overarching objective was to play a part in the fight to secure the full rights of citizenship for migrants and to ensure that migrants played a full role in British society. This meant working with migrants to gain the attention and support of trades unions and, after the intervention of James, backing initiatives for black people to join the police.
The collective believed that through joining unions and working within existing institutions black people could advance their own struggle and play the leading role in radicalising institutions which had ossified during the period of social democracy, and which had tended to represent the interests of white men, rather than the working class as a whole. The collective's approach to journalism was also distinctive. Rather than writing about ideology, it deliberately focused on the experience of minority communities and women. This was not, however, a rejection of intellectual concerns. Rather, it was rooted in an intellectual position: the recognition of the truth of James's view that disenfranchised groups should articulate their own experience, formulate their demands and determine their own strategies.
During the 1970s this strategy led to success. The strike by Asian workers at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester, beginning in July 1974, won Asian workers better pay and conditions and, perhaps more importantly, forced the Transport and General Workers’ Union to work whole-heartedly for the interests of its Asian members. In another campaign of the mid-1970s the collective threw its organisational expertise behind the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG), organising the largest squat in Europe.23 The squatters’ campaign won Bengali residents in Tower Hamlets decent, affordable housing which was safe from National Front violence. Moreover, the campaign forced the Tory-led Greater London Council to recognise the right of Bengalis living in Tower Hamlets to live in majority Bengali areas, which guaranteed the community safety from racist attacks.
Informed by five years of backing campaigns and publishing its paper, the collective formally set out the kernel of its ideological position in 1978:
Race Today is an organisation which has had as its guiding principle, that its content and practice be guided by the activity of the black working class – what it is saying and doing. That the working class will always be in the leadership of any struggle or movement.24
By 1980 the collective was a repository of considerable organisational experience. What is more, it had also been accepted by the black working class of Brixton as a group who genuinely understood their struggle and as people who could help them to effect change.
The early 1980s was a turning point in British politics. The post-war consensus, which had been under strain for some time, finally gave way to political polarisation. Anti-immigrant sentiment played an important role in the rise of Thatcherism. The Tories overtook Callaghan's government in the polls soon after Thatcher's highly publicised claim that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped with a different culture’, declaring that she would not allow ‘false accusations of racial prejudice’ to stop her from tackling the ‘problem’ of immigration.25 True to Thatcher's word, a White Paper was produced within a year of her election and a new British Nationality Act reached the statute book in 1981, further restricting the right of Commonwealth citizens to settle in the United Kingdom.
It was in this context that the New Cross fire, quickly dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, occurred. In the early hours of Sunday, 18 January 1981, a terrible fire started at a birthday party held at 439 New Cross Road in Deptford, South London. Thirteen people aged between fourteen and twenty-two lost their lives and many more were injured. All were black.
In the immediate aftermath of the Massacre a new movement emerged. A week after the New Cross fire, 2,000 people arrived for a public meeting from as far afield as Bradford, Manchester and Leeds. The meeting established the Black People's Assembly, or General Assembly as it was known, a body open to everyone who supported the general aims of the campaign. The collective quickly became involved in the spontaneous movement which determined to force the political establishment to acknowledge the horrors of the Massacre, to conduct a full and fair inquiry into the causes of the blaze and to bring the perpetrators to justice. Howe was elected by an impromptu grass-roots assembly to give the emerging movement shape. The assembly met every week. It heard from the survivors of the fire, discussed the troubled history of the black community in Deptford and addressed the question, as Howe put it, of ‘what has to be done?’
In concrete terms, the assembly made recommendations to the New Cross Massacre Action Committee (NCMAC), a body open to migrants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, which would decide how to implement its proposals. In the short term, the NCMAC established a Fact Finding Committee, which would take statements, gather evidence and oversee the police investigation. Additionally, the NCMAC called a press conference in response to the misleading reports which were beginning to appear in the press. In the longer term, the General Assembly and the NCMAC called for a Black People's Day of Action. Howe conceived this to be ‘A general strike of blacks’, an idea that had been circulating among black radicals since the late 1960s. Therefore, he argued that it should be held on a working day and during the school week, a deliberate break with the left's convention of calling national demonstrations on Saturdays. Howe later explained the reasoning behind the date of the Black People's Day of Action:
I said ‘Well if they are going to kill so many kids in a fire, we have to show them we got some power in this place, and the only way to do that is to call a general strike of blacks’.26
The General Assembly and NCMAC voted for Howe, along with the Race Today Collective, to organise the Day of Action, acknowledging that their experience of grass-roots organisation and their connections across the UK meant that they were best placed to organise a national campaign. Howe and the collective also played an important strategic role in shaping the march. The question of white participation emerged early in the planning process. Some argued that white people should be able to participate in the march on equal terms with black and Asian people. Others argued that the march should exclude white people. Howe's solution symbolised his conception of the role of white people in the movement. He argued that white people should be able to join the march, but should march at the rear. This symbolised the leading role of black people directing their own movement, while recognising that white people could legitimately play a supporting role.
