Black and British: A Forgotten History

by David Olusoga

In the twenty-first century the shadowy figures whose plight plays on our collective conscience are the millions who toil in factories and sweat shops making our clothes and mobile phones and the impoverished Indians who construct football stadiums and fantasy towers in desert kingdoms that we visit on our holidays. In the eighteenth century the invisible enablers of everyday luxury were Africans, slaves who produced the tobacco that millions smoked in little clay pipes and snorted as snuff, and the cane sugar that in two generations went from a frivolous extravagance – added to the food of the rich in tiny quantities – to one of the main sources of calories for the poor.

The abolitionist movement, especially in its campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s, could not possibly have achieved what it did without their involvement.

Sigh

The faith in gradualism said much about the racial ideas that prevailed among the abolitionists and most people in nineteenth-century Britain. It said nothing about the capacities and inner nature of African people.

The government recognized that it would have to foot the bill: twenty million pounds was raised and set aside to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners. That sum represented 40 per cent of all government spending for the year 1833 and is the equivalent of around seventeen billion pounds today, making it then the largest pay-out in British history. The eight hundred thousand slaves were to be freed, but not immediately. They were to be compelled to pay some of the cost of their own manumission. All slaves who worked the fields were to continue their labours for an additional six years, unpaid and for the same masters. Domestic slaves were to work for a further four years. This system was euphemistically called ‘apprenticeship’,

The two younger Wilberforces also committed one of the most outrageous acts of historical vandalism when they convinced Clarkson to send them much of his correspondence with their father. These letters were not returned and have never been found. They are presumed destroyed. But Clarkson was just one among a long list of historical casualties. The contributions of the black abolitionists, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Ottobah Cuguano, the Sons of Africa and others were also redacted, and a similar fate befell the female abolitionists, like Elizabeth Heyrick and Hannah More. The pro-slavery men of the West India Interest are rarely discussed and nor is their leader George Hibbert. The slave rebellions that had nudged the nation towards final abolition were likewise forgotten; the black men and women who had led those uprisings, perished in them or who had been executed in the retribution that followed were reduced to footnotes or expunged entirely. The notion that the enslaved people had played a role in their own emancipation, that liberty had been demanded and fought for, rather than simply given, was for the most part forgotten. This version of the history of slavery and abolition, that first took form in the latter half of the nineteenth century, remains dominant even in the twenty-first century, despite half a century of challenge and reassessment by generations of Caribbean and British historians.

During the nineteen months from his arrival in 1845 to his departure in April 1847, Frederick Douglass, by his own estimation, lectured on slavery on three hundred occasions, meaning that he spoke publicly against slavery on more days than he was silent.

Harriet Jacobs wrote that being in Britain felt like ‘a great millstone had been lifted from my breast’, as ‘for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion’.36 This might be because British racism was mild in comparison to the strains they had known in the United States, and was therefore deemed to be not worth reporting. But as a key strategy of the abolitionists was to lionize Britain and repudiate America, they also had a clear motivation for under-reporting the racism that was a feature of British culture. In The Heroic Slave, his novella of 1853, Douglass had his central character explain that to be an American slave in Britain was to nestle ‘in the mane of the British lion, protected by his mighty paw from the talons and the beak of the American eagle’.37 The character into whose mouth Douglass placed those words was a slave on board the Creole, the American ship seized by the slaves on board and diverted to the Bahamas in 1841, in order to find their own safety.

