In the late 1960s and early 1970s, race politics and the processes of racialization in Britain were reconfigured through television coverage of US Black Power, urban uprisings, and global black resistance politics. In the postwar decades, the end of empire and the onset of large-scale nonwhite immigration from the former colonies resulted in the “re-racialization” of national identity and citizenship in Britain. This process has been explored as it worked through the cultural legacies and memories of empire; however, historians are only now beginning to investigate the place of the United States in the race politics of postwar, postimperial Britain.Footnote 1 Not only was Britain an important location in the development of US race politics, but the latter also formed a backdrop against which Britain's own racial dramas unfolded. In the 1950s, as Kennetta Hammond Perry has recently shown, the US South was often appropriated as a counterpoint against which “to define the virtues of the British nation … and appeal to the imagined antiracist ideals tethered to notions of what it meant to be British.”Footnote 2 After the momentous eruption of Powellism in 1968, when appeals to antiracist ideals lost what little weight they had, US race politics again played a central part in the reconfiguration of the British political terrain. Powellism broke apart the “race relations settlement” of the postwar decades, “to manage ‘race’ and, crucially, take it out of national political debate.”Footnote 3 Its success was partly driven by mobilizing fears of the urban conflicts enveloping the United States as a potential future for British cities. The postwar consensus was equally eroded, albeit with less popular traction, by the rise of black radicalism and the radical left in Britain.Footnote 4 In this, African-American visitors to the United Kingdom played a significant role, quick, as they were, to condemn British racism and acting as catalysts in the growth of anti-racist politics.Footnote 5 Even when not physically present, however, these African Americans and the politics that they were seen to represent could have a transformative effect on British race politics. In all this, television coverage was crucial.
The increase of television set ownership in Britain coincided, as Stuart Hall has noted, with the era of large-scale nonwhite immigration to Britain; television in this period “played a critical role in how that issue came to be defined, understood and interpreted.”Footnote 6 Explorations of how the rise of television changed cultural and political life in postwar Britain remain scarce. While television studies have undergone a “historical turn” over the last decade, this has so far failed to make much of an impact on the wider historiography of this period, which tends to focus on the content of programs and leaves largely unasked the question of how television viewing in itself reconstituted social imaginaries.Footnote 7 By contrast, this article suggests that we need to reconsider television as a site of racial formation in this era. Doing so will allow us to redraw the transnational maps by which we understand the development of race politics in Britain at the end of empire. In the 1950s and 1960s, “race relations” programming became a regular part of the broadcasting schedule, a venue through which racial anxieties about miscegenation, housing, and employment were often explored.Footnote 8 As Wendy Webster has proposed, this programming on domestic race relations also worked through a transnational imaginary, often superimposing narratives of impending racial collapse generated in the coverage of anticolonial wars in Kenya and Malaya.Footnote 9 However, by the mid-1960s, as the late dramas of decolonization had in most regions reached their end, narratives of racial disorder were increasingly found in coverage not of the former colonies but of the United States of America.Footnote 10 Scenes of urban unrest in the United States held substantial political weight in Britain: “That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,” as Powell infamously intoned in his “Rivers of Blood” address of April 1968, “is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come.”Footnote 11 Statements of this kind could be profoundly dislocating, and the unprecedented groundswell of public support for Powell following his “Rivers of Blood” address is testimony to the political potential of articulating these fears of racial disorder. It was primarily through television that many in Britain encountered US race politics, and thus through television that racial anxieties were frequently formed or reconfigured. However, beyond anxiety and racism, the televisation of US race politics also offered new sites of identification, community, and solidarity in the formation of new cultures and politics of blackness that were expanding rapidly in this period.
“A GREAT MOMENT”
The era of blackness in the USA seemed to show us a direction. Television gave us a long line of black spokesmen. Footnote 12
With the increase in television ownership from the mid-1950s, the medium became “a constituent part of the everyday life of citizens … a vehicle for the transformation of the everyday, and a privileged source of information and insight into it.”Footnote 13 While in the late 1940s there were fewer than twenty thousand television sets in Britain with a viewing population, mostly concentrated around London, of around 1 percent of the adult population, over the following two decades the geographical growth of technical transmission facilities and a broadcasting infrastructure allowed the development of a national, fully networked television service. By 1955, the viewing public had increased to 40 percent of the adult population, and ten years later it stood at 91 percent. With households viewing an average of nearly two hours each day by the mid-sixties, domestic life, as Tim O'Sullivan has proposed, was “decisively rearranged by the arrival of television”: the previous night's television was frequently a point of discussion with friends and colleagues, and television viewing as a communal activity at a neighbor's or friend's house persisted well into the sixties, and significantly remade the daily patterns of neighborhood life.Footnote 14 In this process, television became a central site for the imagination of community. Even while Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy opined the collapse of working-class community inaugurated by the new developments in mass culture of the postwar years, popular television shows like Coronation Street allowed the nation, in a determinedly working-class hue, to be remade again in miniature. Such shows resolved contradictions and restored familiarity to an increasingly unfamiliar world.Footnote 15 Television was not without its shocks and displacements, but there was much in this era to constitute a sense of national life, whether in the homely chat of Cilla or the acerbic popular television comedies of the era, from Steptoe and Son to Till Death Us Do Part, in which entire social worlds were collapsed into conflicts between fathers and sons.Footnote 16
