"A VISION OF BLACK ENGLISHNESS":
BLACK INTELLECTUALS IN LONDON, 1910–1940 1
Deborah J. Rossum
What I myself wanted out of life was no help.... The
ordinary man did not ask himself the questions I was always asking. But I had not always
asked myself these questions.... [If] I had been French or German or African I would have
thought differently. But I was British, I knew best the British way of life, not merely in
historical facts but in the instinctive responses.... I had acquired them in childhood....2
The most common historical narratives relating the
presence of Black communities in Britain begin, still, with the post–World War II
arrival of the SS Empire Windrush. Less is known about the existence since
Elizabethan times of Black settlements in Britain, communities whose members were
servants, sailors, abolitionists, and, later, barristers, journalists, cricketeers, and
composers of music. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those who
traveled to Britain from the Black Diaspora did so for disparate reasons and augmented
these established communities for varying lengths of time. Their sojourns were as
businesspeople and professionals, as petitioners to the Empire’s highest courts and,
in the greatest numbers, as laborers and students. For some, the migration to Britain was
mandated largely by economic exigencies and heightened by a near-universal desire for self
(and family) betterment. For others, the "journey"3
was more a pilgrimage, a lure, which had at its end the metropole—the
"Empire’s centre of gravity."4 As
ascribed by Cedric Robinson, England was the natural setting for this British, if Black,
middle class, a "site so persistently and idyllically envisioned in the literary and
historical texts employed in the [colonial schools, and] ... where students could extend
their intellectual and professional attainments and anticipate coming into their rightful
heritage."5 In boarding a Plymouth-bound ship
to depart Trinidad in 1932, C.L.R. James recounts his thoughts and the incumbent emotions
when he was poised at last to enter the arena where he believed he would play the role for
which he had prepared himself: "The British intellectual was going to Britain."6
It is this particular stratum of
individuals—Black, middle-class intellectuals who traveled to and resided in London
during the first half of this century—that is the focus of this essay. Specifically,
we examine briefly the formation of Black British identities as they related to the
prevailing notions regarding "Englishness" and the body politic, including an
assessment of how this relationship intersected the principal canons of western
liberalism. This is an important ideological battleground, and one, I believe, on which
these Black intellectuals were obliged to engage. How did this linkage vary over time and
accommodate the ever-shifting and continually negotiated spaces that configured the
British "colour line"?
BLACK BRITAIN: AN OVERVIEW
There has been a Black community in Britain for over
five hundred years. The maritime explorations of West Africa from the fifteenth century
onwards gradually brought that continent and its people to the active attention of the
Europeans. By the 1500s, a Black presence in Britain was perceived as inevitably
"troublesome"—a contaminant within the body politic—and was
defined increasingly as a social "problem" to be solved by repatriation. In
1596, in a letter to the Lord Mayor of London, Queen Elizabeth I protested that there were
of late "divers Blackamoores brought into these realms, of which kind there are
already here to manie...."7 A 1601 royal
proclamation pronounced that the Queen was
highly disconcerted to understand the great numbers
of Negroes and Blackamoores which are carried into [the] realm ... the most of them
[being] ... infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel: hath given special
commandment that the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged
out of this Her Majesty’s realms.8
Despite this royal edict, the Black community
increased. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was fashionable for titled
and propertied English families to have Black slaves as part of their household staff.9 More than any proclivity on the part of the British
aristocracy, however, the increased Black population in Britain during this time was a
result of increased white settlement of the West Indies and the explosive expansion of the
slave trade. The "triangular trade" involved the capture of greater numbers of
Africans and their shipment from their homelands to the New World. Trading ships returning
to England carried tropical fruits and, not infrequently, a "coffle of slaves,"
as did the ships bearing planters, sailors, and military and government officials
returning to England for their retirement. By 1770, the Black population in London was
estimated to be between 14,000 and 20,000; for Britain as a whole, it was estimated at
between 40,000 and 50,000.10
The years between 1770 and 1939 were marked by three
major periods of Black migration to Britain. In 1783, the population increased notably
with the influx of loyalists, Blacks who fought on the British side during the American
Revolutionary War and, consequently, had been awarded their freedom. Britain’s Black
population increased again in the 1870s when sailors from West Africa and the East and
West Indies—attracted by the prospect of casual labor or dumped from tramp
steamers—augmented the small but established community in Cardiff, which was
beginning to prosper as a coal port along with Newport and Barry. By the early 1900s,
population estimates placed the number of Blacks in Great Britain at between 20,000 and
25,000.11 Black communities in Britain grew and
expanded substantially during the First World War, owing to both increased migration and
the British recruitment practice of importing large numbers of laborers—as well as
service personnel—from its colonies. Despite the influx of Blacks during the First
World War, overall the Black population in Britain declined over the course of the
mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. High unemployment and migration back to the
colonies followed the shutdown of the war industries and the demobilization of the armed
services, but the number of Blacks newly immigrating to Britain—where economic
prospects were thought to be better—following the First World War, particularly from
the West Indies, was consistently larger than the number of those who returned to the
colonies.
Despite the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and
the outlawing of slavery itself in the British colonies in 1833, the legal status of
Blacks in Britain remained problematic. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, Black slaves were employed chiefly as domestic servants who worked alongside
white, paid employees. After 1807, these individuals augmented the numbers of
Britain’s white laboring classes. But for both former slaves and for freeborn Blacks,
dominion over their freedom was perceived as tenuous and at risk as long as slavery in the
colonies endured. The abolitionist movement founded in the 1760s provided an
"official" forum for questioning, if not initially challenging, the morality and
the lawfulness of slavery. In the decades to follow, pressure from both abolitionists and
proponents of slavery provoked a series of legal confrontations that sought, in part, to
define the concept of "freedom."12 What
was the status of an enslaved individual brought into a society built on a supposed
heritage of liberty? What questions did this issue pose for society? These issues
critically informed the subsequent debates relating "race to society, debates that
would propel generations of Britons of all colors."13
These debates were inflamed during the race riots
that followed the end of World War I. During 1919 and 1920, "disturbances"
visited nearly every port town where a Black community resided, prompting government calls
for deportation. Discharged white soldiers who were resentful of and bitter over the
scarcity of employment directed their frustrations and hostilities against the Black
workers. Accusations of "stealing" whites’ jobs were accompanied by charges
of "stealing" whites’ women, renewing historically long-lived fears of
miscegenation.14 Despite the accusations of
demobilized soldiers, most members of the Black workforce lost their positions to the
returning white veterans. Indeed, the circumstances were so dire in many instances that
some individuals and families felt they had no choice other than to leave Britain. Most of
the newer immigrants, however—if questioned—considered themselves British
subjects and chose, when possible, to remain in Britain.
