Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

black sensibility that was, it was becoming clear, increasingly grounded both in Handsworth and in Britain.

      Like all historians, I am an outsider to my subject. Moreover, although the germination of Black Handsworth came with my own formation in inner-city Britain in a different time and space, I have never had firsthand experience of what bell hooks famously described as the “killing rage” that the prevalence of racial discrimination can induce.⁷³ If a key aim of this book is to emphasize the importance of everyday cultures and ordinary experiences, this is not—as Raymond Williams reminded us—to vacate the arena of politics.⁷⁴ The black structure of feeling had far-reaching implications. In the context of the long 1980s and the resolute presence of Britain’s postcolonial amnesia, it was part of a process of confronting Britain with the implications of its imperial past and, in so doing, of moving toward the belated decolonization of the metropole itself.⁷⁵ But the importance of race in 1980s Britain should also be understood on its own terms. What I describe in the pages that follow represents just one manifestation of what might be conceptualized as the “diaspora-ization” of urban Britain.⁷⁶ Propelled by the transatlantic energies of the black globality, this was a process that, paradoxically, was enabling a black community to arrive at a sense of rootedness in the one-time mother country. Black Handsworth in the long 1980s is just one chapter in the continuing story of the making of black Britain.

1

      Shades of Black

       Political and Community Groups

      INTRODUCTION

      On 4 and 5 June 1977, as Britain was readying its street parties, processions, and Union Jack bunting for the queen’s forthcoming Silver Jubilee, the Handsworth-based African-Caribbean Self-Help Organisation (ACSHO) hosted Birmingham’s inaugural African Liberation Day. The idea had first been mooted by newly independent African states in the late 1950s, and the date had been set as 25 May to mark the anniversary of the formation of the Organisation of African Unity, a coalition committed to ending all colonial influence across the continent.¹ A decade later, African Liberation Day began to be picked up across the black globality. In the United States the Black Power activist Owusu Sadaukai envisaged that it would be a means of drawing public attention to events in apartheid South Africa, as well as emphasizing “‘the relationship between what is happening to our people in Africa and what is happening to us in the United States and other places.’” Drawing on a network of support that included prominent civil rights and Black Power groups, Sadaukai’s 1972 Liberation Day comprised a demonstration in Washington, D.C., of thirty thousand participants and protests outside the Portuguese and South African embassies.² In Handsworth five years later, events consisted of poetry readings, music, drama, and workshops, and culminated in a march of one thousand people from a local school to Handsworth Park. The ACSHO shared Sadaukai’s rationale for a Liberation Day as a means of emphasizing the transatlantic connections between liberation movements in Africa and political struggles across the diaspora and, given the historic role of jubilee events as a means of generating loyalty to the British Empire, no doubt recognized the political symbolism of staging the event over jubilee weekend. In the context of recent declarations of sovereignty in Angola and Mozambique, the group pitched its Liberation Day as a simultaneous celebration of victories in the struggle against colonialism and an expression of a commitment to defeating “‘the last colonial outposts’” overseas, as well as what was understood as domestic neocolonialism in contemporary Britain. The overarching theme of the event was “‘Africans in struggle at home and abroad.’”³

      Similar events were subsequently held in London and Manchester, though by the 1980s the ACSHO had become the main organizational driver behind African Liberation Day in Britain.⁴ The group had been established in the mid-1960s to attempt to combat the racism black communities faced across British society, but it maintained a line of analysis that placed these struggles in the context of worldwide anticolonial and antiracist movements past and present. It was therefore part of a long-standing tradition of black political organization in Britain stretching back at least to the 1930s, when London in particular had become a focal point for Pan-Africanist mobilization thanks to the activities of black students, intellectuals, and other sojourners, who used the city as a base for the development of campaigns against empire and demands for the advancement of the rights of black populations within it.⁵ A more immediate influence on the ACSHO was the political associations and pressure groups that were set up to advocate on behalf of the growing black population in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the battles fought in this period were largely stimulated by domestic flashpoints, activists again emphasized a perspective that encompassed the black Atlantic. Activists such as the Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones drew parallels between the struggles of “‘Afro-American freedom fighters’” and domestic campaigns against racist violence, the British color bar, and the onset of increasingly discriminatory immigration legislation.⁶ The transatlantic nature of these currents was signified in 1965 when, following the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths’s shock election victory in Smethwick, the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) extended an invitation to Malcolm X to pay a visit to Griffiths’s new constituency, two miles from the IWA’s base in Handsworth. If his earlier spells in London and Oxford had contributed to his characterization of the sun finally setting on the “‘monocled, pith-helmeted’” British colonialist, Malcolm X’s stint in the midlands prompted him to reach for another analogy: black people in Smethwick were, he told reporters, being treated “‘in the same way as the Negroes . . . in Alabama—like Hitler and the Jews.’”⁷

      Focusing on the ACSHO, the IWA, and other local organizations, this chapter unpicks the nature of black politics in Handsworth over the long 1980s. As the ACSHO’s rhetoric around African Liberation Day suggests, what Kennetta Hammond Perry has underlined as the “overlapping imperial, diasporic and global valences” of black politics in the 1950s and 1960s continued to resonate in the politics of Handsworth-based organizations in the later period.⁸ What was distinctive, however, was the extent to which this perspective was able to contribute to mobilizations across ethnic lines, as a growing South Asian population took up residence alongside African Caribbean communities in Britain’s inner cities. To varying degrees, it has been argued, groups in the 1960s emphasized the importance of an inclusive politics based on mutual experiences of discrimination and a shared relationship to empire. In February 1962, for example, the newly established Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference urged all “‘Afro-Asian-Caribbean citizens’” of Britain to march on the House of Commons to protest against the imminent passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Other groups likewise adopted an inclusive outlook that was at once “transracial, multiethnic and universal,” something anticipated by Claudia Jones in 1959 when she renamed her campaigning organ The West Indian Gazette so that it included the epigraph And Afro-Asian Caribbean News.⁹ By the later 1960s, influenced by the spread of Black Power across the Atlantic following the visits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and other American-based activists and the formation of groups such as the Universal Coloured People’s Association (UCPA), this unity began to manifest itself among immigrant communities with a shared embrace of the semiotic power of “black.”¹⁰ Just as Carmichael had emphasized the importance of the “Third World” jointly mobilizing under the Black Power program, so in this milieu a “peculiarly British notion of ‘blackness’” was said to have emerged in which the generalizations and stereotypes immigrants faced upon their arrival in Britain were reappropriated into an internationalist tool of political unity. According to Ambalavener Sivanandan, the Sri Lankan activist and one-time affiliate of the reconstituted UCPA, black had begun to be understood as a “political colour” to which Africans, Caribbeans, and Asians could each lay claim.¹¹

      This is an important reminder of the malleability of black in postwar British discourse. In order to examine the nature of black politics in Handsworth, in this chapter it is necessary to include an interrogation of those South Asian organizations that also sought to mobilize under the same inclusive banner. Indeed, the long 1980s have been identified as the period during which the encompassing notion of black fragmented, giving