While the precise context may have been different, Britain’s own fight for equality drew inspiration from events across the pond
WORDS: DANNY BIRD
The struggle for civil rights resonated beyond the United States, including in the United Kingdom. But Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry, honorary senior research fellow and founding director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University, stresses that we should always be mindful of the “specificities of the context of disenfranchisement” when looking at echoes of the US movement around the world. Rather than being the result of legally enforced segregation, the British campaign arose during the period when European imperialism was in retreat and postwar British governments were encouraging mass migration from Britain’s colonies.
Indeed, throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, immigrants from across the British empire and Commonwealth were answering the call to fill vacancies in the job market. But this sudden change in Britain’s demographic makeup provoked racial violence and discrimination in major cities like London, Birmingham and Nottingham. Skilled workers from Britain’s overseas territories found their prospects limited by racist attitudes and often had to settle for careers that squandered their experience. And later, when the British economy fell into decline, black workers were disproportionately affected by job losses and unequal pay.
READY TO MOBILISE
It was a climate that was all-too-readily exploited by far-right movements. Former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, for instance, distributed leaflets bearing the message, “Take action now. Protect your jobs. Stop coloured immigration. Houses for white people – not coloured immigrants”. Then, in August 1958, tensions boiled over in London’s Notting Hill district when hundreds of white teenagers began attacking the homes of West Indian residents. The race riots drew widespread condemnation, with the delegates at that year’s Trades Union Congress even going so far as to claim that “elements which propagated racial hatred in Britain and Europe in pre-war days are once more fanning the flames of violence”.
Tragically, more violence was to come, notably when an Antiguan-born carpenter named Kelso Cochrane was murdered by a gang of white youths in west London in May 1959. But the Afro-Caribbean community rallied. As the 1960s dawned, Cochrane’s death was treated by UK civil rights