This reconstitution of the everyday of national life on television, however, often excluded nonwhite Britons. While race relations programming was usually undertaken with liberal intentions, black Britons featured most frequently on television screens as the marker of a social “problem” under discussion.Footnote 17 When, in 1965, under director general Hugh Greene, the BBC launched a series of conferences to involve Asian and West Indian organizations in discussions on the future of programming for and about “immigrants” in Britain, calls were raised to integrate black actors into programming as an unremarkable part of everyday life, featuring “more in programmes simply as people in their own right and in their own jobs.”Footnote 18 In October 1965, the Leicester Campaign for Racial Equality similarly appealed to “simple realism” and the “criteria of accuracy and verisimilitude” to argue for “casting in line with the presence of coloured people in many of the occupations and roles portrayed.”Footnote 19 However, with the notable exception of 1967's Rainbow City, a drama series about a Jamaican lawyer and the West Indian and Asian communities in Birmingham, it was not until Empire Road in the late 1970s that the BBC came to address such ambitions. For entertainment programming of the 1960s and 1970s, Jim Pines has suggested that there existed an “apparent collapse of a liberal motivation either creatively or institutionally, which resulted in the absence of imaginative dramas or documentaries relating to black British experiences.”Footnote 20
This is not to say that black people were wholly absent from British television screens. While, as Trinidadian filmmaker Horace Ové remarks of British television in the 1960s, “they would have five people on television talking about ‘the black problem’ and no black people present to articulate their own problem,” it was also the case that “[a]t the same time, the black struggle in America was having a great impact on black people in England.”Footnote 21 In the era of the civil rights movement and Black Power, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, “[t]he TV was the ritual arena for the drama of our race.”Footnote 22 This applied to Britain as much as the United States; the televisation of black radical politics held a transformative political potential, remaking the racial everyday for both black and white Britons. Television provided a new immediacy and proximity to world events. “It's often said that the Vietnam War was the first major conflict to be played out nightly on TV,” wrote Mike and Trevor Phillips in their oral history of Windrush migrants. “It wasn't so for us. For us, it was the Civil Rights struggle and the subsequent battle between the Black Power activists and the American Government. During those years we got to know their names and faces better than the next door neighbours.” In this way, everyday life—and everyday television—was punctuated, disrupted, and reorganized by the intervention of these dramas of modern politics through the television set. The formal properties of television as a new communication technology were central:
This is how I remember experiencing the world in the sixties. First there were hints, vibes shivering through the air, and then you'd be zapped by the whole thing in sight and sound in your sitting room. … That is how it was, and what happened in the world became part of your domestic space. You have to remember this in order to understand some of the things that happened to migrants in the sixties.Footnote 23
The historical record bears out such claims, and witnessing US civil rights and Black Power on television is time and again narrated as a formative moment in black identity and the constitution of black politics in Britain. In Trevor Carter's account of black British postwar political formation, he recalls that
[w]hen the black American athletes at the 1968 Mexico Olympics gave their Black Power salutes as they received their medals, thousands of black people in Britain, from our generation and our children's, felt we were on the map. People remember that occasion like they remember President Kennedy's assassination: a symbolic moment in our history.Footnote 24
Carter was a Trinidadian labor activist who had emigrated in 1954. A member of the West Indian Committee of the Communist Party in the 1950s, he was also a friend and ally of Claudia Jones, and had long been involved in anticolonial and antiracist politics in Britain.Footnote 25 It would be too straightforward, in this complex history, to suppose that the spectacular dimensions of US civil rights and Black Power constituted black politics in Britain, even while Carter himself suggests that, despite the long commitment to anticolonial struggles among many in the black communities of Britain, “the influence of Black Power from the United States captured the hearts and minds of the black community to an even more significant extent.”Footnote 26 Nonetheless, time and again, media events such as the Black Power salute at the Mexico Olympics—to take Carter's “symbolic moment”—jump out as originary moments for black British identity. As Dilip Hiro wrote in 1971, “[w]hen, at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, black Americans were seen on television giving the Black Power salute, millions of black people in the Western world instantly identified with them.” One Jamaican teenager who had joined his family in the London suburb of Lewisham in 1967 remembers how the Olympics salute “changed my life. … My perception … just simply sharpened up,” while in Liverpool, a woman of African Caribbean descent situates the moment in her development, through African American politics, toward a black feminism. For Hanif Kureishi, glimpsing footage of the Olympics Black Power salute on the backroom television of a Bromley sweetshop was “a great moment.”Footnote 27
Accounts of black political formation in Britain continue to privilege moments of organized politics, street demonstrations, and the transformative potential of the transnational movements of black activists,Footnote 28 but it is worth considering how far the above narratives locate the formation of race politics indoors, in domestic space, or in the unremarkable spaces of “everyday” life. Consumer culture and the rise of mass communication technologies, long identified as sites of political formation in the “new political histories” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, have much to tell us about the reconfiguration of race politics in the postwar era.Footnote 29 Black Power, in the United States and internationally, was embedded in the media cultures of its time. Many commentators, rightly aggrieved at the seeming reduction of Black Power politics to its media forms—a reduction that, they contest, evacuates its political content—have emphasized the activist content of Black Power politics.Footnote 30 But these activist projects worked more forcefully through their proximity and translatability to mass culture than their distance from it.Footnote 31 It was through modern communications technologies and commodity culture that a strong visual—and sonic—Black Power repertoire was constructed and experienced.Footnote 32 Bobby Seale has written of the Black Panther Party's determination “to use the mass media as a means of conveying the message to the American people and to the black people in particular.”Footnote 33 Indeed, in a revealing comment, Emory Douglas, Black Panther Party Minister of Culture, recalled that his early days in the Panthers were “like being in a movement you'd seen on TV and now you could participate and share in that movement; when you'd seen Malcolm on TV, when you had heard talk about Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown. … To become part of that brought a sense of pride.”Footnote 34 In Douglas's comments, the Panthers become part of a wider history of black radicalism through television's capacity to act as the site for the imagination of black radical community, and an integral medium of a black formation.