The route of the march was also symbolic. Starting in New Cross, heading over Blackfriars Bridge, through the City and Fleet Street, past Scotland Yard and the Houses of Parliament before finishing in Hyde Park, the route took protestors from the site of the fire, past the symbolic centres of press, government and police power, in protest at the indifference, incompetence and institutional racism in the nation's institutions.
Finally, the collective played a leading role in the organisation of the march. The members of the collective, who acted as chief stewards, organised stewarding, instructing all stewards on the necessity to encourage discipline and restraint in the face of police provocation. Howe determined to start the march half an hour before it was advertised, in order to keep the police on the back foot. The police were also caught off guard by the scale of the march and the sophistication of the organisation. Howe said that they ‘underestimated us … They thought we were a load of little, stupid, black people. They had never seen that size of demonstration by black people before. So the police didn't know culturally what to do.’27 Over 20,000 marched, and thousands of protestors gathered to hear speeches by Howe and others. Against tremendous opposition, the marchers had triumphed. The collective had been responsible for organising the largest demonstration of black people in British history.
The march had an immediate effect on black communities in London and on London's police. Research funded by the Metropolitan Police into police behaviour at the time reveals how the Massacre and its aftermath ‘had the effect of focusing racialist attitudes within the Met’.28 At the same time, black people, Howe recalls, had a new self-confidence in the wake of the Day of Action.
In the immediate aftermath of the Black People's Day of Action the police initiated Operation Swamp 81, an operation which turned the police presence in Brixton into something akin to a colonial army of occupation. Interviews with police officers at the time indicate that many officers believed that black activists had come out on top in the Day of Action, but that the police hoped to even the score in what one chief inspector referred to as ‘the return match’.29 For Howe, Swamp 81 was nothing but ‘an attempt to reassert police authority’.30 By the end of the first week of Swamp 81, local organisations were overwhelmed by complaints from young black people about their treatment by the police. Hassan recalls that during Swamp 81 life in Brixton resembled reports that she had read of South African apartheid.
Meetings took place between community leaders, including members of the collective, and the police in order to try to persuade the authorities to end the operation. However, these led to nothing. The upshot was a spontaneous insurrection, which the press dubbed ‘the Brixton Riots’. The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail published reports soon after the riots referring to Howe and the collective as ‘agitators’, alleging that they had stirred up the conflict and demanding that they should be the subject of police investigation. The collective's role in the riots was also considered at Cabinet level. In a now declassified briefing prepared for the Cabinet in July 1981, after the riots had spread to at least twenty other cities, the contribution of ‘extremists’ in sparking the initial Brixton uprising was considered by the government. However, authorities would ultimately conclude that ‘it seemed unlikely that in any major case the extremists have actually instigated the violence or been able to plan it’.31 Indeed, while the collective was based one minute's walk away from the ‘front line’ on Railton Road, it members were effectively penned in by squads of police who used Shakespeare Road as a base. Consequently, the police themselves knew that the collective had played no part in initiating the uprising. Hassan recalls:
Unless you were in it, you have no idea of what it was like. It was a feeling of euphoria, of freedom, of people really believing once and for all the oppression we had put up with for years, we were finally taking a stand against it … The black youth, they high-jacked a bus, there was a racist pub called the George they burnt it down, it was an absolutely targeted insurrection … there were military tactics, the way they would contact each other from the side roads … the way they came at the police in an armed way, when they were injured the way they were looked after in some of these houses where we had mini hospitals. For the days that it raged it was absolutely unbelievable to live in, but it's that feeling it gave us, that we are so fed up with the way you're messing with black people in this country that we are taking a stand. And for us, it was really freedom.32
Nonetheless, the collective did play a role in the events surrounding the insurrection. First, it was able to monitor events. Anticipating an uprising, all of the members of the collective, with the exception of Johnson, who was attending a conference in Amsterdam, met throughout the weekend at their Shakespeare Road headquarters in order to be ready should an uprising take place. Second, the collective was instrumental in establishing the Brixton Defence Committee (BDC), which campaigned for an amnesty for all those arrested during the confrontation. As the radical barrister and fellow BDC member Rudi Narayan made clear in his cross-examination of witnesses during the Scarman Inquiry, such a demand came not as a plea for clemency. Rather, it reflected the conviction that a revolt was inevitable, given such widespread police abuse, and that the uprising was a legitimate act of self-defence against an illegal police operation involving the unlawful stopping and searching of thousands of innocent people.33