Economic depression and the accompanying
unemployment were persistent and serious problems in the interwar period and were most
acutely felt by Britain’s working classes. Discriminatory practices directed against
Black workers by both white employers and unions critically aggravated the levels of
poverty and distress existing within poorer Black communities. At the same time, the
increasingly visible Black professional and student populations were met by a societal
color bar whose inherent racist and discriminatory practices affected their lives in the
most fundamental ways. Additionally, looming on the international stage were the specters
of apartheid and Jim Crow. It was, however, the more privileged circumstance of the
professional class and the more favored position of the student intellectual that
"frequently lay bare the fundamental contradictions within imperial rule."15 For the Black intelligentsia "the question of
color and racial prejudice became an increasingly important one both politically and
ethically."16 In the immediate aftermath of
World War I, British society faced a "sizable domestic race problem" for the
first time; a circumstance, it is argued, that formed the embryonic stages of the modern
concept of "race relations."17 Eric
Walrond offered the following reproachment in a 1938 issue of the Marcus Garvey
publication The Black Man:
[I]t is indeed a paradox that London, the capital of
the largest Negro Empire in the world—the cradle of English liberty, justice and
fair-play—the city to which Frederick Douglas fled as a fugitive from
slavery—should be so extremely inexpert in the matter of interracial relations....18
By most definitions, the Black community in Britain
was a marginal one. As noted historically, the socioeconomic status of Blacks in Britain
was one in which they were identified as members of the working classes. There was during
this same period, however, a small community of largely middle-class men and women from
which a cadre of intellectual elites was drawn. The composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and
Battersea city mayor John Richard Archer were native-born Blacks; journalist George
Padmore and barrister and West African Students’ Union [WASU] co-founder Lapido
Solanke were semipermanent residents. In addition to the pursuit of their own livelihoods,
it was on behalf of the Black working classes that many of the philanthropic efforts of
this intellectually aggressive, politically conscious Black middle-class intelligentsia
were directed during this period. The nature of this interclass relationship is
important and will be a further focus of this paper. For now, in short, the interwar years
were chronicled by this Black populace as dynamic, exhilarating, harsh, and volatile; and
it is against this backdrop that the following discussion will play.
"VISIONS OF ENGLISHNESS"
My father was an important member of the community
in church and state. We were British and proud of it.... All education from kindergarten
to University in Freetown was English. So was history, inc ‘1066 & all that’
school children learnt. The whole Empire pledged their troth annually by sitting to the
same Senior School Leaving Certificate of Cambridge, with the option of London
Matriculation & Oxford being available. We know the geography of Britain & Europe
better than that of our own country....19
It is a widely held opinion that the concept of Englishness
was recast during the years 1880-1920, a period of great national crisis when not the
least of the nation’s anxieties lay in the uncertainties of the destiny it had
manifested for itself vis-à-vis its imperial aspirations. The responsibility for defining
Englishness, subsequently, was appropriated by certain narrowly drawn constituencies and
their institutions—for example, the middling professional classes who were the chief
architects of the public school system and whose identities, in turn, were forged and
influences consolidated in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
If prior to 1880 Englishness was construed primarily
within constitutional parameters, the post-1880 "traditions" relating to
identity were reinvented to emphasize a celebratory sense of moral and cultural
superiority, skin color,20 the English language,
and the popular ideals of freedom. Freedom, as it was represented by nineteenth-century
liberalism, was characterized as "an ideal force ... [located] deep within the
national character, and capable of universal dissemination as England’s special gift
to the world,"21 and, above all, to her
colonies. Englishness became linked inseparably to "otherness," and the former
became a "peculiarity" that was determined by relationship rather than by
classification. In his pivotal examination of the concepts of Orientalism, Edward Said
posits that during the last two decades of the nineteenth century the efficacy of the
dominant version of Englishness resided in its ability to represent both itself to
others and those others to themselves.22 Or, as is
argued, the potency of Englishness lay in its ability to recognize, to interpret,
and, I would maintain, to contrive.
It is important to note the binary as well as the
oppositional characteristics of Said’s illustration. At stake is the command of
privilege, especially its prerogative to construct and to license acts of representation
and their consequent dissemination and promotion via empire at home and abroad.23 In brief, the brokering of claims to authenticity and
authority are at issue here as well as the resultant perception of a sanctioned dominion
over the properties of inclusion and exclusion; that is, the naming and the
colonizing—both literally and figuratively—of the Other. Within this
dominion, consequently, lies the space where the meaning, place, and utility of the Other
are defined. In concluding his 1915 study Inequality of the Human Races, Arthur de
Gobineau writes:
[History] shows us that all civilizations derive
from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that society is great and
brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it....24
The concepts of Orientalism are by no means solely
applicable to the Black experience in Britain. In a mid-1970s study of the sociopolitical
relationship of the "Celtic fringe" to greater Britain, Michael Hechter defines
a framework of "internal colonialism" wherein the identity of the provincial and
Gaelic culture (the periphery) is ordered and maintained by that of the metropolitan and
English culture (the core).25 Philip Dodd and
Robert Colls, in an influential 1986 collection of essays, Englishness: Politics and
Popular Culture 1880-1920, revisit this association; they further contend that
certain Celtic influences are granted an essential, unique, and, I would offer,
complementary role as contributors to a larger, and perceived superior, English national
vision. Of special interest in their analysis is what they argue are the costs of the
satellite culture’s marginalization; that is, the positioning and placement of the
satellite culture as the subject of the core culture’s observations in a
relationship that has been called the imperial gaze. In much the same way, for the
mid-Victorian era the presence of a Black Britain—so-called "the Negro
Question"—was at the center of intense debates for not only what the white
English imagined it said about themselves but also, more specially, for what it told them
about their own supposed racial uniqueness and superiority.26
I want to turn now to a consideration of the
interstices of race, gender, and class variables in late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century Britain. Despite my specific focus on a Black, mainly middle-class
intelligentsia, the predominantly working-class status of Blacks within English society is
especially significant to the evolution of racialist ideologies. Barbara Fields posits
that race and gender—and I would add class—are interdependent and socially
constructed.27 In highly class-conscious Britain,
these characterizations constitute, as well, social hierarchies which, in turn, gave rise
to master narratives and discourses. These narrative discourses could be and were
crafted and deployed by one group with the intent of subordinating the other. Importantly,
the discourses of British racialism were predicated, in part, on preconceived attitudes
toward distinctions of class. A 1894 issue of The English Race, an ideological
journal published by the Royal Society of St. George, read:
There is some fear that the English stock is getting
deficient in that healthy and legitimate egotism which is necessary to
self-preservation.... Above all other racial elements in the British system, the English
needs to be distinguished and preserved....28
"Class" has occupied much of British
historiography for the past thirty years in ways that lie outside the scope of this essay.