In Hanif Kureishi's memoir of growing up in the southern London suburbs, it was Black Power encountered through the technologies of mass communication that offered a route out of his immediate surroundings. Kureishi would search television, often in vain, for representations of black life to which he could relate. “[T]o watch TV … was too embarrassing, too degrading.” Pakistanis were “derided on television. … Television comics used Pakistanis as the butt of their humour.” At school, one teacher spoke to him always in a “Peter Sellers” Indian accent. Footage of the Mexico Olympics was a “great moment” for Kureishi because it pulled together an alternative culture and politics of race that he had been gradually compiling, primarily through the ephemera of a consumer culture. It was in a copy of Life magazine read in his local library that Kureishi first came across images of the Black Panther Party “in black vests and slacks, with Jimi Hendrix haircuts.” His most thumbed book became the Penguin edition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. On his bedroom walls, he replaced posters of Cream and the Rolling Stones with posters of the Black Panthers.Footnote 35 Kureishi's was a private drama that must have occurred in many other bedrooms across the country. Ska singer Pauline Black narrates an almost identical moment from her own childhood. In her version, the library was in Romford, the text Malcolm X's Autobiography (also published as a Penguin paperback in the late 1960s), and the bedroom decoration a clenched black fist with “Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud,” painted in black on a large piece of cardboard. Through a heady mix of Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and, once again, Thommie Smith's and John Carlos's black-gloved Olympics salutes, an “awareness of another world beyond the sleepy, suburban confines of Romford took shape in my mind.”Footnote 36
Placing two black teenagers’ encounters with television, radio, and magazines beside the memoirs of a more straightforwardly “political” figure such as Trevor Carter draws attention to the recurrence of these mediated forms—especially television—as sites of black formation in the 1960s and 1970s. The televisation of race politics in this era held the capacity to reconstitute not just black identities and politics, but white identities and politics, too, and it is to this that I shall turn next. In closing this section, however, I want to return again to organized politics to suggest how, even in direct encounters with African-American political activists and spokespersons—the encounters that have thus far dominated historians’ analyses of this political moment—television could intervene in revealing ways.
Television was the terrain on which, as the Phillips brothers recall, “we could watch black giants walking the earth.”Footnote 37 And yet these giants—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Angela Davis, Penny Jackson, Fania Jordan, Inez Williams—also came in person to Britain, in visits that could hold an equally strong political and emotional charge. When Stokely Carmichael delivered a speech at London's Roundhouse in July 1967, a West Indian man in the audience appealed to him: “We're not even noticed till we're moving in next door, or going down the street with a pretty chick or something like that,” the man told Carmichael. “Then people'll look at you, and say ‘look at that black man.’ Otherwise, they don't even know we're here. You know, I mean we realise your situation in America, man, but we got an even bigger problem here cos we ain't even noticed. You are.” The man's frustrations captured both the invisibility of black Britishness, and the turn to the United States for a means past this predicament. The statement put to Carmichael concerned the very conditions of black visibility in Britain. The man feared erasure: that people “don't even know we're here.” He feared the confinement of otherness: only existing as a bogeyman to police the borders of the nation. He wanted to control those conditions of visibility, to define himself, something that Carmichael was credited with having done. Significantly, even in this direct encounter with an African American, television was identified as a key site in the negotiation of identity. Carmichael's interlocutor made his point by arguing for the need for more diverse representations of black people on British television—“I would like to see a Negro on television doing a part as a lawyer, or a doctor, or something like that, something I respect, you know.”Footnote 38 On the face of it, this must appear a strange appeal to make to a man like Stokely Carmichael. Such an appeal points again to the connection between community and the mode of its imagination, and returns us to the demands made of the BBC in their 1965 conferences. Visibility—being noticed—was inextricably tied up with seeing oneself on television. Indeed, we might assume that the man's charge that Carmichael was “noticed” may well have to do with the level of media coverage his actions received at that time. Such appeals demand that we situate the visits of African-American political figures to Britain in this era within the wider frames through which they had already become familiar faces to their British audiences. They also suggest that, in attempting to understand the significance of television for the reconstitution of race in this era, we cannot limit ourselves either to news broadcast programming about civil rights, Black Power, or race relations, nor to documentary or drama. If race was reconstituted through television, it was in the “flow” of television across the programming schedules.Footnote 39
LIVING VICARIOUSLY
While some welcomed interventions such as Carmichael's in British race-relations politics, others were less enthusiastic. In 1968, Mary WhitehouseFootnote 40 argued for the inclusion of broadcasting within the terms of the new Race Relations Bill. She had her sights on the airtime afforded to the Pakistani radical socialist and president of the Oxford Union, Tariq Ali, the anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First, and the Black Power leader, Stokely Carmichael.Footnote 41 Following a BBC interview with Carmichael after his 1967 London tour, Whitehouse wrote to the broadcaster and several newspapers to complain of the damage the broadcast might do to public morale.Footnote 42 Her appeal was premised on the fear that the increasingly volatile rhetoric of international antiracist and black liberation politics, transmitted into British living rooms, could threaten the stability of the social order in Britain. In this era, many within the emerging British New Left were beginning to define their politics in a postimperial internationalist frame. Whitehouse's reaction can be located in a countervailing commitment “to the ‘survival’ of the nation, against (post) imperial international concerns [and] the transnational commitments of both the New Left and postcolonial, diaspora communities in Britain”—a position more readily identified with Powellism.Footnote 43 Television, a technology of modernity ambivalently welcomed by Whitehouse, here held the potential to menace national stability.
For Whitehouse, such broadcasts demonstrated the “lack of understanding amongst television professionals of the power of television to accentuate problems.”Footnote 44 Throughout her career, Whitehouse was motivated by an anxiety over television's disruptive capacities. “[T]he very basic reality and responsibility of television,” she would declaim in 1965, was “that it comes into the home.” As one Whitehouse supporter added, TV was “an intruder into private homes.”Footnote 45 As Janet Thumim has proposed, the rise of television led to a fundamental transformation of the “crucial structuring boundaries” of “past and present, here and there, self and other/s,”Footnote 46 reordering the relation of the domestic space of the viewer to the world depicted on screen. For this very reason, television was valued by some “as a means of connecting the private, personal world with the public ‘world out there’ of historical events and process.”Footnote 47 For those exasperated by their apparent exclusion from the national “everyday” of television, this was particularly valuable, especially as it connected the viewer to wider transnational spaces. Certainly this was the case for Mike and Trevor Phillips, Trevor Carter, Pauline Black, or Hanif Kureishi, watching Black Power history unfold on screen. Indeed, it could be just as transformative for white Britons: my partner's father remembers vividly the excitement and energy of watching the Olympics Black Power salute from his television set in a remote farmhouse in Suffolk. But this apparent collapsing of national and global, and of private and public spheres, offering an ambivalent sense of distance and proximity, familiarity and unfamiliarity, could also make television viewing a remarkably uncanny experience. In its disruptive qualities, television could play a critical role not only in the imagination of community, but in apprehensions of its collapse. In an extensive sociological survey of racism and the mass media in the late sixties and early seventies Britain, Paul Hartmann and Charles Husband noted that white respondents to their interviews were most likely to frame hostility to their black neighbors in terms of feared “riots and trouble.” This was a framing the authors attribute to “the centrality of violence and conflict in the overseas coverage,” noting that “crime, riots and trouble (including the American situation)” were the most frequently recalled topics that respondents remembered from media coverage of “coloured people.”Footnote 48 Such mass-mediated apprehensions of their neighbors worked through television's capacity to close the distance between the neighborhood and a wider world represented as in the grip of violent racial conflicts.
