Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(8)
By 1958, Nottingham’s black population numbered 2,500. But a decade of legislation explicitly welcoming Commonwealth citizens to Britain had not changed attitudes on the ground. Quotes from a local newspaper reported a colour bar in Nottingham’s pubs, with black men expected to stand aside until white people had been served. White resentment towards the city’s black residents was rife, and black resentment at white resentment was simmering. On 23 August 1958, an altercation in a pub between a white woman and a black man spiralled out of control. Reports on what sparked the following events are sketchy. What we do know is this: later that day, a thousand people had crowded into St Ann’s Well Road ready to riot. Razors, knives and bottles were used as weapons, and eight people were hospitalised.
What happened in Nottingham was also occurring in other parts of the country. On 20 August in Notting Hill, west London, a group of teddy boys – young rock-and-roll-loving white men who wore creeper shoes and suits – set upon the streets with the sole objective of attacking black people. They called themselves the ‘nigger hunters’. That night, their violent spree put five black men in hospital.23
At the time, Notting Hill was a poor and overcrowded area of London, with desperation for housing exploited by the notorious slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman’s reputation was so poor that his name became a synonym for bad treatment of tenants. Chambers 21st Century Dictionary defines Rachmanism today as ‘exploitation or extortion by a landlord of tenants living in slum conditions’.24 It was black people who fell prey to Rachman’s small dilapidated properties and extortionate rents. They had very little choice. Oral histories from those who lived through these times report ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs in the windows of other, more respectable properties.25 This only exacerbated poor race relations in the capital.
Nine days after the nigger-hunting spree from Notting Hill’s teddy boys, and a mixed-race married couple – a black man and white Swedish woman – were arguing outside Latimer Road tube station. It was an August bank holiday. With many off work, the argument drew a crowd of white men, who jumped in to defend the woman, perhaps believing that she was under attack. Spotting the onslaught, some black men got involved to support her husband. They began fighting each other.
Later, interviews with white rioters suggest that there was a rumour going around that a black man had raped a white woman.26 This scuffle outside a train station quickly escalated into two hundred white people roaming the streets chanting racist abuse. As the fighting intensified, some white rioters berated the police for holding them back from attacking black people. The riots stretched on for three whole days. Swastikas were painted on to the doors of black families. Black people fought back with weapons and makeshift Molotov cocktails. Those black people who were stopped on the street by the police during the violence stressed their need to defend themselves. No fatalities were recorded, but over a hundred people – the majority of them white – were arrested.
In 2002, prematurely released government files revealed that police detectives had successfully convinced then Home Secretary Rab Butler that the Notting Hill riots weren’t about race, but instead were simply the work of hooligans. ‘Whereas there certainly was some ill feeling between white and coloured residents in this area,’ wrote Detective Sergeant M. Walters, ‘it is abundantly clear much of the trouble was caused by ruffians, both coloured and white, who seized on this opportunity to indulge in hooliganism.’ No mention was made of the nigger-hunting teddy boys.27
After Nottingham and Notting Hill, race relations in Britain were rapidly deteriorating. It was becoming clear to post-Windrush black people in Britain that they would not be allowed to live quietly, to work, pay tax and assimilate. That instead they would be punished for their very existence in Britain. Black and brown labour had proved integral to Britain’s success in both world wars, but black people themselves would face extreme rejection in the decades that followed.
Throughout the 1950s, the government was reluctant to recognise that the country had a problem with racism. But there was some movement. In 1960, backbench Labour MP Archibald Fenner Brockway repeatedly tried to bring forward a Race Discrimination Bill with the aim of outlawing ‘discrimination to the detriment of any person on the grounds of colour, race and religion in the United Kingdom’.28 Every single one of the nine times he tabled the Bill, it was defeated.29 On the other end of the spectrum, in 1959, Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, saw fit to return to parliamentary politics after stepping down in 1930. He stood in a constituency near Notting Hill and advocated the repatriation of immigrants, losing with an 8.1 per cent share of the vote.
It wasn’t until less than a decade after both the Nottingham and Notting Hill race riots that the state attempted to pose a solution to Britain’s racism problem. Coming into effect on 31 May 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act drastically restricted immigration rights to Britain’s Commonwealth citizens. Even the wording was different. The 1948 British Nationality Act used the words ‘citizens’ to describe those from Commonwealth countries; in 1962 they were described as ‘immigrants’, adding a new layer of alien to people who had enjoyed the right to reside just fourteen years earlier. With a new emphasis on skilled workers, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act stated that those wishing to move to Britain now needed a work permit to settle in the country.30 The logic behind this still prevails today.