Black Rebellion

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This summer black youth burst onto the streets of Britain's cities, fighting back alongside white youth. But outside of the spectacular riots, how have black people in Britain been organising against racism? What ideas and projects have they launched? Andrew Hornung summarises an important recent survey by A.Sivanandan, Director of the *Britain 81: Rebellion and Repression, a special double issue of Race and Class. £1:50 from the Institute of Race Relations, 247 Pentonvitte Road, THE RASH of recent reports on 'race relations' give some picture of black people as the victims of racial discrimination and racial attacks, and as the special double-victims of capitalism in crisis.

What is missing is the picture of blacks in Britain not as victims, but as fighters and creators, as builders of organisations, founders of projects and developers of ideas.

A.Sivanandan's : article in the current edition of 'Race and Class' (From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain') is an invaluable attempt to make good that omission. The article will. form chapter in a forthcoming book to be published by Pluto, 'Race, Class and the State' One of Sivanandan's central themes is the 'invisibility' to a still largely racist white working class of the contribution of black militants. What is beginning to be recognised in the sphere of 'style' and music has not begun to be recognised in the more historically decisive arena of political people reading chis article - many of you will have been on the Left for a long time, and some will know a good deal about the history of the labour movement -have heard of Udham Singh? I hadn't.

'On 25 June 1940" Sivanandan writes at the beginning of his article, "Udham Singh was hanged. At meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society and the East India Association at Caxton Hall, London, he had shot dead Sir Michael O'Dwyer who (as the Lieutenant General of the Punjab) had presided over the massacre of unarmed workers and peasants at Jallianwalla Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919.

'Udham was a skilled electrician, an active trade unionist and a delegate to the local trades council, and, in 1938, had initiated the setting up of the first Indian Workers' Association, in Coventry".

A regular working class hero: : uncompromising, unassuming, unsung and black.

Likewise, how many readers who might have a vague recollection of the so-called Spaghetti House siege back in 1975 know that the three young West Indians that held up the Knightsbridge restaurant hoped to use the money to help set up proper schools for the black community, finance black political groups, and assist the liberation struggles in Africa?

These are only two of the more spectacular moments in the long, hard, creative battle by blacks in Britain. What of the less sensational forms of the daily war waged for better conditions, for dignity, and for liberation?

Before Notting Hill BEFORE World War Two, most black organisations were either religious (nonChristian gatherings in those British ports like Cardiff where blacks had .:ablished communities in "en century) or student The student based .. atons were frequInstitute of Race Relations* London N1. ently radical and orientated towards supporting the anti-imperialist struggles in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

For instance, Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester was the site of the Fifth Pan African Congress, many of whose delegates had set up the International African Service Bureau here in 1937. They included Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore, C L R James and Ras Makonnen.

The early organisational moves by black workers, like the West Indian Association in Liverpool (founded in 1951) and the Indian Workers' Association of Coventry (1953) drew inspiration from the movements for colonial freedom, but were also concerned with cases of racial discrimination in Britain. In time, however, Sivanandan points out, 'these early organisations generally ended up as social and welfare associations".

Fascist

In the case of the Asian organisations in particular, whether they ended up that way or not had a lot weight within them of Indian Congress Party or Communist Party supporters, and later of pro-Moscow or pro-Chinese militants.

In response to the Notting Hill riots' of 1958 -directed by the tiny but growing fascist organisations - 'even moderate organisations like the Committee of African Organisations... pledged to organise their own defence". The 'riots' themselves produced temporary organisations in London and elsewhere, but blacks were organised politically before that.

C. L. R. James In March 1958, for instance, few months before the 'riots' Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian and a Communist Party member; together with other West Indians including Amy Garvey (widow of Marcus Garvey in the Us and an early black leader jamaical produced the West Indian. Gazette. Sivanandan records it as "the parent Afro-Caribbean journal in Britain, and the Gazette organised London's first Caribbean carnival.

The same period saw the unification of the . local Indian Workers' Associations into the IWA-GB. Once again it was a combination of the pressures of the new home and the old home: Indian prime minWomen strikers at Imperial Tyl ister Nehru had advised such unification a year before, but the 'riots' added urgency to the advice.