Though surviving footage from this era is disappointingly scarce, making a reconstruction of viewing experiences for white and black Britons in the 1960s and early 1970s an even more difficult task than it would already be, it is certain that news of American race politics was at this time ubiquitous. The protests and violence that shook many American cities during the successive “long hot summers” of the late 1960s received extensive coverage in Britain's national papers, conveying the soon familiar images of burning buildings and baton-wielding police. While footage from the television news channels has not survived, the British Pathé newsreels of this period suggest these scenes were as readily reproduced in film as they were in print. The newsreels record the mid-sixties uprisings in Los Angeles and in Newark, Detroit, and Harlem, playing images of looted shops, smoldering buildings, armed police, and crowds running down city streets.Footnote 49 These uprisings equally animated the current affairs programs of the late sixties, with This Week broadcasting The Fire This Time in 1967 and, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, City at Gunpoint, focusing on the now-familiar scenes of civil unrest in Newark.Footnote 50 This coverage of the uprisings in northern US cities of the late 1960s was never far removed from coverage of the Black Power politics that were seen, by many, as their counterpart. Again, current-affairs programs were quick to expand on the news coverage.Footnote 51 From 1966 to 1971, the BBC and ITV aired numerous programs covering the rise of Black Power in the United States and in Britain,Footnote 52 while the Times dedicated a series of investigative features to the topic, calling it “The Black Man in Search of Power,” later published as a single volume in the summer of 1968.Footnote 53 The visual signs and rhetorical devices of US Black Power were sufficiently common currency by 1971 for the popular television comedy Please, Sir! to run an episode hinging on the anxieties generated in the old-guard (and implicitly Powellite) school caretaker, Potter, when he is convinced by the pupils of 5C that his new assistant is a Black Power militant. In a gag that introduces the theme to the episode, Potter is called over by one of 5C's troublemakers. “What do you want?,” Potter asks. “Black Power,” responds the pupil, holding up a clenched fist. This was a joke that worked through allusion to Willie Ricks's famous and constantly repeated call-and-response at Stokely Carmichael's 1966 address in Greenwood, Mississippi; it relied, precisely, on how quickly that footage of Carmichael and Ricks, introducing “Black Power” to the world, could be called to mind.Footnote 54
The readiness to turn anxieties around Black Power politics into comedy in Please, Sir! suggests that there was no inevitability about how Black Power could be coded on British television screens. However, Potter's fears, parodied in Please, Sir!, appear to have had substantial traction. Genre is important here. The homeliness of Please, Sir!, a long-running situation comedy (1968–1972) on the trials and tribulations of Bernard Hedges, a young teacher caught between the boisterous antics of his pupils and the stiff and reactionary Potter, offered a site in which each conflict was matched with a resolution, and each week the stakes were again reset. Such imaginations inhabit the sensibility of a stable “everyday” that television could often work to sustain. But just as Kureishi's description of his adolescent racialization moves between his exclusion from television's “everyday,” the reformation of the “everyday” through television, and the capacity of television as spectacle to unsettle and rework the “everyday” itself through “great moments,” so too within the wider flow of the broadcasting schedule there was much that, for some, could inspire anxiety. Indeed, as Kureishi also recalls of the moment he caught the Mexico Olympics in a Bromley sweetshop, “[t]he white shopkeeper was outraged.” The familiar of television had been made unfamiliar: “He said to me: they shouldn't mix politics and sport.”Footnote 55 If the generic logics of sports coverage, soap operas, or situation comedies work through the articulation of familiarity, then the logic of television news and current affairs is the inverse. At the center of the former stands the “everyday;” at the center of the latter, “spectacle.” As these different generic conventions merged in the overall flow of television programming, and as this was encountered as a constituent part of and a site for the reconstitution of everyday life, we cannot too readily separate these different dynamics of television in our understanding of its capacity to rework race politics, racialization, and racialized experience at this time. Within television's “flow,” race politics as spectacle held the capacity to remake the racial everyday, generating not just individual moments of revelation, but significant disquiet.
An early ambitious attempt to cover the global trajectories of black liberation and its televisation was a feature-length BBC documentary by David Wheeler initially titled The Negro Challenge but soon rebranded The Colour War, broadcast on BBC1 on 13 September 1967.Footnote 56The Colour War operated as meta-television, a commentary on the capacity of television viewing to produce racialized experience. As such, it provides a privileged access to television “flow” as a formal dimension of television viewing in this historical moment. Wheeler's program ranged across race politics from the United States to South Africa, Brazil, and Britain, and it included forays into the history of colonialism and slavery in the Americas. The sections of the program were linked by recurrent footage of racial violence and urban unrest in the United States, suggesting the specter of such violence as a continual undercurrent to the more sober debates they intercut.