For the purposes of my argument, it is important to note that, throughout the nineteenth
century, social advancement for the middle and laboring classes was widely held to be
possible through the vehicles of moral probity, thrift, and self-help. Higher up the
social scale, members of the professional classes increasingly augmented the registries of
gentility, and the impetus for acquiring a higher social ranking itself intensified. At
the same time, however, access to the avenues of social mobility began to decline.29 The search for status prompted increased levels of
self-awareness as well as more aggregate and differentiated models of class consciousness.
Upwardly mobile individuals and groups recast the measure of respect and prestige as much
by their exclusion of the "unsuited" as the acceptance of the
"qualified." The chasm between the poorest and richest segments of society
inevitably widened as new models of differentiation were adopted. One of these models,
that of biological selectivity, assumed ideological standing. It was a model that allowed
the urban gentry to barter their perceived common identities as members of the Anglo-Saxon
race for the privilege of conditional class membership beside the traditional, landed
aristocracy.30
Forty years after the pivotal parliamentary reforms
of 1832, a process of "segregation and differentiation" was in play which
resulted in the separation of the working classes into two static categories—the
respectable and the residuum. Given the predominantly working-class status of
Black Britain, the racial character of this population became defined by and associated
with purported social and criminal patterns of deviancy. As such—regardless of
community ties, class, and, to a lesser extent, gender—Blacks were depicted
increasingly as a commonly accepted threat to the nation’s social order. While
working-class and middle-class 31 Blacks had never
been collectively considered social equals by the majority white society, they were
considered in certain happenstances as capable of achieving "gentlemen[ly]"32 status. Ironically, the poor and the
"non-English" were those "Englishmen" whose rights were the
inspiration for Pax Britannia; but here they were cast as the residuum of society.
Working-class Blacks were a part of Britain’s casual labor force and, as such, were
considered part of society’s residue—a "dangerous and contaminating element
of society."
Gareth Stedman Jones characterizes this transitional
period as one wherein the working classes moved from a state of demoralization to
one of degeneration.33 He argues further
that in the first circumstance, the working classes were regarded as "impressionable
and biddable" objects of a generally benign middle-class gaze and held in a type of
"cultural stasis"—a site where the former await the effect upon them of
their betters’ "civilizing mission."34
This purported transformation took place as Britain’s industrial powerhouse was on
the downswing. During this period, the advocates of racial purity established a notable
public forum, and, likewise, found a natural audience in the self-conscious anxieties of
the middle classes. The efficacy of the "civilizing mission" upon the laboring
classes was challenged by some in the middle classes who hypothesized that this capability
had been overstated.35 Subsequently, an obvious
and reconstituted knowledge came to the fore, and a cultural narrative was reinvented.
The more strident racialism that marked the
late-Victorian era had been foreshadowed in the volatile and increasingly unstable dynamic
of the colonial experience. Imperialist aspirations were considered the medium for framing
questions of race. Britain’s imperial mission was imbedded in metropolitan,
industrializing English society: advances in science, art, and manufacturing were all
viewed as tools for "civilizing" the "savage" brown, black, and yellow
peoples of the world. Englishness was conceived as the ultimate measure of civilization
and an attribute whose superiority was dependent on the inferiority of its subject gaze.
However, over time, resistance to British imperial authority on the part of the colonials,
not surprisingly, was amplified considerably and became reflected in violent rebellions
such as the so-named Jamaica Insurrection of 1865 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. But civil
British society measured itself against the devastation visited by the institution of
slavery upon West Indian and African societies and, not unexpectedly, the former was
judged vastly superior.36
Black West Indians, like the casual poor, were
considered beneficiaries of the largely middle-class call to "civilize" the less
fortunate, both at home and abroad. The discernible poverty within the Black British
communities was seen as a form of racial incapacity, which was preordained by
quantitative, biological determinants. In short, historically, Black people were
considered as bound to a state of servility and, as a race, constituted a
significant exception to the liberties decreed by and enjoyed under English rule.
Racialism, similarly, became an accepted ideological medium by which questions of power
and privilege, sovereignty and citizenship, justice and might were tested and promoted.37 Racial theories were used "to legitimize
relationships of dominance and disability within the Empire." Likewise,
Britain’s achievement of military supremacy and administrative authority over
colonized peoples was fed back to the metropolis in the forms of stereotypes, mythologies,
and ideologies, which, in turn, were used to validate the presumed idolatry of the
Anglo-Saxon race.38 The signifying of race in this
manner suggests an assumption of authority—whether moral or otherwise—that
dictates the subordination of one group of people to another.
Informed both by colonialism and by social
Darwinism—particularly its presumptions about evolutional and racial
hierarchies—discourse relating to the Black working classes was affixed increasingly
to a nationalist dialogue that intimated class and was posited, most significantly, under
the rubric of "the Natural Order." The positioning of one race to another,
subsequently, was defined as a form of class interaction,39
where, hierarchically, Black people as members of a particular race could be and were
portrayed as symbols of British society’s feared decline. Alienness as equated
to inferiority became the language of racialist discourse and, as such, was promoted
specially in the popular customs and culture of the time.40
From the 1880s onward, this anti-alien bias, abetted
by an institutionalized racialist ideology and secured by protectionist legislation, was a
strategy employed repeatedly against Black, Asian, and the so-designated others. In
designating separate classifications for Blacks, whites attained the former’s
preemptive exclusion from the ranks of the paid working classes.41 This was especially the case in assessing the practices of the
British shipping industry. "British radical opinion," Paul Rich contends,
"...remained [well into the twentieth century] unreceptive to the notion of
permanently urbanized Black working-class communities as an inevitable concomitant of
British imperial expansion and development." George Brown, an investigator sent to
Cardiff in 1935 by the League of Coloured Peoples to investigate the specifics of the
"coloured seamen’s crisis," concluded in his report:
[This] hostile labour attitude towards coloured
seamen respects neither kith nor kin, creed or colour. For these coloured men have their
homes in this country. Their wives are products of the soil, their children are ENGLISH.