Dickens, who we know admired Douglass’ writing and was able to empathize with the sufferings he had endured as a slave, still felt compelled to remove his portrait from a copy of his biography he was sending to a friend. No matter how difficult it is for us to understand, the fact remains that many millions of Victorians who, like their most famous author, passionately opposed slavery saw no contradiction between that opposition and an unshakable belief in black inferiority.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains largely unread in the twenty-first century not simply because its melodramatic style has fallen from literary favour but also because it is highly contentious. In the second half of the twentieth century it was largely disowned by African Americans, who recoiled at the meek passivity of the central character, whose name has become a pejorative shorthand for a black person unable to stand up for his own life and in thrall to white power. Tom is the simplistic and saintly figure that Stowe intended him to be, but also the embodiment of the stereotype of Africans that had emerged from within transatlantic abolitionism; honest, childlike, uncomplicated and deeply imbued in the Christian message. Other characters can also appear to be personifications of various stereotypes, or at least to display traits that accord with the racial paternalism of the abolitionist movement. As these characters were some of the best known ever generated by any work of fiction, the significance of these failings and limitations is enormously magnified. Yet there are other characters who demonstrate autonomy, resistance, pride and devotion to family, most notably George Harris, who bravely leads his family to liberty in Canada.* Even Uncle Tom, who refuses to whip another slave and is punished for his disobedience, does not fall neatly into the stereotype.

At some point in the 1830s, Rice began to appropriate aspects of the musical and dance traditions that had developed among the enslaved people of the Southern states. He had assembled these cultural fragments and added his own distortions to black speech patterns and exaggerations of black dancing, and created the stage character Jim Crow, an enslaved man dressed in rags and faded finery who sang songs, danced and told jokes. To complete the persona, Rice blackened his face and hands, as earlier minstrel performers had done. In 1836, at the height of British abolitionism, three years after the passage of the Emancipation Act and four years before the World Anti-Slavery Convention, Jim Crow came to Britain.

On occasions the most benign of the minstrel songs and sketches presented the anti-slavery cause as a form of anti-slavery entertainment, one that condemned American slavery while at the same time lampooning and stereotyping black people. From the 1830s to the 1850s white men in blackface delivered anti-slavery speeches from the stages of British theatres and music halls, in the same acts in which they rolled their eyes and crudely imitated black dancing, during their high-speed comic routines. Thomas Rice’s first performances as Jim Crowe in the Surrey Theatre were a mixture of singing and dancing, racial

The minstrel acts, even when anti-slavery in sentiment, presented black people as childlike and unsophisticated. This was in striking contrast to how contemporary audiences reported their encounters with Frederick Douglass. Many accounts noted his obvious intelligence and evident learning, attributes which were cited on occasion as proof that when freed from slavery and given the gifts of education and moral instruction black people were able to demonstrate their intellectual capacities and potential for refinement. Douglass played on the gulf between his intellectual abilities and the expectations some of his audience might have had of him within the strictures of some of his lectures.

Some black performers arrived in Britain as established stars of the American stage and were able to attract large audiences. Bill Kersands, a comedian and minstrel dancer of legendary athletic skill, toured Britain in the 1880s. Kersands performed his dance routines for Queen Victoria and was a hit on both sides of the ocean. His routines however struggled to escape the crude stereotyping of the blackface shows. Known for his large mouth, one feature of his act involved him putting billiard balls in his mouth, several at a time, and contorting his face to comic effect. To uproarious laughter he would attempt to regale his audience with comic anecdotes through a mouthful of billiard balls or even while holding a complete cup and saucer between his lips. When he met Queen Victoria, Kersands is reputed to have said, ‘If God ever wanted my mouth any bigger, he would have to move my ears.’66 Given that throughout the nineteenth century it was not unknown in both Britain and America for physically disabled people, or those with congenital birth defects, to be put on public display in travelling circuses, the contortions of Bill Kersands’ large mouth might have seemed relatively harmless in comparison, were it not for the fact that his physical comedy was so in keeping with prevailing stereotypes of black people as a race that was marked out by outlandishly sized lips and mouths – as well as other features.