The Colour War opens with the sound of a police siren wailing over footage of burning buildings, the silhouettes of armed police visible before the flames. A gunshot rings out and the image changes to a pane of glass with a bullet hole through the middle, as a disembodied voice begins a question: “When you were out there on the streets, throwing bricks and bottles and whatever else you were doing, what was going through your head?” “Try and knock the hell out of any white man I seen,” replies a man now in view, an African American in prisoner uniform. “Tear up his car, tear up his clothes. Anything I could find that would destroy him.”Footnote 57 The shot cuts to the infamous inaugural address of Governor George Wallace proclaiming “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” to a whooping crowd, before cutting once more to Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, where a man of African descent speaks out against American racism under the banner “Pan African National Crusade.” As a member of the audience shouts for the speaker to “get up in the trees where you belong,” gesticulating at the trees behind him, the speaker screams: “I want to see you die!”Footnote 58 In the space of ninety seconds, The Colour War's opening sequence darted between images of devastated American cities and segregationism's most famous address, which were immediately recognizable to a British public. The montage itself speaks to television's capacity to produce “the continual collapsing of narratives, narratives located in ‘the wrong’ place, strange displacements, the merging of stories, [and] repetitions”;Footnote 59 the appearance of a speaker in Hyde Park raging against American racism collapsed the distance between America and Britain as the footage that preceded it appeared reconstituted, animating a domestic political confrontation.
The next shot in the program's opener was perhaps the most dislocating. From the violent rhetoric of Speakers’ Corner, the shot moved to the interior of an English home. A man sits on a sofa, curtains drawn behind him. This is unmistakably a front room. The camera faces the man, sitting where an armchair or, more likely, a television might, creating a mirror image for the viewer at home. The man delivers a short line: “What is better for Great Britain: multiracial violence, or, repatriate these people from whence they came?” Immediately the frame changes to an African American man, who stands, by contrast, outside, in the ruins of post-uprising Watts. “This is gonna happen all over America,” he warns. “It's going to be a hot world, not a hot summer—it's a hot world.” The inclusion of an ordinary Englishman in his front room is significant. His environment mirrored that of many watching from their own front rooms, in their own homes. The contrast between his domestic stability and the flames and ruins of American cities provides a sense of distance between the worlds depicted on screen. And yet his position amid these shifting images of confrontation and destruction, and the short ultimatum he delivers, closes this distance. We can well believe that he, like the viewer, has seen the footage that surrounds his appearance, and he is unsure about how far it can relate only to a world “out there”: it is already organizing his vision of a future Britain. The Colour War was itself both a constituent part in the relaying of images of America—and of American Black Power—to a British audience, and a program that appeared to offer a critical exploration of the effects of the process for organizing visions of America and visions of Britain. “Soon,” wrote the producer, David Wheeler, in a preview article for the program in the Radio Times, “with communications satellites poised above every continent, the graphic details of every racial incident, wherever it may occur, will be instantly available to everyone with a television set.” This, as the documentary sought to demonstrate, would have definite effects on how race in Britain could be lived. “Already,” Wheeler added, “we in Britain are able to live vicariously through the long hot summers of American cities and watch the battle of the slums day by day and even hour by hour.”Footnote 60
After an hour and a half of footage of conflict from around the world, the program returns to the white Englishman from the opener. Again he warns that the world just witnessed on screen has already been coming into his own, ostensibly separate, space. “This problem has been introduced into this country. It's here and it's here to stay, so long as there are colored people,” he announces. “And things will get progressively worse until in the end we'll find ourselves in the same position as the United States is today.” The camera shot moves to his wife beside him. “We often read in the press of people running amok,” she begins, inviting the viewer to recall the images of civil unrest that were featured in intermittent cuts throughout the program. But then an unexpected turn is made. “Immigrants,” she states, “with axes or choppers. And they're very prone to pull a knife quickly.” It is not clear who exactly the woman on the sofa was referring to, but it seems a superimposition was occurring here: the scenes from America provided in nightly TV coverage were being reimagined on the streets of Britain. Or, as David Wheeler might have it, here a white British woman, watching the television from her living room, was living vicariously through the long hot summers of America.
“A NEW AND DANGEROUS PHILOSOPHY”
It is in the context of the televised coverage of US race politics that we must understand the reception of African American activists in Britain in this period. On 15 July 1967, Stokely Carmichael arrived in Britain for a ten-day tour of London. While Carmichael visited black communities around London and gave a series of public addresses, urban uprisings in the United States increased in intensity and spread from Detroit to Pontiac, Toledo, New York, and Cambridge, Maryland. Eliciting frenzied reporting in much of the popular press, the uprisings provided an immediately recognizable visual repertoire of “America in crisis” through the endlessly reproduced footage of flaming buildings, running crowds of “rioters,” armed police, and speeding police cars with wailing sirens. Media accounts of the urban unrest in the United States and reports on Carmichael's presence in Britain were frequently read together. A leading editorial in the Times spoke of the Detroit uprising “rioters” as mobilized by “a new and dangerous philosophy … that any rioting, any destruction, any killing of white-skinned people is a battle won in the cause of Negro emancipation.” In this “new philosophy” of “hit out, and hit back, defy the law, and shake society,” the paper further ventured, “[t]he figure of Mr. Stokely Carmichael, though he was not there in person, dominated the scene with his maxim ‘an eye for an eye.’”Footnote 61 The “philosophy” in question was “Black Power,” and here it was unequivocally framed as a philosophy of violence and destruction. But this was not a concern only for the pages on world affairs. The same edition of the Times reported that Carmichael—the absent presence of the Detroit uprising—had spent his time in Britain visiting “Brixton, Notting Hill and other areas with large coloured populations, advocating Black Power.”Footnote 62 One ITV program on Carmichael's London visit, broadcast just days after his departure, intercut footage of his London addresses with footage of the Detroit uprising.Footnote 63 Television collapsed these spaces together.