Many of them have given of their youth and labour to the industrial and military services
of this great nation ... these men are coloured, so are five out of every seven persons in
the British Empire! Without people of colour there would be neither Cardiff nor an
Empire....42
In his seminal 1940s study Negroes in Britain,
Kenneth Little argues that class variables dominated those of race in accounting for the
experiences of the Black British. The treatment of Blacks in England, he contends, was not
necessarily the same circumstance as the enslavement of Black people. "It was poverty
and the wrong connections, rather than the wrong color, which accounted for the
Negro’s lowly place in society and the prejudice shown against him [sic]."43 I have argued here, however, that when assessing the
wedding of liberal and imperial England, such claims become problematic. In examining the
historical accounting of Black experiences in Britain—comparatively or
otherwise—it is clear that a discriminatory, as well as an institutionalized, color
bar was advanced, employed, and maintained. In examining the collective experiences of
Black Britain, I am persuaded by the work of Hazel Carby, Barbara Fields, Henry Gates, and
Toni Morrison, among others, who argue that the category of race is constructed, in part,
as an ultimately reductive master narrative through which variables of class and
gender are reflected, positioned, and negotiated.
These interconnections, however, cannot be framed
simply in terms of racism or in terms of the contributory presence of racialist attitudes,
however pervasive the latter might seem. This conclusion denies the strategic role that
race represents as a metalanguage, a strategy contrived and predicated on the
desire to recognize—and by this manner, to exploit—difference as a
means of social subordination.44 Race and
racialism are regularly dealt with as constants— transhistorical phenomena—and
as variables so absolute that they defy historical analysis and which, subsequently,
cannot be argued persuasively within the disciplined boundaries of academia. I posit here
a divergent hypothesis, where, as a circumstance, English racialism is held as a
constituted, historical artifact that is produced as a means to a societal end. In this
way race—like racialism—is a commodity whose worth can be measured in terms of
agency. It is a concept with the capacity to transfigure, to act, and, in turn, to be
acted upon. In sum, race as a classification constitutes an ideology complete with a
vocabulary tooled for contrasting life experiences and, as such, is best understood not in
isolation but in conjunction with other ideological predictives. In short, although
Euro-ethnocentrism and racialism share meanings in common, the perceived shift in societal
attitudes was reflected primarily in the degree of antagonism directed toward and active
discrimination against Black settlement in Britain. This was a development that,
subsequently, was endowed by the political and legal canons of that nation, and one
reflected, as well, in the very sum and substance of that nation.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY BLACK INTELLECTUALS AND THE CRISIS OF
LIBERALISM
[The] meritocratic England [of our sensibilities]
... the one of Romance novels and Whig Histories ... fair play and deep moral regulation
... [had passed] and was now more a [de]lusion.45
Eric Walrond believed that England’s aura shone
with a particular intensity in the colonies:
Viewing the ‘Mother Country’ with an
adoring eye, the Negro in the British overseas colonies is obviously at the mercy of the
rainbow. He [sic] sees England through a romantic and illusive veil. What he so
affectionately imagines he sees does not always ‘square’ with the facts.... This
deception, common to the virgin gaze of African and West Indian alike, is partly a case of
‘distance lends enchantment,’ partly a by-product of the black man’s [sic]
extraordinary loyalty to the Crown.46
I began this essay with a brief discussion of
liberalism, which was regarded during the later decades of the nineteenth century as
nearly synonymous with Englishness as incorporated within the statutes of the polity. This
liberalism "established itself as a major element in the self-image of [the British]
people,"47 both domestically and
abroad—an image, as well, that need not be dependent on skin color but was shaped
through thought and deeds. In the liberal and gendered concept of a good society,
theoretically, there was a pride of place for every white male including, with discrete
omissions, the immigrants and visitors who "flocked to [that nation] for its
liberties, safety and prosperity."48 In the
early twentieth century, certain liberal concepts were on the wane, as Edwardian and,
later, Baldwinian conservatism found increasing favor on both the popular as well as the
institutional levels of English society, and the ideologies of social Darwinism and
eugenics still maintained a significant currency. This period coincided with the
heightened visibility as well as the increased numbers of more vocal and activist segments
of the Black communities, whose intelligentsia, after all, had been weaned on ideals of
brotherhood and a common humanity. Such an archetype, when set beside their shared
experiences with an increasingly vituperative and vigilant color bar, was disillusioning
at best. It is the example and nature of these fault lines within British society, their
culture and meanings, which will provide the focus for the remainder of this essay.
"FAULT LINES AND ENGLISHMEN"
We are all British subjects. To many of us the
pigment of our skins bars us from taking our rightful place at the table of Empire....
English reserve must be made to melt away, before the fervour of those who plead our
cause. We must show that we are ready for a place in the sun after a century of freedom.49
Ideologies gain agency from the embodiment of what
Paul Gilroy calls commonsense interpretations and, accordingly, provide a vocabulary for,
as well as a means of, deciphering new situations.50
Conflicts arise when perceptions and experiences change to a degree that they are no
longer mirrored in established ways of knowing. Barbara Fields has argued that an
established vocabulary "attaches itself, unnoticed, to new things ... [and results
in] a limitless capacity for usurping the lives of men and women."51 This model is especially helpful in examining Britain of the
1920s and 1930s—a country perceived as in crisis—and the growing radicalization
of larger segments of Black Britain. The "language of race"52 was appropriated by these Black intellectuals and used, in turn,
as a discursive tool to "signify a [positive and an empowering] cultural
identity."53 Certain developments within the
larger Black communities—increased levels of migration, a growing (albeit slowly)
middle class characterized by a heightened awareness of political and community activism,
the increased circulation of a London-based Black press 54—were
dynamic forces for change. Moreover, they had a critical effect on both the
conceptualization of race as a means of classification and the evolution of race
relations in greater Britain.
"CALL AND RESPONSE"
At the start of another year’s work we would
urge upon our members ... to take an active part in this organisation. The League has not
been formed, as some of our critics like to think, because coloured people in England have
an inferiority complex and are anxious to impress the people of this land of the free. All
thinking people of all shades and nationalities are seeking either to make stronger and
firmer their place among nations of the world, or make a place for themselves as they have
so far been unrecognised. The thinking Negro is seeking a place for himself [sic] in the
world today.... It is [met] therefore that those who are privileged to come to the
world’s metropolis ... should come together in one united and strong organisation and
seek out how best to help the race travel along the road of progress....55
I noted previously the variety of circumstances that
prompted Black migration to Britain, augmenting that nation’s permanent Black
settlement. Importantly, these individuals and their causes were divided by a number of
factors: class and caste differences, ethnic rivalries, competing sensibilities between
West Indian and African interests, differing cultural backgrounds separating migrants from
the east and west coasts of Africa, and so on. For the purposes of this study, however, I
will generalize and incorporate these separations into two sociopolitical groups: the liberal
humanitarians and the radicals. Each of these groups had its own operational
style and ideology, as well as its own distinctive approaches to and relationship with
Englishness and the metropole. These respective categorizations shared overlapping
memberships, and it was not uncommon for individuals, and even organizations, to combine
their efforts on behalf of community interests—such was the case during the Black
seamen’s crisis of 1935, as well as the mobilization on behalf of Abyssinia in 1936.
