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

by David Olusoga

Those in favour of mixed marriages made comments such as ‘How can anyone stop them if they love each other?’, or ‘If there’s one way of breaking down the colour bar it’s through marriage’, while ‘Those who argued against intermarriage confined themselves to stating what they felt – “it’s not right”, “looks peculiar”, “not natural” ’, etc.’

suggested that mixed-race children were mentally deficient or prone to other congenital defects.

It’s one of the reasons why France is a third class nation today. Too much mixed blood.

Well how do you think we can help remove it? LORD ALTRINCHAM: Well I think to just those of us who believe in it to say so as often as possible and those of us who fall in love with coloured people get married as quickly as possible.

The idea of pure race is nonsense; there isn’t such a thing as pure race. We’re all the result of mixed marriage in the past and that’s why the human race is fairly exciting and fairly interesting.

The better off and better educated were, to some extent, insulated from the worst aspects of British racism.

The disturbances were called riots, but were in reality attacks launched against black people and their homes by white mobs.

white drinkers objected to a black man and a white woman talking together in a bar in the St Ann’s area. In only a few hours, a thousand white men were involved in attacks on West Indians,

one regional bus company began offering tours of the parts of the city in which the fighting had taken place, forcing the Lord Mayor of Nottingham to make an appeal for people not to go to the area ‘for sightseeing purposes’.

some of whom were former servicemen, had organized and armed themselves. They defended their community vigorously. It was at this point that the police finally stepped in to regain control.

two Nottingham MPs used the violence as the pretext to call for immigration controls, despite the fact that black people had been the victims rather than the perpetrators of the disturbances.

In this perverse reading of events, proximity to members of a ‘lesser race’ had triggered a moral decline among white working-class Londoners that had inspired them to attack their black neighbours.45

But even some of those in Westminster and Fleet Street who understood that these ‘race riots’ had in fact been thuggish attacks on black people by white gangs went along with the debates about the ‘social problems’ and ‘economic difficulties’ that were said to arise from black migration.

the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act determined that Commonwealth citizens carrying passports that were not issued directly by the UK government, but rather by a British colonial government or governor, would be subject to immigration controls

It was also pointed out in Parliament that white immigrants from the old dominions would be largely unaffected by the act,

Ever since the Smethwick election it has been quite clear that immigration can be the greatest potential vote-loser for the Labour Party if we are seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come in and blight the central areas of our cities

further Immigration Acts from 1968 to 1971 removed the last remnants of the rights of entry and residence that had been awarded to Commonwealth citizens by the 1948 Nationality Act

Powell believed could never become British despite knowing no other homeland. ‘The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England become an Englishman’

he described skin colour as being like a ‘uniform’ that could not be removed.

On 23 April, as the House of Commons debated a second Race Relations Bill, 2,000 London dock workers downed their tools in protest at his sacking. The next day the meat porters of Smithfield market submitted a petition containing ninety-two pages of signatures in his support.

What was needed, he later stated, was a ‘Ministry of Repatriation’. Yet by the mid-1970s 40 per cent of the black population were British-born.

victims of the economic crisis for which they were held partly responsible.

in March, around twenty thousand black people marched from Deptford to central London to demand a thorough investigation, sections of the press reported the predominantly peaceful march as a day of riots.

With breathtaking insensitivity that revealed the depth of racism within the force, the Metropolitan Police chose to name the operation ‘Swamp 81’. Over two days, 120 plainclothes officers stopped and searched 943 people, arresting 118 on various charges.

Cities that had been enriched by the slave trade and the sugar business saw fires set and barricades erected by young people who were the distant descendants of human cargo.

The 1990s and the 2000s were, in many ways, better days. Survey after survey plotted the decline of racist sentiment as a younger generation emerged who had not experienced the racism of the post-war period nor been brought up to view the world in racial terms.

One of the ways in which black people, and their white allies, attempted to secure that future was by reclaiming their lost past.

To see Equiano, with his cravat and scarlet coat, was to feel the embrace of the past and of a deeper belonging.

The ‘Windrush Myth’ raises the possibility that the story of post-war immigration might overshadow the black British history that the post-war migrants themselves were so eager to see exhumed and have celebrated.

The great post-war project to build an English-speaking multi-racial Commonwealth with London at its heart, a community of willing nations led by statesmen and businessmen, has, in a sense, been overtaken by globalization and unprecedented levels of world migration.

Despite the questionable attractions of nearer Dubai, millions of Africans still feel powerfully drawn to London.

The remarkable capacity of West Indian immigrant families to assimilate can be seen in the marriage statistics. Less than half of British West Indians have partners who are also West Indian.

A report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission published in August 2016 showed that black graduates in Britain were paid an average 23.1 per cent less than similarly qualified white workers.

Black people are far more often the victims of crime. ‘You are more than twice as likely to be murdered if you are Black in England and Wales’, said the report, starkly.

When accused of crimes, black people are three times more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced than white people.

The racist attacks that, two decades later, led to me and my family being driven from our home by thugs inspired by the National Front were a feature of another inescapable aspect of that same history – the development and spread of British racism.