Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(6)
Just five days later, on 11 June, the South Wales Echo reported: ‘a brake [vehicle] containing a number of coloured men and white women was going along East Canal Wharf. It attracted a crowd.’9 Cardiff, another port city, had been whipped up in anti-black sentiment. On seeing these black men and white women together, a frenzied mob of white people began throwing rocks at the vehicle. It’s not clear if anyone in the vehicle was injured. Days later, in violent protest at the audacity of interracial relationships, another angry crowd of white people set upon a lone white woman, who was known to have married an African man. They stripped her naked.
In the port city of Liverpool, similar race hatred was gaining ground. Post-war employment was scarce, and over a hundred black factory workers suddenly and swiftly lost their jobs after white workers refused to work with them. On 4 June 1919, a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette. Numerous fights followed, with the police ransacking homes where they knew black people lived. The frenzy resulted in one of the most horrific race hate crimes in British history. Twenty-four-year-old black seaman Charles Wootton was accosted by an enraged white crowd and thrown into the King’s Dock. As he swam, desperately trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted with bricks until he sank under the surface. Some time later, his lifeless body was dragged out of the dock. It was a public lynching. The days after Charles Wootton’s murder saw white mob rule dominating Liverpool’s streets as they attacked any black person they saw.10
These acts of vicious race hatred did not go unseen by the British government. Concerned by the levels of unrest across the country, the state responded in the only way it knew how – a repatriation drive. As a result, six hundred black people were sent ‘back to where they came from’ by September 1919.11
Despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise, Britain is far from a monoculture. Outward-facing when it suited best, history shows us that this country had created a global empire it could draw labour from at ease. But it wasn’t ready for the repercussions and responsibilities that came with its colonising of countries and cultures. It was black and brown people who suffered the consequences.
But some of those people fought back. Born in 1882 in Kingston, Jamaica, Dr Harold Moody was not one of the young Caribbeans who fought for Britain in the First World War. Instead, he arrived in Bristol in 1904, aged twenty-two, with a focus on advancing his education. He had his heart set on becoming a doctor, and had spent time working at his father’s successful pharmacy business in Kingston to save up the funds for his studies. With Jamaica still under British rule, his move to England wasn’t a surprise; among Jamaicans, Britain was seen as the ‘Mother Country’.
Upon his arrival, he boarded an express train to London Paddington and took himself to a hostel – the Young Men’s Christian Association, now known as the YMCA – until he found somewhere more permanent to live. It was during these first days on British soil that he learned the mother country wasn’t going to be as hospitable as he’d been led to believe. He struggled to rent, and was turned away from a number of potential lodgings before managing to find a place in Canonbury, north London.
Once settled, Harold began medical training. He graduated in 1912 and set about looking for a job. He applied for a position at King’s College Hospital, but his potential employers did not want to hire a black man.12 He tried again, applying for a position in south London, with the Camberwell Board of Guardians. The board was part of Camberwell’s Poor Law Parish, a local government organisation that oversaw the well-being of the area’s most elderly and vulnerable residents with an infirmary, as well as managing children’s homes and workhouses. He was turned away from this job too, but not before being told ‘the poor people would not have a nigger attend to them’.13 Determined to serve the community, Harold responded to these knock-backs by setting up his own private practice.
A year after qualifying, Dr Moody’s practice opened at 111 King’s Road in Peckham, south-east London. Although he’d faced overt acts of racist discrimination, it was his Christianity rather than his politics that drew Dr Moody to his activism. For him, racism was a religious issue. He was active in the wider Christian community. His respectable, middle-class job positioned him as a beacon for black people in 1920s and 1930s Britain. He advocated on their behalf, quickly becoming known as a man who would help if you were in need. That popularity and momentum led Dr Harold Moody to form the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931.
The League was both a Christian mission and a campaigning organisation. Its objectives, published in its quarterly journal The Keys, were:
?To promote and protect the social, educational, economic and political interests of its members
?To interest members in the welfare of coloured peoples in all parts of the world
?To improve relations between the races
?To cooperate and affiliate with organisations sympathetic to coloured people14
First published in 1933, The Keys served as the written arm of the League, campaigning against racism in employment, housing and wider society. In 1937, The Keys published a sternly worded exchange with the Manchester Hospital about the barring of black nurses’ employment. The letter questioned a quote from the hospital’s Matron L. G. Duff Grant, who had written, quite openly, ‘we have never taken coloured nurses for training here. The question was once raised at Nursing Committee, and there was a definite rule that no one of negroid extraction can be considered.’ Dr Moody, then President of the League, wrote to the hospital’s board, only to find that no such rule was in place. ‘There is’, read the reply from N. Cobboth, chair of the board, ‘no rule against the admission of coloured women for training as nurses at the Manchester Royal Infirmary and the Board wish it to be understood that each individual application will be considered on its merits.’15