However, the dichotomy between liberal humanitarianism and radicalism is useful in any
examination of Black identity in the interwar years.
The liberal humanitarian League of Coloured Peoples
[LCP] was founded in 1931 by Harold Moody, a Jamaican-born physician. It was London-based
and functioned alternately as a social club, housing bureau, employment agency, and
political pressure group. The LCP, along with the West African Students’ Union 56 and the African Progress Union,57 represented what St. Clair Drake called the pan-African style
of liberal humanitarianism and was the first conscious and deliberate attempt to form a
multiracial organization led by Blacks in Britain. Their significance lay, in part, in
their ability to bridge the gap between the mainstream, white, paternalistic bodies like
the Anti-Slavery Society and the more locally based student bodies like the West African
Students’ Union. During the 1930s, editorials, essays, and even poetry appeared in
the pages of The Keys, the journal of the LCP; efforts that examined issues as
diverse as the "good character" of the visiting West Indian cricket team and the
outrage and condemnation of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936.58 In the early issues of both The Keys and the WASU,
contributors articulated a consciously socially correct, "uplifting" image of
Black Britain, one designed to promote and to advance Black culture while challenging the
racialist stereotypes and attitudes that denied the historical existence of Black culture
and Black civilization.
The liberal humanitarians considered themselves
"ambassadors, unpaid representatives of their race"59
and, on the whole, desired simply the participatory rights of good citizenship to which
they were entitled as ardent and responsible subjects of His Majesty’s British
empire. C.L.R. James writes:
[We] can help to stimulate the growing consciousness
of the blacks ... [and] to learn from the black masses the lessons of the profound
experiences that they accumulate in their daily toil, to point out certain pitfalls that
may be avoided, to co-ordinate information and organization, to do an incessant propaganda
in every quarter of Britain, exposing the evils, pressing such remedies as are possible,
and mobilising whatever assistance there is to be found in Europe for the cause of African
emancipation.60
In the first issue of the African Times and
Orient Review, editor Duse Ali Mohammed endorsed the following:
[In] stepping into the arena of Anglo-Saxon
literature and politics, [the journal] arrogates to itself no pretensions of superiority,
neither does it gird itself with weapons of offence.... [The] recent Universal Races
Congress, convened in the Metropolis of Anglo-Saxon world, clearly demonstrated that there
was ample need for a Pan-Oriental, Pan-African journal at the seat of the British Empire
which lay the aims, desires, and intentions of the Black, Brown and Yellow
races—within and without the Empire—at the throne of Caesar.61
The radical movement began in London in 1934 when
Blacks formed an ad hoc committee to assist two Gold Coast delegates who had come
as political petitioners with grievances to place before the British government. This
collective was revived as the International African Friends of Abyssinia [IAFA]. In 1936,
when Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia, the IAFA’s stated main purpose was
"to arouse the British public’s sympathy and their support for the victims of
fascist aggression,"62 and, wrote George
Padmore, "to assist by all means in their power in the maintenance of the Territorial
integrity and political independence of Abyssinia." In 1937, the IAFA became the
International African Service Bureau. Padmore, Issac Wallace-Johnson, C.L.R. James, and T.
Ras Makonnen formed its executive board. Although the IAFA had white sponsors 63 the International African Service Bureau insisted
that it owed no affiliation or allegiance to any political party, organization, or group
in Europe. It regarded Pan-Africanism as an independent political expression of Negro
aspirations for complete national independence from white domination—whether
Capitalist or Communist—and "saw the opportunity ... to help enlighten public
opinion ... as to the true conditions in the various colonies."64 Like the League and the West African Students’ Union, the
IASB had an official mouthpiece in the African Sentinel newspaper, which was
succeeded by the monthly International African Opinion. Edited by C.L.R. James, the
motto of the IAO journal was: "Educate, Co-operate, Emancipate: Neutral in nothing
affecting the African Peoples."65 In
assessing the evolution of Black nationalist ideology during this period, Cedric Robinson
argues that the Black radicals in Britain were the political vanguard of Black
nationalism, the "gatekeepers in the British imperial metropolis for a nationalist
audience."66 Their residence in Britain was
often only semipermanent; no matter long their stay, their goals clearly were to stimulate
the growing consciousness of the worldwide Black community and, eventually, to "press
the case for the independence of their national homelands." These activists were
harsh critics of Britain and its imperialism. Not surprisingly, they were also censorious
about the Englishness within themselves. C.L.R. James had occasion to caution more than
once that Africans and people of African descent had been "poisoned by British
imperialist education."67 In his 1930 essay How
Britain Governs the Blacks, theorist George Padmore alleged:
During these centuries of colonial domination and
exploitation, the imperialists of Britain can truly be said to have learnt the art of
‘governing.’ Their policy is a dual one. On the one hand, they maintain their
domination over the colonial masses through deceit, hypocrisy and corruption. And when
these methods fail, brute force and terrorism, backed up by machine guns and bombing
planes are brought into action in order to maintain the authority and ‘prestige’
of these white overlords.68
Whatever the ideological differences between them,
individuals from both camps—liberal humanitarian and radical—concurred in
cautioning members of the Black communities against "apeing [sic] the white man
[sic]"69 and "craving [too much] ... the dubious advantages of western bourgeois
society."70 In 1938, writing in London,
C.L.R. James admonished his peers with the following:
[We must] base ourselves upon the masses of the
people. The individual achievements of a few black men [sic] do not and cannot solve the
problems of the blacks. One of our most important tasks is to make clear to the black
intellectuals and other members of the middle class, that in the present state of world
affairs there is no way for them by seeking the crumbs from the tables of their
imperialist masters. They must identify themselves with the struggles of the masses. The
betterment of their conditions, helping them in their efforts to raise themselves to the
fullest rights of citizenship, that is the main task.71
These ideologically differing organizations and
their individual members joined forces similarly on behalf of community interests, such as
the Black seamen’s crisis of 1935 and the mobilization on behalf of Abyssinia in
1936. Ultimately, the more significant common ground between two groups—the political
reformers and the self-styled revolutionaries—became their shared disillusionment and
a resulting political consciousness. When confronted irrevocably with the reality of
England and its anathema to Black Englishness, both groups realized that the
alleged contradictions within this identity would disallow full participation in and
enjoyment of the benefits of white British society. This society had represented itself as
the model for liberal standards of fair play, embodying the forms of social assimilation
while professing the assurance that any citizen of the crown should and could
become as British as the next. The rift between rhetoric and reality led Eric
Walrond to write, in his essay entitled On England:
Two [words] ... whose powers of distortion are
difficult to excel are ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy.’ More crimes are
committed in their name than one would care to enumerate. But it is characteristic of the
English, in their hypocrisy and love of deception to loudly proclaim the existence of that
which does not exist or which they do all in their power to suppress....72
In examining the responses of Black British
intellectuals to their largely negative reception in Britain, it is useful to consider the
body of work by Cornel West that examines the "cultural politics of difference."