Finally, members of the collective utilised their close ties within the community to assemble the leaders of the uprising, debrief them and interview them in extensive detail on the causes and course of the insurrection. The interviews confirmed what the collective had observed from the vantage point of the Race Today offices: the uprising had been organised with military precision, using the network of parallel streets and intersecting roads, to organise black and white resistance to the police.34
Looking back thirty years later, Howe viewed the People's Day of Action and the 1981 insurrection as a turning point:
The Day of Action was the first organised mass intervention with a semblance of the March on Washington and the huge mobilisations in the Caribbean that I had been involved in. The thinking in Race Today was we could replicate it and we did. It represented an end to the easy going way and resignation to our lot, to the belief that things were bad but that we couldn't do anything about it. When the insurrection occurred it fundamentally broke with the past which had consisted of complaining quietly about our lot and whispering in the ear of white power. People acted in a massive spontaneous way and said ‘if you continue to treat us as you have been doing we will burn down every city’.35
As far as Dhondy was concerned, ‘CLR was the ideological guide for Race Today’.36 Speaking in 1992, Howe described the relationship between the collective and James in the following terms:
he lived with us, the small organisation, for the last ten years of his life. He actually physically lived with us. He lived upstairs above the offices. By and large, people use the word ‘consultant’ these days – I don't think it means anything, but we had this relationship with him, he was a grand old man, suitably respected, who intervened and worked with us over ten years.37
In 1982 James moved into a flat above the Race Today offices and the collective began looking after him. The collective supported him in numerous ways. In 1981, in collaboration with the publishers Allison and Busby, they organised his Eightieth Birthday Lectures. On a more prosaic level, Hassan remembers shopping and cooking for him, and Dhondy polished his shoes. Others would fetch wine, brandy and flowers when James was entertaining, and on these occasions Howe recalled, ‘if anybody called, you were entitled to say “C. L. R. James is dead” rather than interrupt him!’38
Harry Goulbourne, who had known Howe since the early 1970s, recalls spending a number of evenings at the Race Today offices, talking with Howe and James. ‘It was wonderful spending evenings there, just sitting around and chatting. It was a part of a great Trinidadian tradition – liming.’39 Goulbourne recalls Howe's relationship with James as one of ‘nephew and protector. Darcus provided CLR with care, he made sure that visitors didn't exhaust the old man, and one got the impression that he felt very privileged to be in that position, to take care of him in the last leg of his life.’40
James's influence was evident in the collective's attitude to Western culture. Rather than rejecting it, as the nationalists had done, ‘the Collective picked up from C. L. R. James that the western intellectual tradition has to be respected and built upon – that is absolutely the basis of Race Today, there is no way that that can be gainsaid’.41
The collective's strategy had always been to penetrate mainstream institutions, seeking ‘integration on our terms’.42 The events of 1981 propelled Race Today journalists into the mainstream media like never before. Following the New Cross Massacre, Howe appeared on Skin, directed by Trevor Phillips for the London Weekend Television (LWT) Minorities Unit. Rather than offering a political programme, Howe used the interview to reflect on what was going on in the community. His brief interview set contemporary events the context of black struggle since the mid-1960s and stressed the scale and potency of the self-organisation that had followed the fire.43 Howe took a similar tack during his appearance on an episode of The London Programme dealing with the Scarman Report in November 1981.44 A final example, an ITN News debate chaired by Peter Sissons, featuring Howe, Gerald Kaufman, Michael Mates and Leslie Curtis, the Chairman of the Police Federation, saw Howe setting out a forensic case against the police. Howe's critique of police racism appealed to the most progressive aspects of British political culture. Indeed, Howe situated the fight against stop and search in ‘the British democratic tradition’.45