An immediate result of Carmichael's visit was an increased sensitivity to the signs of Black Power in Britain as evidence of an impending conspiracy to import American violence. In the weeks following Carmichael's visit to Brixton, the Brixton Advertiser ran several articles exploring his impact on local black Brixtonians. The various respondents were quick to qualify any criticisms that they made of Carmichael with explanations for his appeal. They provided equally strong criticism of current race relations and immigration policies, and condemned a recent speech by the Conservative MP Duncan Sandys on the supposedly disastrous effects of miscegenation for the health of the nation. However, accompanying editorials honed in only on the potential violence Carmichael's presence might bring, a move which tacitly supported Sandys's interventions and blamed the looming nightmare of American violence on “the biggest and most fatal blunder ever made by leaders of our country, who have deliberately transformed us from a white country into a black and white one with all the attendant consequences such as Stokely Carmichael and Michael de Freitas, leader of the Black Muslims in Britain, to plague and threaten us.”Footnote 64 Invoking memories of Britain as a “white country,” the Brixton Advertiser's response played upon fantasies of a lost time of whiteness that were deeply imbricated in the history of empire.Footnote 65 However, these fears were articulated through the image of American racial crisis reanimated on the shores of Britain. Letters to the London Evening News and Daily Telegraph show such concerns reverberating in popular responses, too, as readers wrote in to the papers to complain of the rise of Black Power politics at Speakers’ Corner, imploring the police to “act … to persuade these more articulate Africans not to bite the hand that feeds them.”Footnote 66
The fears of reproducing American conflicts within Britain, fears mobilized in response to Carmichael's July visit and the constant footage of urban unrest in America, created a new panic around Black Power that significantly altered the relation between black political organization and the state. Upon leaving Britain for North Vietnam on 25 July 1967, Carmichael was banned from reentry by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, on the grounds that his presence was “not conducive to the public good,”Footnote 67 while the Trinidadian activist Michael Abdul Malik—previously Michael de Freitas, and best known in the press as “Michael X,” the most recognizable face of an embryonic British Black Power politics—was arrested under the Race Relations Act for a speech he made in Reading in place of Carmichael on 24 July. Cassette recordings of Carmichael's London speeches were also considered by the Department of Public Prosecutions for possible enforcement under the same Act, while Conservative MP Kenneth Lewis lodged a formal complaint over a “Black Power outburst” on children's television program Come Here Often, after the program makers engaged “14 coloured people … in a live discussion on the American race riots and their relevance to Britain.”Footnote 68 Though no action appears to have resulted from Lewis's complaint, a similar complaint in December by Enoch Powell and his fellow Conservative MP Sir Cyril Black, over the BBC's broadcasting of an interview with Stokely Carmichael in which Carmichael had been asked “[what] we black people in Britain should do to liberate ourselves,” led to a public apology issued to Powell on behalf of the BBC that was reported in all the major newspapers.Footnote 69
In the three months following Carmichael's visit, all the new Black Power leaders who had risen to prominence following Carmichael found themselves the objects of state attention and of intense coverage by the local and national media. Nigerian playwright Obi Egbuna, founder of one of Britain's earliest Black Power organizations, the Universal Coloured People's Association, claimed that since Carmichael had shared their Speakers’ Corner platform in July, members of the organization had been subjected to increasing police harassment and arrests.Footnote 70 The most publicized case was that of Michael Abdul Malik, who was prosecuted under the Race Relations Act and sentenced to one year in jail. Malik's colleagues Roy Sawh, Ajoy Ghose, Alton Alexander Watson, and Uyornumu Michel Ezekiel were similarly prosecuted under the same law for speeches made at Speakers’ Corner in July. At both trials the press was quick to report any Black Power badges worn by defendants and supporters, and to note any raised fists in the gallery.Footnote 71
Carmichael's visit inaugurated a series of crises that demonstrated the increased political weight attached to signs of Black Power within Britain. The change from the early 1960s was palpable. In 1963, a local black activist from Bristol named Paul Stephenson, influenced by the Civil Rights politics of the Montgomery bus boycotts, had organized a similar boycott of the Bristol Omnibus Company in protest of their color bar in employment policy, gaining the support of Harold Wilson, Tony Benn, Fenner Brockway, and Sir Learie Constantine in the process.Footnote 72 Meeting Stokely Carmichael four years later, Stephenson knew that the success of his campaign was contingent on its historical moment—before Carmichael. “If it had come after you had said ‘Black Power,’” as he remembers telling Carmichael in 1967, “I'd have been doomed. They didn't know what to call me other than a nuisance. But if I had been coming out as a Black Power leader!”Footnote 73 Stephenson's comments reveal much about the changing political landscape of the time. Cultures of black resistance were not born in the moment of Carmichael's arrival to Britain, but the construction of the folk-devil figure of the Black Power militant—a figure that recalls footage of the incipient American Black Power violence, and that brought with it a host of fears about societal disorder and racial crisis—belongs definitively to this moment.
TELEVISING BRITISH BLACK POWER
Carmichael's visit was a watershed in the development of black radical politics in Britain, and in the growth of cultures of radical blackness. In his wake, television programs began to address the growing visibility of radical blackness on British streets. After the immediate stories generated by Carmichael's arrival—the publication of a Black Power manifesto by the Universal Coloured People's Association, the arrest of Malik and Egbuna, and the censorship of Carmichael's voice—those projects that had taken longer to plan emerged with more in-depth explorations of this new phenomenon. In late January, ITV's flagship current-affairs program, This Week, ran an episode called “The New British—Integration or Black Power?,” while the following month the BBC's Man Alive aired its documentary and studio discussion, Black Power in Britain, generating much publicity over the studio walkout of Obi Egbuna. In March, the Times ran its series of features “The Black Man in Search of Power,” which, as noted, were expanded for general publication in June. These media productions reflect an existing awareness of the presence of Black Power on the international stage and anxiety about the meaning of the appearance of Black Power cultures within Britain. They refined the frames through which this development could be understood, and they provided narratives into which Black Power in Britain could be explained and responded.
The production of February's Man Alive program sheds light on the processes of narrativization. Man Alive was a BBC current-affairs program begun in 1965 by This Week reporter Desmond Wilcox and his coproducer Bill Morton. The program aimed, in Wilcox's terms, to provide “a forum for ordinary voices … proving that ordinary people could and should articulate their own circumstances.” It soon developed a reputation for exposing “the raw, ragged nerves of the human condition.”Footnote 74 In preparation for the Black Power in Britain program, the production team spent two months recording on-site interviews with Black Power leaders and black teenagers of African, Caribbean, and South Asian descent. Footage of the interviews would intersperse and direct the debates on the program; those interviewed were invited to appear in the Man Alive studio to participate in a recorded debate with a group of “white liberals,” including the chair of the Race Relations Board, Mark Bonham-Carter. The on-site interviews produced hours of footage of discussions ranging from whether white Britons should be encouraged to listen to more South Asian music to the roles of missionaries in independent African states, and they included many and varied responses on the meaning of Black Power. The interview transcripts reveal a young black British population still coming to terms with what Black Power signifies to them, but the demands of brevity and thematic unity required that the interviews were compressed and edited substantially in order to focus instead on discussions of impending violence.