In the following 20 years the street thugs that had first become notorious in Notting Hill (and at the same time in Nottingham) united, split and regroupid into the various fascist formations active today. They kept up their attacks. But the main concern of black organisations was soon to become increasingly the state itself. Immigration acts, increased police harassment, and race relations legislation soon showed who the godfather was.

discrimination ACCORDING to Sivanandan, the two most important umbrella organisations of the early '60s were the Coordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination in Birmingham and the Conference of Afro-Asian Caribbean Organisations (CAACO) in London.

Death

CCARD was founded after "a meeting at Digbeth (Birmingham) called by the West Indian Workers' Association and the Indian Youth League to protest Patrice Lumumba's murder in the Congo"

for all his Stalinist/reformist views was probably the most important Asian activist in Britain until his death from a heart attack while on a demonstration against virginity testing by immigration officials) and Maurice Ludmer, the recently deceased founder of the anti-fascist journal Searchlight.

CAACO was initiated by the West Indian Gazette and worked closely with Fenner Brockway's Movement for Colonial Freedom (now Liberation). Thus both movements related to the black struggle in Britain and to the anti-imperialist national liberation struggles in the Third World.

Internationalism

Later, in 1965, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination - polka-dotted with white liberals and lacking the other movements' internationalism -came into being at the instigation of Martin Luther King, who passed through London on his way to Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize.

RAAS: 1965 BY THIS time the politics and the practical struggles of the blacks of the US were making themselves felt among Afro-Caribbeans in Britain - but for the militants it was Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael who made the deepest impression, not Martin Luther King.

Malcolm's visit to Britain in February 1965, just before his assassination, inspired the founding of the Racial Action Adjustment Society (RAAS) by Michael de Freitas (later called Abdul Malik, and still later Michael X). Other leading lights were Roy Sawh and Ajoy Ghose.

Neither RAAS's earcatching and sometimes outrageously stupid racial rhetoric, nor Michael X's criminal past and murderer's end, should blind us to the significance RAAS.

In a way it was, as Sivanandan rightly points out, like the Black Muslims of America, who proclaimed black self-assertion in a rhetoric of Muslim religion. It was an inspiration to racial dignity, gathering into itself some of the most militant and able blacks who would later go off in different directions.

Like the Muslims, they based themselves on race and not class, but unlike the Muslims RAAS was anti-imperialist, irreligious and aggressive in its attitude to the state.

The state with its huge forces had had only a lew of RAAS's speeches thrown its way, but it took instant revenge: it tested out its new race relations legislation to indict Michael X in 1967 for 'an inflammatory speech • against white people' RAAS was treated by the press as the personal property and publicity organ of Michael X, showman and shaman. Not without some truth. But it was RAAS, not CARD and not anyone else, that went to Red Scar Mill in Preston in May 1965 to help Asian workers there in what Sivanandan calls 'the first important 'immigrant' strike". Roy Sawh set up office in Preston and worked full-time in support of the strikers.

Hatred

RAAS was influenced by the 'white devil' hatred of the Black Muslims and the anti-imperialism of Malcolm X. The United Coloured Peoples' Association was influenced by the anti-imperialist struggles in Asia and Africa and the Black Power ideas of Stokely Carmichael.

UCPA: 1967 UCPA was founded in June 1967 by Obi Egbuna, a Nigerian playwright. UCPA speakers at Hyde Park - where according to white folk's and tourists' myth you can say whatever you like - were soon being prosecuted under the Race Relations Act for the same sort of anti-white rhetoric as RAAS had been spouting for two years.

Sivanandan estimates, 'UCPA rhetoric was helping to stiffen black backs, its meetings and study groups to raise black consciousness, its ideology to politicise black people. The prosecution of its members showed up the complicity of the courts - 'protection rackets for the police' ; the secretary of the West Indian Standing Conference (one of the most durable black organisations) was to call them. And its example, like that of RAAS, encouraged other black organisations to greater militancy"

The battles in the workplace THE RED Scar strike - a strike against a racist managemeni backed by racist white workers and a racist trade union bureaucracy -was defeated. But the struggle in the workplaces did not stop. Later that year the strike at Woolf Rubber in Southall was defeated too. White left-wing organisations supported this strike, but the treason of the trade union bureaucracy and widespread (often racially motivated) indifference saw to its defeat.