One of the most significant opportunities that Howe took hold of in the wake of the insurrection was the commission to write a lead article in The Times in response to the Scarman Report. His feature article, the first he had written for the mainstream British press, was published on 26 November 1981. Drawing on the material acquired from the leaders of the Brixton revolt to help inform his perspective, Howe rejected the plaudits that Scarman had received from the liberal press. While Scarman had resisted right-wing demands to recommend the granting of even greater police powers, he had failed to ‘grasp the nettle’ by addressing the systemic abuses which had led to the revolt. Next to Scarman's continued support for ‘stop and search’ and his failure to recommend safeguards against physical abuse and forced confessions of detainees, or greater scrutiny of the police evidence used by magistrates to convict black people, his call for a more independent police complaints system was ‘mere tinkering’. Ignoring a wealth of personal testimony of widespread police racism towards black people, Scarman preferred police accounts which explained such racism in terms of a few inexperienced junior officers. He considered the image of a hostile police force held by black people, young and old alike, to be ‘a myth’.46
These forays into the mainstream led to bigger things. In 1984 Howe did a screen test for LWT's Black on Black. Inspired by James, Howe viewed culture as a progressive force. Radicals had long seen the potential of the media as a propaganda weapon, but for James, the media's progressive role was rooted in the sociological dynamics of modern society. American Civilization argued: ‘[t]he modern popular film, the modern newspaper … the comic strip, the evolution of jazz, a popular periodical like Life, these mirror from year to year the deep social responses and evolution of the American people …’.47 The bureaucratisation of modern life, James contended, stripped people of their freedom and threatened their individuality. As life became increasingly restricted, people sought liberty in the field of entertainment, demanding ‘aesthetic compensation in the contemplation of free individuals who go out into the world and settle their problems by free activity and individualistic methods’.48 In this sense, the modern media tended to reflect the desire for liberty and self-organisation. Black on Black was a false start, the screen test did not go well.49 Howe would soon get a break, with much more scope for creativity, in the form of the Channel 4 television show The Bandung File.
The collective's interest in culture extended beyond Howe's career in television. As the 1980s progressed, Race Today became increasingly oriented towards black cultural movements. Under the direction of Akua Rugg, Race Today's in-house literary critic, the magazine gained sections such as ‘Poet's Corner’ and ‘Creation for Liberation’, a regular section which covered music, theatre, films and books. The cultural orientation of the magazine was given further prominence from 1980 with the publication of an annual Race Today Review. The first Review contained ‘a short story and poems’ as well as reviews of ‘novels, the work of poets, musicians, playwrights and film makers’.50 Howe conceived of the Review as a small taste of the ‘creative activities which flow from the terrain on which we do political battle’, work that was ‘forged in the heat of confrontation between the new society in the making and its suffocating and increasingly murderous opposite’.51
The second Race Today Review contained James's essay ‘I am a poet’, which championed the work of Ntozake Shange. Drawing inspiration from the 1981 Polish Spring, James argued that artistic expression in the modern world would reflect either the desire for freedom embodied in Solidarity or imperatives of the ‘regimes that are described by Solzhenitsyn in his book, The Gulag Archipelago’.52
Howe returned to the topic of culture and politics in his 1981 ‘Introduction’ to the Race Today Review. The essay addressed the conditions necessary to a flourishing cultural scene. Howe argued that artistic expression must be ‘nurtured’:
artistic creativity is fed and stimulated in an ambience which generates work of the highest quality. It requires vibrant, social institutions in which the works are concentrated and made available to those who strive to create it.53
However, Britain in 1981 was characterised by cultural bankruptcy and therefore black artists should look to ‘durable institutions’ within the black community such as ‘New Beacon Books, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Race Today Publications’, which ‘continue to foster the ambience’ in which artistry could flourish.54 Akua Rugg's ‘Introduction’ to the 1984 Race Today Review indicates that Howe's notion of cultural ‘nurture’ was central to her own editorial view of literature. ‘Artists’, she argued, ‘need to be nurtured by a receptive and critical audience’ in order for their work to mature. Therefore, the ‘publishing houses, bookshops, art galleries, theatres and public festivals’ that had emerged as part of the ‘struggles waged consistently over the years by blacks’ were crucial to the black cultural scene.55
Creation for Liberation was one of a number of cultural institutions that thrived during the 1980s to nurture black artists. Established in 1975, the small group of artists and organisers set out the organisation's origins and purpose thus:
Creation for Liberation was born out of the struggles the black community is engaged in for freedom. There is a cultural dimension to these struggles reflected in many areas of the arts, be it music, literature, the fine arts, the performing arts, film or sport. The cultural expression not only draws from the rich and powerful Asian, African and Caribbean heritage but also from the British and European tradition.56
To this end, the organisation set up cultural events, organised discussions and published leaflets and books recording and promoting black talent.