The interviewing team pushed for predictions of violence. One teenager, asked what Black Power meant to him, had responded that “the whole idea to me is communication between white and black to have this integrated society … and I think you can't have an integrated society without first knowing each others’ feelings.” He was quickly directed to change tack with the follow-up question: “Do you feel there should be violence? That there has to be hatred or dislike?” The conversation took several digressions, as the teenager first began talking about his understanding of the colonial past, and then evidently misunderstood the sites in which he was expected to prophesize violence, talking instead about the possibilities of Nigeria amassing an army.Footnote 75 Others interviewed on what Black Power meant to them revealed similar confusion over what they were expected to say, one talking about the work of Dr. David Pitt—a Grenadan-born anti-racism campaigner and former Labour Party candidate, and not a name often associated with Black Power—while another replied uncertainly, “well, erm, well I think, you know, they have got a right, you know, in what they do.” When the interviewer pressed harder (“you want the right to push back?”) his respondent gave a noncommittal “not really” and began talking about racist estate agents.Footnote 76
The transcripts of the interviews are marked with red pen, indicating which parts to edit down for transmission. The more ambiguous responses are marked “BP?” in the margin, and they did not make the final cut, while any predictions of or expressed desires for future violence were marked for potential inclusion, with “VIOLENCE” written in capital letters beside them. The final edit focused heavily on the interview with one sixteen-year-old, Dennis Grant, who had given the most animated responses to questions. But even his most evocative response—“There will be just a great big war”—although used as the hook line of the press release advertising the program's transmission, had to be removed from the final cut because of the incoherence of what followed: it appeared Grant was talking about a war between Britain and Jamaica, not racial conflict within Britain's shores. Careful editing of the interviews was necessary in order to deliver on the promise made by the press release, namely “militant coloured schoolchildren” proposing “violence” as “the only way we will get our rights.” Both previews and reviews in the press focused on the theme of violence, the Daily Sketch adding that the effect could only be to convince white audiences “that black immigrants are a menace to our way of life.”Footnote 77 Audience research on the program revealed that for many viewers the apparent violence of Black Power rhetoric showed “little hope of solving this problem by talks at any level,” and that the program made for “uneasy viewing.”Footnote 78
The construction of the figure of the Black Power man as a representative of unthinking violence revealed the work being done by a fantasized inscription of narratives of America's racial crisis onto British soil. Here was a fantasized, racialized other, a “folk devil” onto whom could be inscribed “visible reminders of what we should not be,” and through whom visions of Britain's present and potential futures could be mapped.Footnote 79 The selections made by the editing team of Man Alive are therefore revealing. It is perhaps not so surprising that, as the signs of Black Power became more visible in the streets of Britain, the current affairs media should turn its attention to the phenomenon, but the choices made reveal how a circularity crept in to this process. Coverage of US urban crises sensitized a white British viewing public into reading Britain's growing black population with increasing foreboding. This reaction itself appears to have in turn dictated the themes to be taken up again by the media covering developments as they progressed.
“THEY MAKE TOO MUCH ON BLACK PEOPLE”
Television and mass culture articulated new ways of being black in Britain from the late 1960s, drawing substantially on black radical cultures in the United States. Speaking before a Select Committee hearing on “police/immigrant relations” in Coventry in 1972, Mr. Stevenson, secretary of the Coventry Community Relations Council, addressed the issue of local police targeting black youths wearing Angela Davis badges. “The ordinary black youngsters are not political,” he insisted. “[T]hey are expressing something which is saying to them ‘We matter; we count.’ If the police see an Angela Davis badge they may think ‘This is a political militant, and therefore we have got to treat this person as such.’ These youngsters are using these badges often with different meanings.”Footnote 80 From badges, berets, and dashikis to “Afro” hairstyles, leather jackets, and dark sunglasses, Black Power as mass culture provided a new ensemble of style in Britain. This crossed a whole network of subterranean channels, borrowing from one subcultural register to another to create a new interpellation into blackness that recalled not just US Black Power cultures but a whole history of postwar subcultures, from the badges of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and antiwar protest to the rock ‘n’ roll and beat generation styles of America and Britain. This was, as Mr. Stevenson recognized in his testimony before the Select Committee, a hugely productive repertoire, capable of sustaining many different meanings. It certainly incorporated the organized politics of Black Power in Britain, but it also moved substantially beyond it into a wider politics in which displaying the integrity of the black self was central.Footnote 81 And yet, as Stevenson also noted, police in Coventry encountering a black youth wearing an Angela Davis badge were likely to entertain only one line of deduction: “This is a political militant, and therefore we have got to treat this person as such.”
In the police response we see the badge-wearing youth transformed into a folk devil. Stevenson's remarks alert us to the potential productivity and reach of the symbolic repertoire of Black Power for a new generation growing up black in early 1970s Britain. However, that he speaks to us from within the records of a parliamentary inquiry into the relationship between police and so-called immigrants commissioned in the wake of two years of increasingly public confrontation between these groups points us to the other side to this story, as does his bleak account of the narrowness of police reasoning. The signifiers of Black Power in Britain increasingly came to be read as synonymous with political extremism and public disorder, and British Black Power came to be elected as an object of public anxiety and state surveillance from the late 1960s onwards, through which a new politics of race could be channeled. If the televisation of US Black Power remade the racial everyday in Britain in ways that could prove liberating for many, it was also the case that the tendency to narrate Black Power through the frames of violence and unrest held the capacity to recast blackness as itself a form of violence and insurrection, remaking the politics of race in Britain through fantasies of US racial conflict.
