The 50th year of the Race Relations Act

In celebrating and reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the Race Relations Act and continued activism, what I am deeply struck by is not only the wonderful black, Asian  and white heroes and heroines -  completely unsung - who fought, struggled and persisted to change, but also that those efforts in the collective clearly demonstrate that here in the UK we very much have had our own Civil Rights Movement.

In fact I’m surprised someone has not written a book -‘The Black British Civil Rights Movement - 50 Years of Struggle’.

In this article I cannot begin to do justice to either the subject or the wonderful individuals that helped change our world, but we will run a number of articles this week and look forward to your reflections too.

What I hope to do is give a snapshot of struggle that perhaps offers a flavour of our UK Civil Rights Movement, sadly, not nearly as well documented or celebrated as our illustrious brothers and sisters in the USA, but nonetheless totally important in the history of social change.

Last week was the 60th anniversary of the 1955 ‘bus boycott’ which began by the arrest of Rosa Parks. But across the water here in London we were fighting our own ‘Jim Crow’ laws. Was it a mere coincidence that in the very same year as Parks and the young Dr Martin Luther King were organising that most famous bus boycott, here in Bristol, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), passed a motion voting against the Bristol Bus Company employing Black or Asian workers.

This was at a time when, in a city such as Bristol, there were some 3000 people from the Caribbean Islands, many of whom had fought in the 2nd World War, and had been invited to come to the UK to rebuild a war weary society.

At the same time in London Oswald Mosley’s 'White Defence League’, were terrorising Black neighbourhoods with their bully thugs, culminating in the Notting Hill Riots in 1958 and the murder of Kelso Cochraine in 1959.

The history about the riots was that although shockingly outnumbered by racist thugs, Black people fiercely fought back. Those riots and Cochrane’s death were a catalyst for the likes of Claudia Jones to bring people together in a celebratory fashion with her most famous legacy, the Notting Hill Carnival, which began proper in 1964.

Back in Bristol during that time Black men including Paul Stephenson, Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown, along with white students and Jewish activist Madge Dressor, joined forces to start their own ‘bus boycott’ against the Bristol Bus Company. They picketed, they lobbied, they shamed and blockaded the bus company until it capitulated and reversed its racist laws.

This local, isolated victory driven by a few, supported by many had reverberations that would propel politicians into making the biggest changes in race relations law in British history when on Dec 8th 1965, the first Race Relations Act came into law. To put this into context, it was only one year before, in 1964, that the USA brought in their own The Civil Rights Act - albeit much stronger than ours.

The Black Struggle clearly didn’t end after the 1965 Act. Three years later Enoch Powell was to make his most infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech. His aim was to sow division and hatred across the country and pit white people against Black people.

During the ‘70’s a new wave of Black activist emerged to take on the brutal SUS laws of what can only be described as nasty and corrupt police force. Once again, Black people had to fight for their rights both on the streets and in the courts. The most famous of the court cases was in the ‘70s with the police trying to ‘fit-up’ the Mangrove 9, from the All-Saints Road in Notting Hill. There, individuals such as Darcus Howe and Frank Critchlow successfully defended themselves against police lies, brutality and intimidation.

We have to fast forward to the brutal death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, to chronicle the other momentous moment that would transform our society and laws. The public enquiry into Stephen’s murder and the level of police corruption - still being investigated today - propelled a dramatic change in law culminating in the Race Relations Amendment Act in 2000.

Every positive change in the law was often been preceded by murder, great struggle and the demand for race equality.

In hindsight as a nation we reached a peak around 2003 in having the most robust legislation for race equality in Europe and perhaps beyond. We were the gold standard. But the years after that a number of things occurred that knocked the race equality agenda for six: The shocking events of 9/11 in New York and Washington, and in 2005 the 7/7 bombings here. The ‘War on Terror’ began and the then Prime Minister Tony Blair signalled that he preferred a ‘light touch’ approach to tackling race inequality, which meant doing nothing.

The result has been the stripping down of an equality body –The Equality and Human Rights Commission - from a budget of £70 million to £17 million, and a staffing compliment that had 500 to around 100. To my bitter disappointment as a Commissioner, I fought and lost that battle.

Unsurprisingly and unceremoniously I was quickly removed as a Commissioner!

Why do these battles matter? Well today racism, including abuse and attacks is back on the sharp rise. Furthermore, with 50% of Black 16-24 year olds unemployed for over a year we are creating a lost generation, with little hope and even less opportunity. Those in work will probably be on a ‘Zero hour contracts’ that offer no rights and shocking instability. At the other spectrum that lack of Black faces at senior levels of both business and local Government shames a modern society such as Britain.

Today, the 8th of December marks a wonderful celebratory day, including the acknowledgement of a Black British Civil Rights movement. But it’s also a sad reminder that the gains that we fought for are not enshrined in stone and can be rolled back in no time at all.

New players need to emerge working with the few groups that have managed to survive in a bold bid to hold the race equality line we have and build upon it. After 50 years of struggle are we to tell this young generation that we’ve given up?

Hell no! Today we celebrate, tomorrow we redouble our efforts.

Simon Woolley