By far the most important of the black American musical troupes to tour Britain in our period were the legendary Fisk Jubilee Singers, who arrived in 1873. They came from Nashville, Tennessee, and were directly responsible for introducing British audiences to the world of Negro spirituals. Their impact upon British music tastes is too significant to be dealt with here, but more than any other troupe they changed British tastes, introducing into the national song book standards like ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I See’ and ‘Deep River’; songs that became part of the lives of millions of Victorian churchgoers. The Fisk Jubilee Singers performed for Queen Victoria and symbolically they gave a concert at London’s Exeter Hall, the historic headquarters of the British abolitionist movement. Two further tours followed, in 1875 and in 1884, during which their popularity remained undimmed. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, thanks to their ever-changing line-up, survived into the twentieth century and gramophone recordings of their singing exist. From these discs emerges music that is powerfully sombre and radically original when set aside the plodding music-hall routines and dated minstrel clichés that were popular throughout the era.

Karl Marx, then resident in London, was said to have sung minstrel songs and taught them to his children.

On more than one occasion Douglass suggested that these changes were the result of the infiltration into the country of what he described as ‘American prejudice’. He detected in the mood of Britain in 1859 and 1860 the toxic influence of what he called ‘pro-slavery ministers’. To counter this he included in his lectures appeals for the rejection of these American influences. During a visit to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1860, the city that was home to the Richardson family who had purchased his freedom in 1847, Douglass identified another route by which American racism had seeped into Britain. He complained that ‘Ethiopian minstrels’, who he regarded as a ‘pestiferous nuisance’, had ‘brought here [to Britain] the slang phrases, the contemptuous sneers all originating in the spirit of slavery’. Minstrelsy, Douglass warned, represented black people as being ‘contented and happy as a slave, thoughtless of any higher life than a mere physical one’.73 The increasing popularity of minstrel shows, and the increasingly derogatory nature of blackface performances and routines in British theatres – whether performed by visiting American troupes or home-grown bands – was more likely a symptom of hardening racial attitudes than a cause.

These new ideas fused and mingled with the older racisms. In this new atmosphere not only did increasing numbers of Britons believe that the nation had no business intervening in the issue of slavery in America, some suggested that even abolition in the West Indies, the great act of moral absolution on which so much of Britain’s self-image and patriotic triumphalism rested, might have been a mistake.

The historian of slavery Seymour Drescher has described British abolition as an act of ‘econocide’, a policy that ran counter to British economic interests. However, the decision to abandon the trade somewhere near the apex of its profitability made the task of suppression almost impossible in the 1820s and 1830s, as ruthless new players joined the trade.

The young children soon recovered from their sufferings, and their elastic spirits seemed little injured. The men next rallied; but several died in the shed devoted to the most sickly, chiefly from dysentery: they were wrapped in a coarse grass mat, carried away, and buried without ceremony. Of the women many were dispatched to the hospital at Kissey, victims to raging fever; others had become insane. I was informed that insanity is the frequent fate of the women captives . . . The women sustain their bodily sufferings with more silent fortitude than the men, and seldom destroy themselves; but they brood more over their misfortunes, until the sense of them is lost in madness.

The wedding of two wealthy, highly educated and well-connected British Africans, one of whom had strong links to the Queen, was of huge interest to the press and the public. Hundreds of people – some reports say thousands – turned out on the streets of Brighton on the day to cheer the couple. Months afterwards reports of the event were still appearing in the colonial press, which reproduced the reports from the British newspapers. Two days after the wedding the Leeds Mercury ran one under the headline, ‘Interesting Marriage in Brighton’ describing the bride and groom as ‘a lady and gentleman of colour, whose previous history gives to the ceremony a peculiar interest, chiefly to those who have been so long and so deeply interested in the African race and who have watched the progress of civilisation caused by the influence of Christianity on the negro’.

In the mind of the radical Newcastle journalist W. E. Adams, the Emancipation Proclamation cut ‘the ground from under the feet of those who profess to sympathise with the South on the grounds that slavery was likely to be sooner abolished by it, than by the North. It is now more evident than ever the pro-Southern sentiments are proslavery sentiments also.’