By 1970, as the presenter of a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Black Power in Britain observed, the words “Black Power” could “send shivers down the spine of the nervous white man and for many can so easily become a nightmare in which they see streets running with blood [and] race riots.” An unnamed black citizen in London interviewed on the program noted how in the media “an attempt is made to give the impression that Black Power means violence and it means buildings burning and it means ordinary people being assaulted in the streets.” Rudy Narayan, a Guyanese barrister and antiracism campaigner, added that “the concept of Black Power which seems to exist in the minds of every Englishman … is that it is a philosophy of violence and aggression and anti-white feeling.”Footnote 82
Violence became the organizing frame through which the signifiers of Black Power in Britain could be made sense of, so that any expression of Black Power in Britain—whether a raised fist, a black beret, a dashiki, or a “natural”—became, automatically, a sign of looming violence, and recalled an American nightmare. Moreover, this reading of black cultures extended beyond only those manifest signifiers of Black Power on the street. As a teenage girl in Islington told a local police officer visiting her youth club in 1970,
I think people tend to think that every time they see a group of black teenagers walking along the street that they're going to cause some trouble whether they're peaceful, whether they're not. It's just that people think that way because they're black. They think that everybody that walks along the street in a gang—coloured kids—that they're Black Power and they're going to cause trouble.Footnote 83
In this Islington teenager's view, Black Power and its associated meanings had become the frame through which race in Britain was itself experienced and understood. “The newspapers as soon as there is something with black people involved they put it in the headlines—Black Power. Police Riots. You know, with race—Race Riots,” she added. “This has got nothing to do with it. … they make too much on black people. As soon as there's anything with black people involved they call it race riots, Black Power in every newspaper.”Footnote 84 Not only Black Power cultures, then, but blackness generally, and, even, the experience of being a racialized subject, turned here on visions of US race politics and racial violence. Writing in the Daily Mirror in early 1971, Keith Waterhouse observed that, for Enoch Powell, “the presence of black people in this country is in itself a portent of violence, revolution and things that go bump in the night.”Footnote 85 In this Islington teenager's account, such sentiments held true beyond Enoch Powell alone, and repeatedly determined how she was received by others.
These were important years in the politicization of race in Britain. Enoch Powell's rising popularity found him supporters across the political spectrum from the trade union movement to the far-right fringes of the National Front. Though he was expelled from the Conservative front benches for his “Rivers of Blood” address in 1968 and eventually left the party for the relative obscurity of Ulster Unionism, Powell was widely credited both with securing the Conservative victory of 1970, and with determining much of the political agenda on race in the years following his 1968 address.Footnote 86 The immigration and citizenship legislation passed in this era certainly bears this out. The introduction of a patriality clause to the 1971 Immigration Act under Heath's government effectively defined British citizenship on racial terms, and this unsavory politics paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's introduction of the Nationality Act in 1981, removing automatic citizenship to those born on British soil.Footnote 87 By the end of the 1970s, the New Right had triumphed in British politics, in a process begun by the breaking apart of the postwar political consensus under Powellism in 1968.Footnote 88 However, the undercurrent to this political shift was the culmination of a new black radical political formation in Britain. From the plethora of radical political organizations springing up across Britain in the 1960s, to the founding of supplementary schools, cultural centers, youth clubs, and housing communities, there developed a network of new organizations centered on an engagement with blackness as a cultural and political resource. In the 1970s and 1980s this often translated into a mass politics. Spontaneous clashes with police at the Notting Hill Carnival became an annual occurrence, and the early 1980s witnessed uprisings across British cities. Protest could also take more organized forms. In 1981, a demonstration of twenty thousand marched across London in protest against racism in the police, government, and the media, and the refusal of the police to protect black communities from often fatal attacks from the far right.Footnote 89
The politics of both white racism and black radicalism were forged through the many crises of the late 1960s. Both substantially developed through transactions with and imaginations of US race politics, as well as the developing politics of black radicalism that was on the rise across the black Atlantic world and beyond.Footnote 90 In a famous scene from the Black Audio Film Collective's acclaimed 1986 film Handsworth Songs, made in the aftermath of the 1985 Handsworth uprising, a female voice-over recounts the words of one local woman to a reporter:
There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories. If you look there you can see Enoch Powell telling us in 1969 that we don't belong. You can see Malcolm X visiting us in 1965 when the Conservatives said, “if you want a nigger for your neighbor, vote Labour.” She remembered Malcolm strolling through Smethwick saying, “if this is the centre of imperialism then we have a common struggle.”Footnote 91
The woman's comments insisted on understanding the urban unrest of the 1980s within a longer historical frame in which not only Powellism and the Smethwick election but the transnationalization of the black liberation politics of the 1960s held a substantial place.Footnote 92
Television was not all that was at play here, but it would also be impossible to tell this story without considering television's transformative force. The woman's recollections appeared over footage of the television cameras trained on the Handsworth neighborhood, where journalists harried residents for comment. In reproducing this woman's words, Handsworth Songs challenged the capacity of television to produce a perpetual present: it challenged the erasure of history effected in the endlessly recycled footage of the Handsworth uprising and its aftermath. The film equally critiqued how the television archive had transformed remembering.Footnote 93 The woman's recollection was intercut with a disordered tour of “race relations” programming, “race” documentaries, and news reportage from the 1940s to the 1960s. Television programs that today form the staple resource for historians exploring the postwar racialization of neighborhood, sexual relationships, or housing politics, were spliced together seemingly at random in this disjointed montage. The juxtaposition of this footage and the woman's comments, as Kobena Mercer has argued, left an “epic disphasure,” a splitting “between the private memories of black life … and the official public records of the [television] archive.”Footnote 94 And yet, while these television programs may exist today as an archive of historical memory, in an age in which everyday life was lived through the television set they existed, at the time of their transmission, as a means of living the present. As much as Handsworth Songs critiqued the erasures effected by television, as a study of race politics in the age of mass communication it also insisted that there was no place fully “outside” mass-mediated experience. Television was a critical site for the constitution of racial knowledge and racial experience in postwar Britain. As a medium that crossed continents, bridging time and space, telescoping, merging and recycling, it was central to the transnationalization of race politics, and to the remaking of everyday, racialized life as a site of politics.