Creation for Liberation was responsible for a series of annual Open Exhibitions, starting in 1982, which showcased the work of black visual artists. The Greater London Arts Council and Lambeth Borough Council provided some assistance, but the greater part of the support came from the community itself, who gave their time and skills as curators, electricians, carpenters, painters and decorators to build the show from scratch.
Chila Burnam, who was involved in the 1987 Open Exhibition, described the Open Exhibition as ‘dead important because it's the only exhibition by black artists, for black artists’.57 Aubrey Williams, the elder statesman of the black British art world, argued that the importance of the exhibition lay in the fact that it gave young black artists the freedom to ‘do their own thing. We're having a do in our own back yard, we're producing our own thing, for our own people … it gives an avenue for pure unfettered black expression.’58
In addition to the visual arts, Creation for Liberation did much to promote the work of black poets, including Maya Angelou, Michael Smith, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison and Marc Matthews.59 Indeed, the group was responsible for Ntozake Shange and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze's 1988 national tour.60 By 1990, with ticket receipts and various forms of sponsorship, Creation for Liberation was generating annual revenues in excess of £39,000.61
In addition to publishing Race Today and supporting the flourishing of black culture, the collective was also engaged in self-education and reached out to other groups that were engaged in struggle with the British state. Self-education was facilitated through ‘Basement Sessions’. These events were designed, in Howe's words, ‘not to build anything, but to discuss the issues of the day’. Sometimes they were reading groups. Indeed, an early set of sessions was devoted to James's Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). On other occasions, the basement sessions built bridges with other communities involved in their own acts of resistance. In 1984, to take one example, at Hassan's instigation, the collective paid for the wives of striking coal miners to come to London and tell their stories.62
Race Today also kept a constant eye on the politics of Northern Ireland. The magazine reported the Republican struggle as part of its wider coverage of anti-colonial movements. For this reason, it came to the attention of leaders of Sinn Fein and members of the IRA. As a result, Bobby Sands submitted a short story, ‘Black Beard in Profile’, which Howe published as part of the 1981 Race Today Review. ‘It had very little literary merit’, Howe recalls, but the submission came in the midst of Sands’ hunger strike. Moved by compassion for the starving prisoner, Howe published the piece. It was one piece among many, but its publication clearly meant something for the Republican movement, for when Ken Livingstone invited Gerry Adams to London in July 1983, Adams requested a meeting with Howe. Howe recalls that the Race Today offices were circled by a police helicopter for the duration of Adams's visit. The two men spoke at length. Adams's physical presence made a deep impact on Howe. ‘He did not smile once. To appropriate a Dickensian phrase, he was “so cold and hard”. Icy even. He spoke literally without a blink. His stare was razor sharp.’ Howe's abiding impression was of a man who had been forced to inhabit a ‘dark grim dungeon’.63
As Howe and Dhondy gained greater access to the mainstream, Race Today changed. In the first few years, Race Today worked closely with media production company Bandung Productions, printing transcripts of segments of the show and publishing pamphlets based on the show's content. However, from the mid-1980s Howe's attention was increasingly focused on his television work. In 1985 Howe stepped down as editor and Hassan took over the running of the magazine. Hassan remembers this as a difficult time. ‘When Darcus left Race Today we were very upset. We used to joke “are you selling out and becoming a TV personality?”.’64 The final issue was published in 1988. Howe was keen, at least between 1988 and 1990, to keep an organisation going. In a letter to the members of the collective written in 1989 he argued that the organisation should continue as a basis for future interventions in British national life.65
The eventual agreement was to dissolve the collective and found a new organisation. The collective formally dissolved itself on 7 April 1991. The formal dissolution, proposed by Patricia Dick and seconded by Michael Cadette, passed all the collective's assets to a new association, The C. L. R. James Institute (Preparatory). From Johnson's point of view, Howe had lost interest in Race Today:
Darcus decided that he wanted to be in the media, and I got the impression that he figured that we had more-or-less won the battle that we had been fighting. I wasn't around for any decision making, I just stopped attending meetings, I didn't think the leadership's heart was in the organisation any more. Also the death of C. L. R. James created a pall over everything. Some members were affected by it. I certainly was.66
For Howe, Race Today had done its job. ‘We had exhausted the moment.’67
From its foundation in 1975 to its dissolution in 1991, the Race Today Collective was, as Hassan argues, the centre of black liberation in England. It was the realisation of James's vision of a small organisation, a repository of organisational expertise and journalistic excellence which kept black rights on the agenda, and which broke into mainstream consciences through the grass-roots campaigns it helped to organise.
