The inequalities that faced black and Asian immigrants in the housing sector had been well known for some time; the sociologists John Rex and Robert Moore, in their influential 1967 study of the Sparkbrook district of Birmingham in the south of the city, positioned immigrant communities as a separate underclass worse off than their fellow occupiers of Britain’s inner-city slums.110 Black and Asian communities were often forced to rely disproportionately on the private rental sector, where, as a result of the unscrupulous practices of “shark” landlords, poor conditions continued to belie postwar narratives of increasing affluence.111 Yet the experiences of organizations operating on the community level suggested that within the immigrant underclass there were significant variations that required particular responses. In 1974, for instance, the black teacher and part-time social sciences student Beresford Ivan Henry completed a dissertation based on field research he had undertaken with Harambee, a Handsworth-based organization that had been established two years earlier to attempt to deal with black homelessness. If groups such as the IWA and ARC found that the familial structures often presumed to be present in Asian households were often irrelevant when it came to the problem of elderly homelessness, Henry suggested that the conservative religiosity of some black parents and the growing disillusionment of black youth in the education and employment sectors had led to young people becoming “alienated from parental or home situations” and in some cases being “rejected from their families” altogether.112 Some reports suggested that as many as a fifth of local black teenagers could be classified as homeless.113 Like the ACSHO, Harambee maintained a globalist, Pan-Africanist stance; the group’s name was taken from the Swahili word for “all together.” But this did not correspond with an interethnic politics based around black as a political color; the commitment to service provision in Handsworth and the particular way in which issues such as housing and homelessness were manifested meant that, like the ACSHO, Harambee focused its priorities elsewhere.
Harambee’s organizational emphasis was encapsulated in the fact that it originally called itself Black Social Workers, though many of its members were also trained teachers and lawyers. Maurice Andrews, an immigrant from Jamaica who cofounded the group and was himself a former social worker, cited a “phenomenal tension” within black households, particularly in instances where marriages had broken down and children were living with a stepparent. Andrews recalled that teenagers as young as fourteen were being evicted from their family homes and sleeping in parks or with friends in bed-sits. Harambee’s ambition was to develop a “positive initiative in order to begin to retrieve the situation.”114 The group obtained funds to purchase a three-story property on Hall Road, a few hundred yards from the “front line” at the Villa Cross pub. This was turned into a hostel that catered not for visiting sojourners or for elderly Asians, but for local black youths specifically. Addressing this issue had become a central feature of Black Power politics following its emergence in Britain in the late 1960s. One of the first hostels for homeless black youths was the so-called Black House in North London, which opened its doors in 1969 and was run by the controversial Trinidadian activist Michael X’s Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS).115 In Handsworth, Harambee’s intention was not only to house and feed homeless black youths, but also to make them “feel more aware of themselves, their situation and the role they can play in society,” as well as “offer opportunities to black adults to regain the trust of the younger generation.” According to the group’s 1974 annual report, there were three stages to Harambee’s interventions: first, an initial rescue operation took black youths off the streets by providing them with short-term accommodation; second, longer-term homes were allocated, often in partnership with local authorities; and finally, an educational program with the overall aim of making young people “more socially aware and self-reliant” was provided. Within seven days of the hostel’s opening all fifteen places in the house had been filled by local homeless young people. By March 1974, seventy young people had stayed at the Harambee hostel, for periods ranging from one night to ten months.116
Throughout the long 1980s Harambee expanded its activities in response to what it saw as the needs of the local black community. It purchased other disused properties in Handsworth and turned them into hostels for black youths, setting up its own housing association to provide low-cost housing in the area. Harambee established an advice center that broached the issue of tensions between police and black communities by offering free legal guidance, and ran a black studies course for residents at its hostels; a nursery was opened to cater for the children of black single mothers, and the group also ran a supplementary Saturday school for older children, which in the mid-1970s became the focus of local newspaper attention because of its status as an “‘exclusive West Indian organisation.’”117 These services were named not after South Asian revolutionaries like Udham Singh but African Caribbean figures such as Marcus Garvey and Harriet Tubman. In the 1970s one of its members summarized its ideology as being “‘influenced by Pan-Africanism, African socialism, and parts of the black power philosophy,’” with the aim of enabling “‘black people . . . [to] carve out for themselves a decent existence in Handsworth.’” As Maurice Andrews saw it, “We had to find our own place in society”; Harambee had emerged out of an insistence that “we had to manage our own affairs. We had our own problems, and it was important we solved them.”118
From the beginning Harambee made a decision that it would seek funding from the state. Unlike the IWA, whose 1978 building of a state-funded welfare center on Soho Road reflected a shift away from the group’s Marxist-Leninist roots, for Harambee using state money was a part of its own radical political rationale, which saw the state as negligent in its duty of care toward black communities. As Andrews conceptualized it, “our theory was that we pay taxes, we are a part of this society,” and therefore it was the state’s responsibility to respond to social problems such as homelessness—if not directly through the provision of adequate services, then indirectly via the funding of locally embedded groups such as Harambee. Although Harambee property was raided by the police three times in the mid-1970s, agencies including the Birmingham Social Services Department, which funded Harambee’s main hostel, clearly valued the group’s ability to work with a section of the community often treated by authorities as impossible to reach.119 In 1975 one funder described the Harambee hostel as “one of the best pieces of self-help work” in the area and saw the group as being “ideally placed to work effectively with young West Indians.”120 From the perspective of those who ran Harambee, accepting state funds did not compromise the group’s emphasis on “togetherness and self-help.”121 To Andrews, at least, calling for the state to fund a group like Harambee was itself a radical position. This was a politics of “self-help backed up with the demand that the state must pay.”122
This attitude was a point of cleavage with the ACSHO, which had been established in Handsworth in 1964 almost a decade before Harambee and three years before a Stokely Carmichael visit to London helped stimulate the expansion of the Black Power movement in Britain.123 The ACSHO became one of the longest-serving black political groups in the country and, like the AYM and the BBS, emphasized the importance of independence from the state. This position was made clear in an article published in the ACSHO’s journal, Jomo, in response to the announcement by the Birmingham City Council in 1989 of funding cuts. For the ACSHO, the cuts were a signal for groups such as Harambee, who had accepted state money, to “learn the bitter lesson of the enemy’s politics.” The ACSHO had been “branded extremists for not wanting to collaborate” but argued that the cuts were an example of the state using its “economic strength to divide and rule” and a validation of the group’s stress on the importance of self-sufficiency. The cofounder of the ACSHO was the Jamaican Bini Brown. If the lesson drawn by the group in 1989 was “never rely on your enemy for liberation,” Brown conceptualized the group’s position even more vociferously: “We don’t like going with our hand begging, begging, begging. If you have to keep on begging somebody for something, what kind of human being are you? You have no dignity. When you’re self-reliant, you do what you do, you’re proud of what you are.”124 The group also refused to talk to mainstream journalists and the growing number of white sociologists who, like Rex and Tomlinson, used Handsworth as a case study for their wider explorations of race and immigration.125 While London-based