Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(7)
Dr Moody’s work with the League of Coloured Peoples was quite possibly Britain’s first anti-racism campaign in the twentieth century, and it would have far-reaching implications for Britain’s race relations in the future.
As Dr Harold Moody was doing pioneering work for black people while he was based in London, an aspect of his personal life – his relationship with a white woman and their mixed-race children16 – was seen as a point of great contention in British society at that time. Mixed-race relationships were controversial in the early twentieth century, and in the north-west of England these relationships were considered disturbing enough to justify academic research. In the late 1920s, the University of Liverpool was solidifying its social sciences department, headed up by anthropologist Rachel M. Fleming. Her research was on what she called ‘hybrid children’ – those with black fathers and white mothers.17 With Liverpool being a port city, there were plenty of black seamen who had taken up permanent residence. Academics estimate that Liverpool’s black population was five thousand at the time. Against the backdrop of race-fuelled riots and the lynching of Charles Wootton, mixed-race relationships did exist, but were seen by many as a social problem that needed to be stamped out.
It was in this context that Rachel Fleming won the support of Liverpool’s authority figures to research Liverpool’s ‘wretched’ – read: mixed-race – children. She founded the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children in 1927. Muriel Fletcher, a University of Liverpool graduate working as a probation officer, was tasked with writing the association’s first report. Her work meant that through welfare services she had contact with some of the poorest families in the city, and it was through this skewed lens with some of Liverpool’s poorest mixed-race families that she conducted her research.
The Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports was published in June 1930. It concluded, with scant evidence, that venereal diseases were twice as likely to be found in black seamen than white seamen, and that mixed-race – or to use the language of the report, ‘half-caste’ – children were more likely to be sickly because of this. ‘The children seemed to have frequent colds, many were also rickety, and several cases were reported in which there was a bad family history for tuberculosis,’ wrote Ms Fletcher. Perhaps reflecting popular attitudes at the time, Fletcher deemed mixed-race girls and women as tainted by their race, writing ‘only two cases have been found in Liverpool of half-caste girls who have married white men, and in one of these cases the girl’s family forced the marriage on the man.’18 In her report, Muriel Fletcher organised the white women who chose to have relationships with black men into four categories: the mentally weak, the prostitutes, the young and reckless, and those who felt forced into marriage because of illegitimate children.
Children who were researched in the study had their eyes examined and their noses measured, with their facial features categorised as either ‘Negroid’ or ‘English’. Commenting on the fact that mixed-race young adults struggled to find work, Fletcher wrote: ‘mothers of a better type regretted the fact that they had brought these children into the world, handicapped by their colour.’ Echoing the hugely popular eugenics movement at the time, it seems that Muriel Fletcher thought that race mixing – or, as eugenicists called it, miscegenation – was such an abomination that the children of mixed-race relationships had ‘little future’.
Popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, the British eugenics movement believed that social class was determined by biological factors such as intelligence, health and the vague criteria of ‘moral values’. Eugenicists argued that those with desirable qualities should be encouraged to reproduce, while those without should be discouraged. The racism was inherent here: whiteness was to be aspired to, whereas any hint of black heritage was considered a kind of contamination, leading to a hard line against mixed-race relationships and mixed-race people. Despite support from influential names like John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw, there was no legislation passed in Britain to cement eugenics into the workings of the state (for example, forced sterilisation), and a 1931 Private Members Bill advocating this was outvoted in Parliament.
On publication, Muriel Fletcher’s Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports had a national impact, with a representative of the Anti-Slavery Society calling it an ‘extraordinarily able document’ containing ‘the most impressive and authoritative detail’. In a recent study on the report, academic Mark Christian argued that it had a long-lasting negative effect on the black people of Liverpool, and cemented the use of the term ‘half-caste’.19
The aftermath of yet another world war brought with it fresh labour demands, and Britain once again encouraged immigration. When the SS Empire Windrush sailed from the Caribbean to England, it carried 490 Caribbean men and two Caribbean women, all of whom were prepared to muck in with the job of restoring a post-war Britain.20 The Windrush docked at Tilbury in Thurrock, Essex on 22 June 1948. That same year, the government introduced the British Nationality Act – a law that effectively gave Commonwealth citizens the same rights to reside as British subjects.
The country’s black population continued to rise. Between 1951 and 1961, the Caribbean-born British population grew from 15,000 to 172,000,21 with the majority of those people from Jamaica (an increase in population from 6,000 to 100,00022).