The first apostle of this new racism was the critic and essayist Thomas Carlyle, a hugely influential figure in the mid-nineteenth century whose writings helped set the tenor of his times, influencing novelists as much as scholars and philosophers. In 1849, less than a decade after the World Anti-Slavery Convention and eleven years after emancipation in the West Indies, Carlyle published an essay in Fraser’s Magazine entitled ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’.

was Carlyle himself who most clearly articulated this theory in 1867, writing that, ‘One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments – with a turn for Nigger Melodies, and the like – he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant.’

No words..

The society was openly and adamantly hostile towards abolitionism and anti-slavery and its members were mockingly condescending towards missionaries, deriding them for working among African peoples whom the anthropologists believed could not advance or be ‘civilized’. In one needlessly provocative gesture the society publicly taunted the Christian Union by displaying, in the front window of the premises opposite them, an articulated skeleton of a so-called ‘savage’.

What to modern eyes seems incongruous is that in the age of the scientific racism it was not the scientists but the novelists and poets who defended the massacres in Jamaica and the pseudo-scientific racism that was deployed to defend Eyre’s actions. On the Eyre Defence Committee were some of the most eminent of the Victorians: Charles Dickens, the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and Westward Ho!. Also supporting Eyre was John Ruskin, the critic and virtual arbiter of artistic taste in mid-Victorian Britain.

The same publication claimed that while ‘The revolution in Jamaica has come like a thunderclap upon the English people’, it had not surprised ‘those who have made even a partial study of the psychological character of the negro’. To the authors of the magazine the ‘Negro Revolt in Jamaica’ had perhaps finally woken the British from their long-held misconceptions about the nature of the African. ‘For the last half century’, the magazine asserted, ‘the negro has been an idol to the masses of the British public, and all classes of society have refused to listen to any depreciation of this chosen race . . . Nearly all classes in England have . . . agreed that the negro is a being very little (if at all) inferior, either mentally or morally, to the European. Men of science, even, have joined in the same chorus, and . . . come forward to defend this fashionable idol from any assaults his dignity may have sustained at the hands of the few who have declined to swell the strain of adulation.’ Finally, however, in the members of the Anthropological Society of London and their supporters there was ‘a small party in England, which within the last three years . . . has done something to stem this current of popular delusion’.51 During those three years since its foundation they had attracted a growing list of members, including Governor Eyre himself. As the Morant Bay scandal expanded, and the Royal Commission investigated the governor’s actions, Dr James Hunt and the society rushed to...

The sheer speed of the Scramble for Africa was breathtaking. In 1870, 10 per cent of Africa was under European control and 90 per cent of the continent was ruled by Africans. By 1900 that situation had been reversed. Ultimately only Ethiopia and Liberia resisted the European onslaught.

In 1815 she was studied by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, one of the earliest proponents of the theory of extinction in the natural world. In the middle of the century more Khoikhoi and Khoisan people were exhibited in Britain, usually in temporary exhibitions and unsavoury sideshows that described them as ‘Bushmen’. They were followed by a number of Zulu people.

Contrast with Sally/Sarah

In 1917, a writer in the popular magazine Tit-Bits commented that, ‘some years ago we used to have large bodies of natives sent from Africa on military service or in some travelling show, and it was the revelation of horror and disgust to the whole the manner in which English women would flock to see these men, whilst to watch them fawning over these black creatures and fondling them and embracing them, as I have seen dozens of times, was a scandal and a disgrace to English womanhood.’

It was a hectic, inventive and brilliantly stage-managed tour that turned three unknown African kings from minor southern tribes into national celebrities and unleashed a great torrent of press coverage in which Rhodes and the British South Africa Company were largely vilified. The three kings and their missionary allies ensured that every positive aspect of their characters and back stories was emphasized and publicized, and that the people they ruled over were portrayed as the innocent victims of Rhodes and his limitless ambition.

When the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured there were reportedly difficulties with a number of inn-keepers who had accepted their accommodation booking presuming that the ‘minstrels’ were white and were unhappy to discover otherwise.38 Although their music was far closer to what we would today categorize as spiritual or gospel music and they themselves were largely responsible for the rethinking of some of these categories, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were, at the time, regarded as performers of ‘Negro Minstrelsy’.