Shortly after, there was a wave of strikes of Asians working in foundries: Most of these were in the Midlands, where Asians in particular: were: being sweated for £14 a week in the jobs that few whites were prepared to take.

No year went by without strikes by black workers who usually had to fight not only the employer and the trade union bureaucracy but rank and file *racism and fascist thuggery.

One example (not mentioned by Sivanandan): In 1968 a strike broke out at Injection Moulding in North West London. The strikers were mainly Asians, with some West Indians. There was only one white striker, a young Irishman.

The workers' grievances were many: their pay was too low - the minimum the union would allow -black workers were limited to being machine operators even when they set their own machines, while white workers were automatically promoted to the more skilled and better paid jobs of being setters whether they could do the job or not; and management refused to recognise Asian shop stewards on 'linguistic grounds' • although the most prominent ofthem was a graduate who spoke English perfectly.

Refused

The Asians saved for months to finance the strike, which was supported by the local Asian community. When the blacks tinally struck, the whites (with one sole exception) refused to come out, claiming financial hardship.

The blacks then offered to share their strike kitty with the whites who had contributed nothing to it. Some of the white workers took the money... and still scabbed!

The union supported the black workers, but tried time and time again to sell them out. Finally, the strikers - helped by local IŞ (now SWP) militants -won a rise of about 80 per cent and smashed through the racial barriers.

The next big wave of strikes. was In the East Midlands textile industry. In May 1972, the ble workers at Crepe Sizes Nottingham struck for series of demands incl ing union recognition (: the TGWU) and for an e to appalling wages: conditions (£40.08 for: 84 hour week for some!).

Their victory helped f the will of the black worke at Mansfield Hosiery Loughborough, of Harwo Cash Lawn Mills in Mar field, and E E Jaffe a Mamlic Lace in Notting am. The same area w later the site of the impo ant• Imperial Typewrite strike in Leicester, whe the National Front and t local : TGWU organis scabbing.

The Mansfield Hosie Strike Committee,.. aft their victory, sponsored conference on trade unio and racism. Among tho attending were such grou as the Black Worker Movement and the Bla People's Freedom Mor ment (Nottingham), bo of which were part of t Black People's Natior. Action Collective.

Shortly after, the focus the struggle shifted to tl factories of West Londo and initiative, in mai cases, from Asian men Asian women.

The defeat at Periva Gutterman was followed t the strikes led by Asia women at Futters, Grul wick, and, later, furthi west, at Chix.

Decency

IN A NUMBER of ther struggles, the state tried appear as the voice public decency. An offici inquiry into Mansfie Hosiery, for instanc conceded that manag ment, white workers, ar the trade union (Nation Association of Hosiery ar Knitwear Workers) wel racist in varying degrees.

Looked at from this sic the state seemed all war. fur and soft purring. Loo ed at from another ang - immigration laws ar police harassment - it wi clearly all sharp teeth ar claws. To blacks the secor side was more evident.

Infamous

In March 1968 a Labor government passed tr 'Kenyan Asians Act'. If Labour Government coul do that, a right wing Tor could do more. In Apr Enoch Powell delivered h infamous 'rivers of bloor speech.

If a Tory Establishmel racist could say that, the the fascists could c more: fascists active amon the dockers and porters London's East End le those workers to march 1 Parliament in support i Powell, with openly raci slogans which turned int anti-Semitic threats whe they saw East End Labor MP lan Mikardo.

But, as Sivananda reminds us, "blacks wes on the march too. On tr same day as the dockel and porters marched, r presentatives of over fifi organisations (includin IWAs, West Indian Stan‹ ing Conference, Nation:

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Socialist Organiser no. d6 December 16 198) Pase 7

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Hanged' For instance, how many