Black Lives Matter protesters in Britain have shown themselves to be a rainbow coalition. It is, though, surprising to me how many of them have been black. Despite a tradition of white activists casting black people as radical agents of change, historically speaking black Britons, at least the Windrush generation and their children, have been notably cautious about joining such protests.
Black Caribbeans who came to Britain were the inheritors of a strategy of resistance to authority dating back to slavery, characterised as “playing fool to catch wise”—cunningly disabusing those with more power of the notion that you constituted a threat to them. That stance evolved over centuries into the recognition that if they protested, they would be in greater jeopardy than their white allies; black protesters were likely to be treated more severely by the courts and marked down as troublemakers by future employers.
“There were streets I couldn’t go down [in Bristol] because I was black,” recalls Paul Stephenson of the turbulent 1960s. “I was arrested and thrown in jail for refusing to leave a public house. We couldn’t work on buses. Couldn’t be a policeman. Couldn’t be a fireman.” At the same time, 4,000 miles away across the Atlantic, black Americans led by Martin Luther King and others were putting their bodies on the line in their fight for freedom. When black people were refused jobs as bus conductors and drivers in Bristol, Stephenson felt something had to be done. Emulating the Montgomery bus boycott, he went on to organise a successful boycott of the Bristol Omnibus Company in 1963.
From as early as I can remember, as the child of Jamaican migrants to the UK, there was always a kind of raw glamour attached to African-American lives. We might have been “under heavy manners,” oppressed by the police and state, but our own privations seemed attenuated versions of those endured by African Americans. We looked on with horror in the 1960s and 1970s at news footage—of defenceless black marchers being spat on, bitten by snarling Alsatians and pummelled by water canons; of sombre mourners of assassinated civil rights leaders; and then American cities on fire. All were terrifying and pitiable. Though the stoical pacifism of King’s followers was ennobling, to most of my black British peers the unflinching defiance of the Black Panther Party was more attractive.
Stokely Carmichael, founder of the Black Power movement, wowed audiences when he came to London in 1967 with his scorching denouncements of American apartheid. Angela Davis recalls his words “cutting like a switchblade,” leaving her buoyed by their “cathartic power.” Carmichael also fired up the British Black Liberation Army. In 1975, three of their armed members, in order to secure funds for their movement, held up an Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, in what became known as the “Spaghetti House Siege.” It lasted six days before the hostages were released unharmed.
My parents, along with their West Indian friends, were bemused and alarmed by their actions. Even though the siege ended peacefully, the activists were lampooned in the press. The writer Viv Adams (who came to the UK from Jamaica in 1962), says: “The British authorities played down the siege’s political dimensions, and attempted to portray it farcically as a robbery gone wrong, the work of hapless, deluded amateurs.”
In the years leading up to the 1981 Brixton riots, the British establishment continued to pat itself on the back and cast the country's race problem as an American import. Though Windrush Generation parents might have disputed that analysis, they were still fearful for their children. Outward displays of protest were dangerous; they considered the best way to change British society was not to tear down the master’s house but to get inside it, snatch the keys from the old codger and show him the door. Looking to America, we were encouraged to learn the lesson not of the doomed Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary” but rather of Virgil Tibbs, the cool black detective played by Sidney Poitier, who uses his smarts to get the better of bigoted white southerners in the Oscar-winning film In the Heat of the Night.
Arguably, the American authorities were not so fearful of stoical civil rights pacifists as they were of activists like H Rap Brown, who understood that “violence is as American as cherry pie” and that no one relinquishes power until they have to. Until the noble artefacts of terror—whether they be statues of confederate army criminals or 17th-century Bristol slave merchants—are yanked from plinths and tossed into the river. As for Robert E Lee, so too for Edward Colston.
Here then is the convergence of our stories, and recognition that the African-American fight is our fight. When President Obama opines that Trayvon Martin could have been his son, we in Britain intuitively understand that George Floyd could have been our brother, or Eric Garner, or the myriad others murdered in recent years. “The black man lives an existential nightmare in America,” says Viv Adams. “From the moment he leaves through his front door until he returns in the evening, incidents will come his way that are possibly dangerous and unpredictable, even if it doesn’t lead to extreme violence or death.”
The same is sadly true here. Black people know that policeman’s knee; have choked under it. (In the 10 years up to 2018-2019, 13 black people have died in or following custody in England and Wales.) “And that awful image, speedily relayed through modern technologies, is a reminder of our own subjugation,” asserts Adams. “It leads to rage.”
The real lesson to be learned from this moment, whether in the UK or US, is that there comes a time when the fire of indignation rages uncontrollably; when, in the words of the reggae musician Niney the Observer, there is “no more water to put out the fire.” In the future politicians, lamenting the destruction of property more than the destruction of the black body, will know that the protesters offer a stark choice: let me breath or let it burn.