West maintains that the initial responses to the "cataclysmic process of
Europeanization," rejoinders he calls modes of resistance, by the modern Black
Diaspora were typically "moralistic in content and communal in character." A
subsequent struggle ensued with the express intent of wresting control over the
representation of Black self-images from hostile segments of white society and reproducing
these images in a universally—and homogenizing—positive and self-affirming
light. The ultimate goal was assimilation within British society and recognition of and
Blacks’ enjoyment of the benefits accruing to good and sober citizenship. In 1926 in
the inaugural issue of WASU, the West African Students’ Union presented its
organizational objectives, in part, as: "...to preach ... the message of co-operation
... to help in exposing the African mind [and] ... to educate the world on the hope and
aspirations of the African and his [sic] claim to his rightful place in the world."73 As Peter Fryer contends, the liberal
humanitarian’s "self-appointed [task] was to save his [sic] people in Britain,
so far as he could from suffering the tree’s poisoned fruit." In contrast, the
task of the Black revolutionary "was to chop the tree down."74
"THE LOGIC OF BLACK SETTLEMENT"
A sense of identity is formulated by and along the
journey’s road; it is interwoven, in part, from the conditions upon which
"settlement" is negotiated, fought, and renegotiated. The journey,
according to bell hooks, is allied to and within multiple and overlapping identities that
beget their own discourse; identities, particularly, that are informed by "personal
rites of passage," for example, immigration, (en)forced migration, relocation,
enslavement, colonization, education, and regionalization.
Paul Gilroy’s recent and compelling work, Black
Atlantic, examines the begetting of as well as the agency for the means of
Black identities as they relate to the "logic of Black settlement." Gilroy
posits that the process of Black Britain’s sociohistorical formation was predicated
on the convergence of distinctly intermixed and varied cultural forms; forms with
decidedly separate intellectual and sociopolitical traditions, and where the act of
settlement itself connoted a "social movement." During the first half of the
twentieth century, the intersection of these sites informed both the constituting of as
well as the locating of certain representations of Black Englishness. It was this
convergence of distinct political and social traditions that informed greatly the
"logic" of the sociohistorical inception of Black Britain. By the mid-1930s
Black British political traditions were meeting and uniting toward a more Pan-African
style consciousness. Over time, Black Englishness became less about "good
character" and more about this marriage of social and political visions with the
intent "to correct [and to educate] ... the errant motherland."75 Ultimately, as noted by entrepreneur Ras Makonnen, "the
British tradition of free speech and civil liberties was a real asset to men and women who
were, after all, seeking to dismantle the British Empire...."76
Modern Britain cannot be studied separately from
empire, nor can Englishness be examined independently from imperialism—as such, a
legacy of the "imperial visage." In attempting to bring forth various as well as
varying voices of individual Black settlers along their respective journeys, it has not
been my intention to oversimplify the complexities or the overlapping loyalties vis-à-vis
these intellectuals and the political construction of identities within Black and
British communities. Plainly, the courses of these journeys have been both reduced and
accelerated. I am hopeful, however, that the distinctiveness of their voices has both
conveyed and actuated the resonance that exemplified their lives. These communities of
Black settlement were far from homogeneous. Their respective journeys—accompanied by
unique and distinct narratives—were as much horizontal as linear. Or, as Barnor Hesse
suggests, "journeying is as much sideways and in the standing still as it is
backwards and forwards."77 The discourse that
attached itself to the concepts and the conceits of Englishness, I am hopeful, has
offered glimpses into the oftentimes convoluted and, simultaneously, contradictory will of
a people to signify identity. The strategic significance of presenting and of
representing the semblance of a monolithic Black community—as a means of both
political agency and cultural survival—was understood well within the community of
the Black Diaspora. C.L.R. James recalls "in the telling" that:
What interests me, and is, I think, of general
interest, is that as far back as I can trace my consciousness the original found itself
and came to maturity with a system that was the result of centuries of development in
another land, was transplanted as a hot-house flower is transplanted and bore some strange
fruit.78
NOTES
1 This article has benefited considerably from
comments by Tom McCalmont, Antoinette Burton, Chris Walters, Doug Klusmeyer, and Bruce
Thompson. However, all errors are attributed to the fractured and fractious sensibilities
of the author.
2 C.L.R. James, Beyond the Boundary (Durham:
Duke UP, 1993) 154.
3 bell hooks, "Representing whiteness in the
Black imagination," Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson,
and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge Press, 1992) 338-46.
4 T. Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism From Within,
ed. (and recorded by) Kenneth King (London: Oxford UP, 1973) 152-53.
5 See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making
of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1983) 369-80; Robinson,
"Black Intellectuals at the British Core: 1920s–1940s," Essays on the
History of Blacks in Britain: From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, eds.
Jahdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing, 1992) 173-201.
6 James, Beyond the Boundary 111.
7 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of
Black People in Britain (London:Pluto Press, 1984) 4-12; James Walvin, Black and
White: The Negro and English Society 1555-1945 (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
1973); Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, ed. Anthony Tibbles
(Liverpool: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1994) 83.
8 Fryer 4-12. See also, Paul Edwards, "The
early African Presence in the British Isles," Essays on the History of Blacks in
Britain: From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, eds. Jahdish S. Gundara and
Ian Duffield (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing, 1992) 9-29.
9 See, in particular, David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s
Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Athens: U of Georgia P,
1987).
10 On this point, see Kenneth Little, Negroes in
Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1948/1972); Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain
(Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1972). Two recent and more comprehensive books that address
the experiences of the Black communities in London during this period are Gretchen
Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995), and
Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Black in Britain c.1780-1830 (London:
Frank Cass, 1996) especially chapter 3.
11 A quantitative social history of this population
remains woefully underresearched. See Fryer, Staying Power; Ron Ramdin, The
Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1987)
16-20.
12 These questions were raised in the 1772 Somerset
case. See David Brion Davis’s book The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975) 479-501. Also, see Douglas A. Lorimer, "Black resistance
to slavery and racism in eighteenth century England," Essays on the History of
Blacks in Britain: From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, eds. Jahdish S.
Gundara and Ian Duffield (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing, 1992) 58-80.
