Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(10)

The day before Martin Luther King, Jr told an audience of 250,000 that he had a dream, a meeting of five hundred bus employees met and agreed to discontinue Bristol Omnibus Company’s unofficial colour bar. The day after, general manager Ian Patey committed to ending it for good. Speaking at a press conference, he announced ‘the only criterion will be the person’s suitability for the job’. But it is important to note that, to date, Bristol Omnibus, now merged with other companies and eventually renamed First Somerset & Avon, has never apologised for its actions. Neither has the Bristol branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, since merged with Unite the Union.

I first learnt of the Bristol bus boycott as a graduate in 2013, when I was working at the race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust. A small team of us travelled to Bristol to launch a campaign. As well as running a pop-up ‘come and talk about racism’ shop, we also held evening events around the city centre. One of those events was with Paul Stephenson. By then, he was in his late seventies. Upstairs in the event space of Foyles bookshop, Paul, his voice withered by age and activism and righteous rage, commanded the attention of the whole room. I felt like I was listening to history.

Around the same time as Bristolians were organising themselves against a colour bar, white nationalist activity in Britain was gaining ground. The National Front, a whites only, anti-immigration and far-right political party, was stoking anger and resentment among British people. Formed in 1967, the National Front has close links to white supremacist movements globally. At the height of their growth in the 1970s, party members adorned themselves with Union Jacks and St George’s flags, as though they felt their politics represented the epitome of Britishness. Just over a decade after its formation, the National Front stood over three hundred people in the 1979 general election, and won almost 200,000 votes. Despite the growing popularity of white nationalist politics in Britain during the 1970s, it was black and Asian people who were considered volatile members of society. The National Front’s membership eventually dwindled by the 1980s, but the sentiment of the party found its home in other forms of activism.

In the 1970s, police officers often wielded a section of the then archaic 1824 Vagrancy Act. The section in question gave the police the power to stop, search and arrest anyone they suspected might commit a crime. This Vagrancy Act came to be known as ‘sus laws’ (taken from wording of the Act that described a ‘suspected person’). Because the police didn’t keep statistics on those they were stopping under the Act, it’s difficult to know just how many people were bothered by the police for the crime of not looking respectable.37 Anecdotally, anti-racism campaigners insisted that black people were being unfairly targeted by sus laws. The notion of who does and who doesn’t look suspicious – particularly in a British political climate that just ten years earlier was denying black people employment and housing – was undoubtedly racialised.

Sus laws ensured a fraught relationship between black people and the police. This was intensified by public panic about mugging and muggers. In 1972, a violent and fatal street robbery in Handsworth, Birmingham led to near constant press coverage of street robberies for the following year. ‘Mugging’ was an American term, imported from police statements and press coverage in black-concentrated cities. The fear of mugging was imported, too.

Street robberies have always existed in Britain. But the importation of the word mugging brought with it a coded implication that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly black, and that mugging was an exclusively black crime. Newspapers reported that it was a new trend. The fear of mugging was about so much more than the fear of crime and violence; it was about the anxieties of those who had been scared of black liberation struggles in the 1960s, and their intense fears around race, reparations and revenge.

There was at least one documented incident of police officers arresting black boys for the crime of looking like criminals. On 16 March 1972, at Oval train station in south London, a group of plain-clothes white police officers targeted and tackled four young black men – who also happened to be members of a radical black organisation – on public transport, later testifying in court that ‘it was clear they intended to pick the pockets of passengers’. But the only witnesses for the prosecution were the police themselves, and the accused young men had no stolen property on them.38 The Oval 4 were imprisoned for two years each, but were released a year early on appeal. Every single one of them maintained their innocence.

While the police were busy arresting black people for looking suspicious, the National Front were capitalising on national anti-black feeling. In 1975 they organised a march against black muggings, which they led through London’s East End. A year later, they found another white-power cause to support. Leamington Spa bus driver Robert Relf became a national news story in 1976 when he put up a sign outside of his house that read ‘For sale to an English family only’. A previous version of the sign was even more extreme: ‘To avoid animosity all round positively no coloureds’. The sign contravened the Race Relations Act, and he was asked to take it down. He refused and was imprisoned for contempt of court. Relf promptly went on hunger strike. The tabloid press used his imprisonment as ammunition to argue against what they called ‘political correctness’. Meanwhile, for the National Front, his were the actions of a martyr. They launched a campaign in support of him, and organised ‘Free Relf’ protests.