The other group able to cross the colour line to service in the regular army were men from Britain’s pre-war black population, many of whom had been born in Britain. The number of black people in Britain before the First World War was very small, probably just a few thousand, and a fraction of the size of the eighteenth-century black population that had been constantly refreshed by the ceaseless arrival of enslaved African servants.

Where did they go? Sirrra Leone?

The determination of the authorities to write the role of black sailors and soldiers out of the official memory and memorialization of the war was noticed by black people living in Britain as much as by those in the colonies. In London, the Society of Peoples of African Origin (SPAO), in its newspaper the African Telegraph, wrote ‘we can only conclude that it is the policy of His Majesty’s Ministers to ignore the services of the black subjects of the Empire.’

That month, tensions over relationships between black GIs and British women were exposed in the British press through the actions of an unlikely figure. Mrs May, the wife of the vicar in the village of Worle, near Weston-super-Mare, took it upon herself to draw up a six-point code designed to limit contact between white women and black soldiers. 1. If a local woman keeps a shop and a coloured soldier enters, she must serve him, but she must do it as quickly as possible and indicate as quickly that she does not desire him to come there again. 2. If she is in a cinema and notices a coloured soldier next to her, she moves to another seat immediately. 3. If she is walking on the pavement and a coloured soldier is coming towards her, she crosses to the other pavement. 4. If she is in a shop and a coloured soldier enters, she leaves as soon as she has made her purchase or before that if she is in a queue. 5. White women, of course, must have no social relationship with coloured troops. 6. On no account must coloured troops be invited to the homes of white women. Mrs May then held a series of public meetings at which copies of her new code were distributed, and she addressed the ladies of Worle, alerting them to their new responsibilities. The result was a scandal in the national press as the women of Worle turned, not against the black GIs, but against Mrs May.

In the majority of racist incidents in which black service personnel were assaulted or insulted, the perpetrators were white American GIs. Such incidents began to occur within weeks of the Americans’ arrival. In August 1942, a West Indian musician playing in a band during a dance in an English village hall attracted no hostility from a group of white Southern American soldiers so long as he remained on stage – white Americans being accustomed to being entertained by black musicians. However, as a newspaper report revealed, the moment he ‘took to the floor with the wife of one of his [white] colleagues in the band, one of the southern American boys probably went across the room and struck him.’

In early 1947 the Colonial Office dispatched an official to the West Indies to dispel rumours that there were thousands of job vacancies in Britain.3 One glaring problem with this strategy was that the newsagents of the islands stocked copies of British newspapers like the South London Daily Press, and West Indians were able to see for themselves the pages of classified advertisements for positions in British firms. Incredulous local governors and journalists were informed that these were not real openings but ‘paper vacancies’. That June, an official from the Ministry of Labour rightly warned that ‘It may become extremely embarrassing if at a time of labour shortage there should be nothing but discouragement for British subjects from the West Indies while we go to great trouble to get foreign workers.’4 Yet the Ministry of Labour remained stridently opposed to recruitment in the West Indies.

When the violence began in 1948, the hostels in which black sailors lived were once again targeted. When, on the second day of the disturbances, a mob two thousand strong attacked one hostel, the police responded exactly as they had done thirty years earlier during the disturbances in Great George Square that led to the death of Charles Wootton: they raided the hostel and arrested the black men trapped inside. What followed in Liverpool was intergenerational distrust of the police by the black community that lingered on into the 1980s.

23 A year later Harold Macmillan reported in his diary, with some incredulity, that Churchill thought ‘Keep Britain White’ might make an appropriate slogan with which to fight the upcoming election.24 In the aftermath of the Second World War such appeals to racial sentiment were widely regarded as unacceptable.