In terms of their ongoing influence, it should be recognised that the members of the collective played a role in shaping the political consensus that emerged in the 1980s. It is usually assumed that this decade witnessed the emergence of a Thatcherite consensus which championed privatisation, deregulation and free enterprise, but that is only part of the story. While the right dominated the economic argument, the left, by and large, won the social argument. From the mid-1990s until around 2015 mainstream British politics was characterised by economic and social liberalism. Notably, although groups such as the Race Today Collective, which had campaigned for the recognition minority rights, were written off in the 1980s as ‘looney left’, by the mid-1990s the message of equality and diversity had been accepted, rhetorically at least, by front-bench politicians of both main parties. In this sense the collective is part of a broader story of self-directing groups, representing minority communities, which, during the 1970s and 1980s, shifted the political consensus radically to the left, an influence that was felt in the content of equality legislation, culminating in the 2010 Equality Act, introduced by the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Stepping back from broad claims about its influence, Hassan sums up the collective thus:
Our history is really the history of Brixton, we were here for the ’81 riots, the Uprising, the road out here had all the police from Herefordshire, Southampton and Bristol, literally lying in this road as the troops that were brought in as reserves to fight the black community who were giving them hell further up. So we would open the door of the offices and step over policemen … Here we had people coming from all over the Caribbean, Steve Biko from Soweto, Jerry Adams came down here … he came and talked to us about the Irish liberation struggle. I hope one day we do have the opportunity to tell the story of this building and what it did for the freedom of black people in this country.68
1 Leila Hassan, interview by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 21 October 2011.
2 The Collective understood the term ‘black’ as universal; that is to say, comprehending people from Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Asia. This chapter follows the Collective's use of the term. In that sense, black has a similar meaning to terms such as people of colour or BAME in contemporary usage.
3 Farrukh Dhondy, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Royal Festival Hall, London, UK, 20 September 2010.
4 Robin Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Obi B. Egbuna, C. L. R. James and the Birth of Black Power in Britain’, Twentieth Century History 22 (2010), 391–414.
5 W. Chris Johnson, ‘Guerrilla Ganja Gun: Policing Black Revolutionaries from Notting Hill to Laventille’, in Stephan F. Miescher, Michele Mitchell and Naoko Shibusawa (eds), Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 280–306.
6 Neil Kenlock, interview by Robin Bunce. Unpublished interview. Emirates Stadium, London, UK, 1 August 2016.
7 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. British Library, London, UK, 20 August 2010.
8 Linton Kwesi Johnson, interviewed by Robin Bunce. Unpublished telephone interview, 14 November 2011; Farrukh Dhondy, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. British Film Institute, London, UK, 15 September 2011.
9 Bunce and Field, ‘Obi B. Egbuna, C. L. R. James and the Birth of Black Power in Britain’, p. 414.
10 Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 137–40.
11 Leila Hassan, interview by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 21 October 2011.
12 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 6 October 2011.
13 Linda Bellos, interviewed by Robin Bunce. Unpublished telephone interview, 31 December 2012.
14 The Collective rejected the slogan on the basis that, in practice, it was used to co-opt black people into white-dominated organisations, and to back campaigns over which they had no influence.
15 Darcus Howe, ‘From Victim to Protagonist’, Race Today 1974, p. 67.
16 Darcus Howe, ‘Bringing It Back Home’, Race Today, 1974, p. 126.
17 Howe, ‘Bringing It Back Home’, p. 126.
18 Linton Kwesi Johnson, interviewed by Robin Bunce. Unpublished telephone interview, 14 November 2011.
19 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 6 October 2011.