13 See Lorimer, as cited above.
14 Historically, when interrelations between Blacks
and whites are perceived as problematic, if not undesirable, the "fear of
miscegenation" is cited most often as a main source of the problems. To this
perception, Paul Rich posits in Race and Empire in British Politics that
"imperialism buttressed a set of social models based on a hierarchy of races, with
the Anglo-Saxon at the top, and upon the inherent antipathy of races to miscegenation
and inter-racial liaisons for these produced a mongrelisation of the white
race." (See, especially, pages 130-35 in chapter 6: The "half caste"
pathology.) See, also, James Walvin, Passage to Britain: Immigration in History and
Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984) 81-82; Rob May and Robin Cohen,
"The Interaction Between Race and Colonialism: A Case Study of the Liverpool Race
Riots of 1919," Race and Class 16.2 (1974): 114-15; Kenneth Little, Negroes
in Britain 234-37.
15 This assertion is argued very persuasively by
Paul Rich, "The Black Diaspora in Britain: Afro-Caribbean Students and the Struggle
for Political Identity, 1900-1950," Immigrants and Minorities 6.2 (Jul. 1987);
and in his book, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1986/1990) especially chapter 3.
16 See Paul Rich cited above.
17 Barbara Bush, "The History of Blacks in
Britain: The 1930s," History Today 31 (Sep. 1981): 46-47.
18 Eric Walrond, "The Negro in London," Black
Man 1.12 (Mar. 1936): 9-10.
19 Robert Wellesley Cole, "Pride of
Empire," Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History 1780-1950, eds.
Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg (Crawley: Rabbit Press, 1986) 233-34.
20 The reference to skin color relates to the
cultural attributing of white skin to a "superior" Anglo-Saxon lineage.
On this point, see Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians
(Leicester: Leicester UP, 1978) 11. Lorimer posits that if the white skin of the
Anglo-Saxon woman and man personified the "apex of human civilization," the
black skin of the colonial was seen as its "photographic negative."
21 Robert Colls, "Englishness and the
Political Culture," Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920, eds. Robert
Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986) 30-31.
22 See Edward Said, Orientalism (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage
Books, 1993).
23 See, especially, John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda
and Empire: The Manipulation of British Politic Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1984).
24 Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human
Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915) 210.
25 See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism:
The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536-1966 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1975).
26 Lorimer 11. Victorians, he offers, "seemed
to get a clear perception of their own supposed racial uniqueness from the inverted image
of the black man [sic]" and, furthermore, the interrelationship between the pressing
moral and political issues of the day and the questions of race and slavery made "the
Mid-Victorians take an interest in the welfare of the black man, which was out of all
proportion to their individual involvement in the affairs of the West Indies, Africa, or
America." For a longer assessment, refer to chapter 6: "Mid-Victorian Gentlemen,
‘Nigger Philanthropy,’ and the Growth of Racialism."
27 On this point, see Barbara J. Fields’s
arguments in "Ideology and Race in American History," Region, Race and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James
M. McPherson (New York: Oxford UP, 1982); and, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the
United States of America," New Left Review 181 (May/Jun. 1990); see, also,
Hazel V. Carby, "White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of
sisterhood," The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain
(London: Hutcheson Press, 1982).
28 See Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain:
Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: Verso, 1977/1981) 255-90.
29 See Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English
Society (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1969).
30 Lorimer 108-30.
31 I believe, however, that this assumption
indicates a certain perception of these circumstances. I maintain that for Blacks access
to a means of upward mobility was achieved only at the level of the individual and,
furthermore, that the acceptance of a Black and English middle class was operating
more at a discursive level in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than one that
was indicative of any actual receptiveness on the part of Anglo-Saxon England to the
notion of a permanent Black presence within these ranks. In short, I contend that these
circumstances were defined, on the whole, by the concept of selectivity assuming
ideological standing.
32 However, I make this assertion reservedly
because I believe that the definition of "gentle" status carried with it an
implicit assumption of whiteness. I refrain, as well, from suggesting that Black
women, in general, could ascend the "pedestal of true womanhood," cognizant as I
am of the very compelling arguments that maintain American white society did not confer
the status of lady on Black women "regardless of income, education, refinement
or character." For a further argument, see Evelyn Higginbotham’s summary of this
early research in her article "The Metalanguage of Race," Signs: Women,
Culture and Society (Winter 1992): 258-74.
33 In his book Outcast London (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984), Gareth Stedman Jones posits that in the earlier state of
"degeneration," the souls of the laboring classes were perceived, at least, as
salvageable. During the 1860s, casual laborers increasingly were considered (and reclassified
as) "dangerous" not only because they were understood to be
"degenerate" by nature, but also because the very fact of their existence in
society was thought to "contaminate" those classes "above" them. (See
especially pages 281-314.) See, also, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class (New York: Random House, 1977).
34 See Stedman Jones, Outcast London.
35 Stedman Jones 281-314; also, see Jenny Bourne
and A. Sivanandan, "Cheerleaders and Ombudsmen: the Sociology of Race Relations in
Britain," Race and Class XXI.4 (Spring 1980).
36 See Fields, Race and Ideology in American
History 148-49. She asserts that "the historical context for the construction of
race as a tool for black oppression is historically rooted in the context of
slavery." Furthermore, "the idea one people has of another, even when the
difference between them is embodied in the most striking physical characteristics, is
always mediated by the social context within which the two came in contact." Also,
see P. Fryer, Black People in the British Empire: An Introduction (London: Pluto
Press, 1988) chapters 10-12. Additionally, see Rob May and Robin Cohen, "The
Interaction Between Race and Colonialism: A Case Study of the Liverpool Race Riots of
1919," Race and Class 16.2 (1974). Cohen and May argue that Blacks were
assigned a position in English society corresponding to that of nature in such a
way to leave the "freeborn Englishman" (sic), of whatever class, the sole
legatee of culture.
37 Fields, Ideology and Race in American History
161-62. She contends that in debating the presumed capacity or incapacity of a slave to accept
freedom, slavery became a "racial" question.
38 See Stedman Jones, Outcast London.
39 I qualify this assumption and wish to point out
the parallel realities that I believe are operating here. I contend that even while the
language of class is being employed in asserting a dominant position, race is
acting as the primary signifier and is conflating the category of class in this analysis.
40 On this point there is a plethora of study open
to the researcher. See, especially, a very thoughtful collection of essays in Imperialism
and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986); and Making
Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism, ed. J.A. Mangan
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990). See, also, Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing
Traditions, Europe 1870-1914," The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm
and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983); Michael Hays, "Representing
Empire: Class, Culture, and the Popular Theatre in the Nineteenth Century," Imperialism
and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. J. Ellen Gainor
(London: Routledge, 1995); Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and
Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880-1918 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994); Robert
Colls, "Englishness and the Political Culture," and Peter Brooker and Peter
Widdowson, "A Literature for England," Englishness: Politics and Culture
1880-1920, eds. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
41 See Laura Tabili’s very insightful and
extensively researched examination of this strategy in her larger work We Ask for
British Justice: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1994); see also P. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics. Here he
attributes to the "colonial legacy" the promulgating of the inference that Black
communities—as ethnic and minority communities—need always lie outside
the cultural bonds that held British, that is Anglo-Saxon, communities together.