In order to change the public mood and prepare the British people for new legislation that would, in effect, strip non-white immigrants of their rights of entry and settlement, successive British governments set about gathering information that was intended to prove that the black settlers represented a social problem. Five internal investigative studies were launched in the 1950s, by both Labour and Conservative politicians, all of which set out to delineate and define the problems caused to the country by the presence of black migrants and demonstrate the negative effects the host population might face if black people continued to arrive in significant numbers. No comparable investigations were established to discover if the arrival of European Voluntary Workers from the Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe might pose similar threats to the social fabric of the nation.

Speaking some years later, Sir David Hunt, Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, paraphrased the dilemma. ‘The minute we said we’ve got to keep these black chaps out, the whole Commonwealth lark would have blown up.’

The trajectory of racism in Britain in the post-war years is therefore difficult to ascertain. Sheila Patterson, the author of the sociological study Dark Strangers, found that while many white people in Brixton had fixed and negative views of their black neighbours, these prejudiced opinions were not universal. The common view, which is reflected in the memories of some West Indian migrants from the era, was that the country was split three ways. In his book The Colour Problem Anthony Richmond argued that one-third of the population were ‘Extremely prejudiced people’ who ‘strongly resist the idea of having any degree of contact or communication with coloured people. They object vehemently to mixed marriages, but are almost as strongly opposed to having coloured people in their homes, or to working with them in a factory or office. In fact they are generally of the opinion that coloured people should not be allowed in Britain at all.’33 Jamaican-born Sam King, who served in Britain with the RAF during the Second World War, came back on the Empire Windrush and, in 1983, became the first black mayor of the London borough of Southwark, agreed. He defined Anthony Richmond’s ‘Extremely prejudiced’ proportion of the population as the ‘third of people in Britain [who] still had imperialist ideas’ and felt that ‘People from the colonies should be planting bananas and chocolate and whatever it is.’ The middle third King regarded as being mildly hostile to black migration and the fi...

Anthony Richmond noted that ‘One remarkable fact which emerges from almost all studies of prejudice in Britain is that most people think others more prejudiced than themselves. In so far as their behaviour is largely determined by what they believe to be the expectations of others, discriminatory practices consequent upon prejudices are nearly always attributed to a need for deference to the views of others.’35 Richmond believed that ‘a judicious educational campaign will have little influence on the minority who are severely prejudiced, but could make considerable headway with others. At the present time landladies refuse accommodation because of what their husbands or the neighbours might think; employers refuse accommodation to coloured workers because of what their white employees might say and do; hotel and restaurant managers worry what their clients will think if they admit Negroes; and people make derogatory remarks about coloured people because it seems the thing to do’.36

One writer in the Contemporary Review argued that the underlying cause of the riots had been the presence of black immigrants. 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.

The riots of the early 1980s were profoundly different from the disturbances of 1919, 1948 and 1958, all of which were at various times described as ‘race riots’ but were mostly outbursts of violence in which white gangs targeted black people and communities. This was not the case in the 1980s. These riots have been called ‘uprisings’. They were fought by young black people in response to years of systematic persecution and prejudice. They were destructive and damaging but they were understandable. While it is clear today that the riots marked the beginning of the end of one chapter, the nature of the new age that followed remains to be seen. 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. Yet this period was the era in which the name of Stephen Lawrence was added to the long list of black Britons who have been murdered by racists.

From the sixteenth century onwards, Britain exploded like a supernova, radiating its power and influence across the world. Black people were placed at the centre of that revolution. Our history is global, transnational, triangular, and much of it is still to be written.

Despite the bunting and the jubilant crowds it was clear that London in 1948 was a city in decline. By the 1980s she would have lost two million of her inhabitants. London did not return to her 1939 population peak of 8.6 million until the beginning of 2015, by which point 44 per cent of the Londoners would be officially classified as Black or Minority Ethnic, many of them immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. From among them came some of the dancers and musicians who performed in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Many of them were grandchildren of the immigrants of the Windrush generation, others were the children of later immigrants from Africa and Asia.

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. It revealed that since 2010 there had been a 49 per cent increase in the number of ethnic-minority sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who were long-term unemployed, while in the same period there had been a fall of 2 per cent in long-term unemployment among white people in the same age category.