20 C. L. R., James, Grace C. Lee and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1974), pp. 128–31.
21 James, Lee and Chaulieu, Facing Reality, p. 126.
22 Darcus Howe, ‘Editorial’, Race Today, 1974, p. 95.
23 The BHAG campaign had grown out of the Anti-Racist Committee of Asians in East London (ARC-EL) campaign which organised small community defence squads. The latter had quickly stamped out the skinhead and National Front ‘Paki bashing’, which took place in the early 1970s in East London.
24 University of Columbia Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Darcus Howe Papers, Race Today Constitution, 1978, Box VIII Folder 1.
25 Margaret Thatcher, interview with Gordon Burn, World in Action, Granada TV, 27 January 1978.
26 Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 328.
27 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 15 July 2011.
28 David J. Smith, and Jeremy Gray, Police and People in London IV: The Police in Action (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1983), p. 116.
29 Smith and Gray, Police and People in London IV, p. 116.
30 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 21 July 2011.
31 The National Archives (TNA), PREM 19/484, 57, Cabinet Papers, July 1981.
32 Leila Hassan, ‘Our History Is the History of Brixton’. Filmed 1 November 2015, YouTube video, posted 1 November 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7YxeuqUHDs.
33 Rudy Narayan, Barrister for the Defence: Trial by Jury and How to Survive It (London: Hansib Publications, 1985), p. 143.
34 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Brixton, London, UK, 1 November 2015.
35 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 21 July 2011.
36 Farrukh Dhondy, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. British Film Institute, London, UK, 15 September 2011.
37 Darcus Howe, ‘C.L.R. James Lecture’, Institute of Contemporary Art, July 1992.
38 Darcus Howe, interview with Humphrey Carpenter. Great Lives, BBC Radio 4, 1 November 2002.
39 Harry Goulbourne, interviewed by Robin Bunce. Unpublished telephone interview, 8 February 2012.
40 Goulbourne, interviewed by Robin Bunce.
41 Farrukh Dhondy, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. British Film Institute, London, UK, 15 September 2011.
42 Leila Hassan, interview with Krishnendu Majumdar. What's Killing Darcus Howe, Channel 4, 24 November 2009.
43 Darcus Howe, television interview. Skin, London Weekend Television, 7 June 1981.
44 Darcus Howe, television interview. The London Programme, London Weekend Television, 20 November 1981.
45 Darcus Howe, interview with Peter Sissons. ITN News, Independent Television, 17 November 1983.
46 Darcus Howe, ‘My Fears after This Failure’, The Times, 26 November 1981, p. 106.
47 C. L. R. James, The American Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 119.
48 James, The American Civilization, p. 127.
49 Darcus Howe, interview by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 16 March 2011.
50 Darcus Howe, ‘Introduction’, Race Today Review, 1980, p. 51.
51 Howe, ‘Introduction’, p. 51.
52 Darcus Howe, ‘Introduction’, Race Today Review, 1981, p. 2.
53 Howe, ‘My Fears after This Failure’.
54 Howe, ‘My Fears after This Failure’.
55 Akua Rugg, ‘Introduction’, Race Today Review, 1984, p. 3.
56 Akua Rugg, ‘Creation for Liberation’, Race Today Review, 1988, p. 3.
57 Chila Burnam, interview with Darcus Howe, Bandung File, Channel 4, 24 October 1987.
58 Aubrey Williams, interview with Darcus Howe, Bandung File, Channel 4, 24 October 1987.
59 Darcus Howe (ed.), Race Today Review, 1988, p. 12.
60 Howe (ed.), Race Today Review, 1988, p. 12.
61 University of Columbia Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Darcus Howe Papers, Creation for Liberation Accounts, 1990, Box VIII Folder 3.
62 Leila Hassan, interview by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 21 October 2011.
63 Darcus Howe, ‘Devil's Advocate’, Evening Standard, 9 September 1994, p. 26.
64 Leila Hassan, interview by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 21 October 2011
65 University of Columbia Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Darcus Howe Papers, Letter to the Collective, 1989, Box VIII Folder 4.
66 Linton Kwesi Johnson, interviewed by Robin Bunce. Unpublished telephone interview, 14 November 2011.
67 Darcus Howe, interviewed by Robin Bunce and Paul Field. Unpublished interview. Norbury, London, UK, 6 October 2011.
68 Hassan, ‘Our History Is the History of Brixton’.