Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

where they lived in a huge boarding house run by the Elder Dempster Shipping Company. This facility, large enough to house between three and four hundred men, was destroyed.

Alongside the lynching of Charles Wootton, this was perhaps the most heartrending of the many tragic spectacles of 1919; the sight of four hundred black people, men, women and children, being marched through the streets of Liverpool under police escort – some of them made refugees in their own city.

a battleship accompanied by destroyers sailed up the Mersey – an overreaction by a British government grown twitchy and paranoid in the aftermath of the Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

There is no question that profound anxieties over the scarcity of work were critical.

in 1919 stood accused of competing unfairly for maritime work and driving down wages. These tensions had long existed but they were amplified by the war, as the number of black seamen in Britain and on British ships increased enormously.

The same month, the Morning Post published an article entitled ‘The Negro Riots. A Lesson for England’, that demonstrated the extent to which scientific racism, with its emphasis on notions of racial purity, pollution and degeneration, had diverted Britain from the idealism that had been expressed (though not always believed) by the abolitionists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The war had increased the size of the black population at the very moment in which forms of racism that affirmed and celebrated white, Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy were on the rise.

To them, black people were both aliens and racial inferiors; they should therefore be at the very back of the queues for jobs and homes and be regarded as legitimate targets for violent assault.

they were men who had volunteered for service and put themselves at risk of injury or death only to find themselves assaulted on the streets and in their homes by other Britons who regarded their skin colour as incontrovertible evidence that they were not and could never be British.

who were British-born were also notionally stripped of their nationality and identity by the racial thinking

plans for the evacuation of the entire black population of the city to abandoned army camps outside the city.

Surveying the global picture, the Colonial Office noted that across the world racial tensions, heightened by the dislocations of the war years and by the spread of new forms of racism, had sparked terrible outbreaks of violence in 1919.

In what James Weldon Johnson, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called the Red Summer, attacks on black people took place in twenty-five American cities.

One of the slogans used by the rioters in Belize was ‘This is our country and we want to get the white man out. The white man has no right here’.

The thing the British public does not realise adequately is that we are a coloured empire . . . We are an Empire of 435,000,000, and 350,000,000 are coloured. What we have got to make our mind up on is whether we’re going to solidify our empire or disrupt

After many years’ study of this difficult question, I have definitively come to the conclusion that colour in itself must be no bar in any sphere of human activity . . . The colour bar is the last rampart of slavery.69

During the riots of 1919, the police undertook interviews with the black people who had been sheltered in the Liverpool bridewells.

This was used after the riots to develop a system of observation and monitoring in Liverpool. Black seamen were issued with registration cards that contained photographs and fingerprints that had to be produced to sign on for ships, a system copied and adopted by other ports.

The Aliens Order of 1920 and Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of 1925 further required all black seamen domiciled in Britain, including British subjects, to register with the police and then prove their nationality.

‘the first instance of state-sanctioned race discrimination inside Britain to com...

However, sailors did not always carry passports and were not required to and so many black seamen had no means of proving their nationality.

Those unable to demonstrate their status as British subjects, and those whose documentation was regarded by the police as unsatisfactory, were required to register as aliens, which made their potential deportation a far simpler process.

exposed to the threat of deportation under a legislation that had been intended to control and ...

One seaman who had his passport confiscated and issued with an Aliens Card was threatened with arrest when he refused to accept it.

There were more black people in Britain in 1944 than there were in 1948, the year the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury and 492 West Indians landed in the imperial ‘mother country’.

Racially segregated America sent a racially segregated army to Britain in 1942.

upheld through a system of organized repression, political disenfranchisement and economic marginalization known as the Jim Crow laws,

If they had been in a position to choose, Britain’s political leaders surely would have been glad to sidestep all of these questions. Their preference would have been for the American army deployed to Britain in 1942 to be all-white.

‘If we treat them naturally as equals, there will be trouble with the Southern officers. If we treat them differently, there will be trouble with the “North Americans”’, by which he meant men from the Northern states.

For their own domestic political reasons, and in response to pressure from black American civil rights groups, they insisted that the American army dispatched to England contained African Americans.

racial prejudice had somehow disappeared. The black Americans were not immigrating, had not come to stay and were not suspected of ‘taking British jobs’ or houses;

‘Everybody here adores the Negro troops, all the girls go to their dances, but nobody likes the white Americans. They swagger about us as if they were the only people fighting this war. They all get so drunk and look so untidy while the negroes are very polite, much smarter and everybody’s pets’,

Exposed for the first time to the sheer vindictiveness of American racial prejudice, it was they who took greatest offence, and they who were most repelled by the violence meted out to black GIs.

In December 1943 George Orwell noted that ‘The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.’

A pub in Bristol displayed a notice that read ‘Only blacks served here’

‘Their money is as good as yours, and we prefer their company.’

Members of Britain’s small black population and the cohort of West Indian servicemen and women in the country also sided with the black GIs when the latter faced attacks or abuse from white Americans. The traditional British love of the underdog may have played a part here, as many Britons almost instinctually took the side of the oppressed minority.

The Daily Mail said that the film ‘should do more than any other single factor to create a genuine Anglo-American understanding’.

Through the work of Mass Observation, a social research organization founded in 1937, the government was well aware that black soldiers were being attacked on the streets and driven out of pubs and dance halls.

After a fractious meeting, it decided that Britain would not oppose the American army’s policy of segregation but would not permit British authorities, military or civilian, to play a part in enforcing it.

‘the Negro British nationals are rightly incensed. They undoubtedly have been cursed, made to get off the sidewalk, leave eating places and separated from their white wives by American soldiers.

Churchill quipped, ‘That’s all right. if he takes his banjo with him they’ll think he’s one of the band.’23

Churchill ‘undoubtedly had nigger blood in him. Look at his build and slouch. The Marlboroughs [Churchill’s family] were a poor type physically, but Winston was strong. Another characteristic of Winston is that when he gets excited he shrieks: again the nigger comes out.’

contacts between black GIs and British white women, however platonic, were liable to elicit violent reactions.

Another white GI revealed how he and others reacted: ‘Every time so far that we have seen a nigger with a white girl we have run him away. I would like to shoot the whole bunch of them.’

Meader confessed to her diary that she felt the British girls should be ‘shot’ for taking the risk of introducing ‘coloured blood’ into their children.

Having travelled extensively within the United States, Colbourne recognized that white American and British views on inter-racial relationships overlapped far more than their views on segregation.

Black GIs in the city had become so accustomed to being attacked by their white countrymen that they had even taken to stationing lookouts.

white Southerners ‘who seemed rational enough until the Negro problem was mentioned, and who would then show a terrifying lynching spirit, which was about the ugliest thing imaginable.’

In one of these unhappy incidents a white GI from the South who had been invited into an English home for the evening was enraged to discover that his fellow guest was an African American soldier, whom he proceeded to physically attack in front of his horrified hosts.