See, in particular, his assessment of this point in chapter 6.
42 Geo. W. Brown, "Investigation of Coloured
Colonial Seamen in Cardiff, April 13th-20th, 1935," Keys: The Official Organ of
the League of Coloured Peoples 3.2 (Oct.-Dec. 1935): 21.
43 See Little, Negroes in Britain.
44 See Higginbotham, The Metalanguage of Race.
45 Robinson 273-374.
46 Eric Walrond, "The Negro In London," Black
Man 1.12 (Mar. 1936): 9.
47 Dennis Smith, "Englishness and the Liberal
Inheritance after 1886," Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920, eds.
Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986) 255.
48 Robert Colls, "Englishness and the
Political Culture," Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920, eds.
Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986) 36.
49 Editorial, Keys 1.3 (Jan. 1934): 42.
50 On this point, see the work of Barbara Fields
and Paul Gilroy, especially The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993); Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism
in South America (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980).
51 Fields, Ideology and Race in American History
153.
52 See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Carly Emerson and Michal Holquist (Austin: U
of Texas P, 1981). The "language of race," Bakhtin posits, has the "power
of the word to mean"—one that arises from "concrete situational and
ideological contexts."
53 On this point, see (among other theorists) the
work of E. Higginbotham, "The Metalanguage of Race"; and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self (New York: Oxford
UP, 1987).
54 During the period 1880-1950, there was operating
in Britain a Black press consisting of over a dozen publications that were predominantly
Black-edited and Black-controlled/owned and included newspapers, periodicals,
organizational newsletters, etc. A good summary of these materials is Roderick MacDonald,
"The wisers who are far away: The Role of London’s Black Press in the 1930s and
1940s," Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain: From Roman Times to the
Mid-Twentieth Century, eds. Jahdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield (Avebury: Ashgate
Publishing, 1992) 150-72. A fuller examination can be found in Ionie Benjamin, The
Black Press in Britain (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1995).
55 Editorial, Keys 1.4 (Apr.-Jun. 1934):
65-66.
56 The West African Students’
Union—founded in 1925 at a meeting attended by twenty-one law students—was the
most successful effort (after several attempts) to form an organization that "could
speak for all West African students in Britain." For twenty-five years the WASU
provided a forum for its members to articulate their criticism of British colonial rule,
as well as to expose and to challenge the discriminatory practices that were an inherent
dimension of that nation’s "imperial adventure." In Staying Power,
Peter Fryer contends that the WASU "provided a training ground for the leaders of the
West African nationalist movements, not surprisingly, drawing as they did from a
membership who would be the future judges, lawyers, and politicians in West Africa."
See pages 324-25.
57 The names of the founding members of the African
Progress Union (1918)—John Richard Archer, Duse Mohammed Ali, John Alcindor—read
like the "Who’s Who" of Black civic, professional, and political life in
Britain during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The membership, comprised
mainly of students and business/professional people, came from Africa, British Guinea,
Honduras, the West Indies, and the United States. The goals of the Union, according to the
December 1918 issue of the African Telegraph, were "to promote the general
welfare of Africans and Afro-Peoples; to set up a social and residential club in London as
a home away from home; to spread knowledge of the history and achievements of Africans and
Afro-Peoples past and present; and to create and maintain a public sentiment in favour of
brotherhood [sic] in the broadest sense." Reported in Fryer, Staying Power
293.
58 Most of these organizations had affiliated with
them a publication: The Keys (retitled The Newsletter in 1940) was published
by the LCP; likewise, the WASU was published by the West African Students’
Union. Two APU patrons were key to publishing the African Telegraph and the African
Times and Orient Review newspapers. John Eldred Taylor—a businessperson and
journalist from Sierra Leone—had assisted Duse Mohammed Ali in launching the
African Times and Orient Review and was also the proprietor of the African
Telegraph.
59 St. Clair Drake, "Value Systems, Social
Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles," diss., University of Chicago,
1954.
60 Editorial, International African Opinion
1.1 (Jul. 1938): 1. Reported in Roderick MacDonald, "The wisers who are far away: The
Role of London’s Black Press in the 1930s and 1940s," Essays on the History
of Blacks in Britain: From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, eds. Jahdish S.
Gundara and Ian Duffield (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing, 1992) 150-72.
61 Foreword, African Times and Orient Review
1.1 (1912): 1.
62 See Fryer, Staying Power 344-45.
63 As reported in Fryer, Staying Power, this
list included future labor colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones, as well as Nancy
Cunard, Victor Gollancz, Sylvia Pankhurst, D.N. Pritt, and Dorothy Woodman.
64 See Fryer, Staying Power 343-47.
65 See J. A. Langley, Pan-Africanism and
Nationalism in West Africa 1900-1945: A study in ideology and social classes (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1973) 63-68. According to Langley, James’s vision of the IAO was
"a journal for activists, not a literary paper giving advice from ivory towers; which
sought, not to dominate other black organizations, but to co-ordinate and centralize their
activities." See also Fryer 346.
66 Robinson 2.
67 C.L.R. James, "Abyssinia and the
Imperialists," Keys 3.3 (Jan.-Mar. 1936): 32, 39-41.
68 George Padmore, "How Britain Governs the
Blacks," Negro Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Negro UP, 1934/1969)
809-13.
69 Tom Grant, "The L.C.P.," Keys
2.4 (Apr.-Jun. 1935): 87.
70 Stephen Peter Thomas, "The West
African," Keys 1.1 (Jul. 1933): 13-14.
71 See Roderick MacDonald, "The wisers who are
far away: The Role of London’s Black Press in the 1930s and 1940s," Essays on
the History of Blacks in Britain: From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, eds.
Jahdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield (Avebury: Ashgate Publishing, 1992) 150-72.
72 Walrond, "On England," Black Man 3.10
(Jul. 1938): 18.
73 See G.O. Olusanya, The West African
Students’ Union: and the politics of Decolonisation 1925-1958 (Ibadan: Daystar
Press, 1982).
74 Fryer 343.
75 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of
the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1983) 376.
76 Makonnen 152
77 Barnor Hesse, "Black to Front and Back
Again: Racialization through contested times and space," Place and the Politics of
Identity, eds. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993) 162-82.
78 James 41-42.
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