Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”

In other words, they encouraged others to liberate themselves. Indeed, Africans were among the initiators of abolitionism – one of the biggest political movements in British history.

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The 1780s saw even more overt efforts at political organising by well-known African abolitionists Ottobah Cugoana and Olaudah Equiano. They acted jointly with several other Africans based in London, writing to prominent parliamentarians, abolitionists and the press from 1785 on.

In December 1787, Cugoana and Equiano styled themselves Sons of Africa, thereby creating one of the first named African political organisations in Britain’s history – and one of the first Pan-African organisations anywhere in the world. Their letters were signed by as many as 12 different Africans, sometimes specifically “for ourselves and brethren”, suggesting that the signatories represented a much wider community.

Through Equiano, the Sons of Africa were connected to other radical political organisations in Britain, including the United Irishmen and the London Corresponding Society.

The rise of community activism

This tradition continued into the first half of the 19th century, when leading figures included the radical British-Jamaicans Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson, and the Chartist William Cuffay, son of a formerly enslaved Kittitian.

Towards the end of that century, the Dominican Celestine Edwards emerged as a prominent anti-racist and anti-imperialist propagandist, writer and speaker, working closely with the African-American journalist and civil rights activist Ida B Wells during her influential tour of Britain.

It seems likely that informal organisations existed in places with large black communities in the 19th century. We know that ‘coloured’ seamen in Liverpool united in 1879 to complain against racist employment practices. But it was not until the 1890s that an organisation emerged to coordinate the activities of African and Caribbean activists.

The African Association was founded in London in 1897 by a black South African, Alice Kinloch, and a Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester Williams. The Association aimed to enable those of African descent to speak with one voice on all issues that concerned them – principally the impact of colonial rule and various forms of racism.

It is now best remembered for convening the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 which, Williams stated, “would be the first occasion upon which black men would assemble in England to speak for themselves and endeavour to influence public opinion in their favour”.

Heralding the start of modern Pan-Africanism, this moment highlights the fact that the Association was in contact with people in Africa, the Caribbean, the US and Europe. Key figures at the conference included John Archer – who later became the first black mayor of a London borough – composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Haitian journalist and lawyer Benito Sylvain, and American sociologist and activist WEB Du Bois.

The African Association aimed to enable those of African descent to speak with one voice on all issues that concerned them – principally the impact of colonial rule and various forms of racism

Many members of the African Association were students and, in the period from the turn of the century to the First World War, several other black student organisations were formed. In 1902, African students at the University of Edinburgh united to urge university authorities to protest against the racist employment policies of the colonial West African Medical Service.

Less localised examples include the Ethiopian Progressive Association, formed in 1904; the African Students’ Union, set up in 1916; and the Union of Students of African Descent, established during the First World War. These were generally concerned with Britain’s ‘colour bar’ – informal racial segregation in public facilities and services – as well as the most oppressive aspects of colonial rule overseas.

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Racism soon grew more overt, including large-scale attacks in nine towns and cities in 1919, in some cases resulting in deaths. One victim was Charles Wotten, a young seaman from Bermuda who was drowned in Liverpool docks in 1919. In response, many African, Caribbean and Yemeni seafarers united to defend themselves.

In Glasgow, for example, black seafarers fired shots, and armed self-defence was a feature of resistance in South Shields and Cardiff. Indeed, in all the towns and cities affected, black residents united and fought back using any means at their disposal.

Confronting institutional racism

These attacks exposed wider racism in various institutions. Government and trade unions had allowed discriminatory practices to persist in the shipping industry, and sections of the press had published articles on the “black peril” even during the First World War when men such as Wotten had served. And in 1919, police arrested many of those defending themselves from racist attacks.

Such actions were met with community protests from organisations such as the Liverpool Ethiopian Association and Cardiff Coloured Association, while seamen in South Shields threatened to strike. The African Progress Union, founded in 1918, demanded reparation for the “Negro race”. It also protested against the 1919 attacks, sending a delegation to the deputy lord mayor of Liverpool and arranging legal defence so those arrested could defend themselves.

Government and trade unions had allowed discriminatory practices to persist in the shipping industry, and sections of the press had published articles on the “black peril” even during the First World War when men such as Charles Wotten had served

Pan-African organisations and their publications flourished between the world wars. Black workers’ organisations also formed to combat racism in various industries, such as the Coloured Film Artists Association.

Wider collective action included mass protests in London against Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Many major British organisations also united in the Pan-African Federation to participate in two Subject Peoples Conferences in 1945, and to convene the more famous Pan-African Congress in Manchester that October.

Activism within the Windrush generation

In the postwar years, the need for collective action continued as the struggle to end colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean intensified and racist attacks in Britain persisted. People who arrived from the Caribbean turned to existing organisations, including the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress and the West Indian Students’ Union, but more direct self-defence was often required.

In July and August 1948, Liverpool’s black community was forced to defend itself from large-scale racist attacks fuelled in part by continued opposition from the government and the National Union of Seamen to the employment of African and Caribbean seamen. The need for this resistance prompted the formation of such organisations as the Colonial Defence Committee and the Colonial People’s Defence Association. As in earlier episodes, the police arrested many of those trying to defend themselves.

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Residents of Causeway Green, Birmingham faced racist attacks in 1949; in the wake of this violence, the influential Afro-Caribbean Organisation was formed in 1952. And in 1958, major racist onslaughts in Nottingham and Notting Hill faced united black resistance on the streets, including from well-organised coalitions.

By that time, a hostile environment had been created by the press and by some politicians who expressed the view that “coloured” immigration was a problem that needed to be controlled. The ‘colour bar’ was still widespread, and successive governments failed to introduce legislation to make racism illegal until the Race Relations Act 1965. Conditions were ripe for racist attacks that black people and anti-racists were left to deal with.

Edward Scobie, a BBC reporter of Caribbean origin, later wrote: “It would be no exaggeration to say that the attitude of the British police in the Notting Hill area during those days of riots and violence [in 1958] was unsympathetic and anti-black.”

And Frances Ezzreco, an activist of the Coloured People’s Progressive Association, recalled thinking: “If someone comes to hit me, I’m going to hit back. If I can’t hit back with my fists because they are bigger than me, I’ll hit them with anything I can lay my hands on – and that’s exactly what happened. We weren’t prepared for that kind of fighting, but when it came to it, we did it.”

Many of the key protests in this period were coordinated by the Committee of African Organisations (CAO). This coalition was the main signatory to a letter condemning racism sent to the prime minister, and it established the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain.

When the government introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, including stringent restrictions on immigration from Commonwealth nations – in other words, mostly non-white people – the CAO played a leading role in protests organised by another coalition, the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference.

Anti-racism in the 20th century and beyond

Through the mid-1960s, black protesters continued to act, launching the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 and the Campaign Against Racist Discrimination, inspired by the 1964 visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr. Radical politics, particularly the Black Power movement, prompted the birth of a range of activist coalitions.

These were among the bodies campaigning against oppression overseas: in 1969, for example, a protest against apartheid in South Africa was held in Manchester Cathedral. It was also in this period that the word ‘black’ was first used in a political context to describe those of African and Caribbean heritage, although for a time it was sometimes also used to describe those of south Asian origin.

Racism in Britain has a long history, closely connected with colonial conquest and enslavement – but so, too, does anti-racism, which has generally been the attitude of the majority. And the collective organising of those of African and Caribbean heritage has played a key role in that tradition – as it still does today.

This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine