The Other Special Relationship

Race, Rights, and Riots in Britain and the United States

R. Kelley, S. Tuck, R. Kelley, S. Tuck, R. Kelley, S. Tuck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137392701
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The close diplomatic, economic, and military ties that comprising the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain have received plenty of attention from historians over the years. Less frequently noted are the countries' shared experiences of empire, white supremacy, racial inequality, and neoliberalism - and the attendant struggles for civil rights and political reform that have marked their recent history. This state-of-the-field collection traces the contours of this other "special relationship, " exploring its implications for our understanding of the development of an internationally interconnected civil rights movement. Here, scholars from a range of research fields contribute essays on a wide variety of themes, from solidarity protests to calypso culture to white supremacy.

1

“U.S. Negroes, Your Fight is Our Fight”: Black Britons and the 1963 March on Washington

Kennetta Hammond Perry

Before departing from London by boat on August 21, 1963, Mr. and Mrs. C. T. Gregory of Fort Wayne, Indiana, made arrangements to a have signed copy of a petition declaring their support for the upcoming March on Washington hand delivered to the American Embassy. Likely clipped from the pages of the international edition of the New York Times, the petition expressed that they had been “tremendously stirred” by the ideals of the march, a demonstration that the petition described as an “exhibition of dignity and courage and persistence.”¹ While they would not have a physical presence at the march, their signatures on the petition affirmed their desire to associate themselves with the event and the broader movement “which aspires not only to eradicate all racial barriers in American life but to liberate all Americans from the prisons of their biases and fears.”² The petition that Mr. and Mrs. Gregory signed had its origins in a meeting of artists, activists, intellectuals, and American citizens in Paris organized by James Baldwin and William Marshall several days earlier with the intent of raising the consciousness of black Americans in Paris about the civil rights movement in the United States and cultivating a sense of esprit de corps with those on the frontlines of the movement in the United States.³ As a result of the meeting, advertisements soliciting international support for the March on Washington movement, including the one that Mr. and Mrs. Gregory signed during their stay in London, were placed in European editions of the New York Times and Herald Tribune accompanied by a request that petitioners present their signed circulars at their local American Embassy on August 21, 1963, between 1 and 3 p.m. in an act of solidarity.⁴

The US Embassy in London reported that 47 “respectable Americans” left signed copies of petitions in support of the March on Washington on the afternoon of August 21, 1963.⁵ However, in the ensuing days, Black Britons who desired to align themselves with the March on Washington movement would engage the physical space of London’s American Embassy as a symbolic site of intervention with the movement in such a way that allowed them to engender a political praxis of diaspora that appropriated discourses of American racial (in)justice to articulate the specificities of the problem of race, racism, and (post)colonial blackness in postwar United Kingdom. On the day after Mr. and Mrs. Gregory’s petition arrived at the US Embassy in London, members of the newly formed Committee of Afro-Asian Caribbean Organisations of London announced plans to hold a march on August 31, 1963, from Ladbroke Grove Tube Station to the American Embassy to express their solidarity with “Afro-American Freedom Fighters” and “demand justice for England’s African Asian and West Indian population” whom they insisted, “also suffer from the cruel effects of racial exploitation.”⁶ Echoing many of the themes of the US march, Black UK activists hoped that their demonstration would further their demands for “equal rights, jobs, housing and education for all” as well as the repeal of what they deemed as “racist” immigration policies in the United Kingdom.⁷ In doing so, the solidarity march became a venue for Black Britons, the majority of whom were first-generation Afro-Caribbean migrants, to publicly register the dimensions of their own struggles for citizenship, inclusiveness, and belonging in the United Kingdom by boldly declaring in the streets of London, “U.S Negroes, Your Fight is Our Fight!”⁸

This chapter examines the diasporic character of the 1963 March on Washington Movement for Jobs and Freedom in the United Kingdom. In the months leading up to the March on Washington, Black UK activists and intellectuals expressed unbridled support for Black freedom in America. They closely followed events in Alabama, Mississippi, and in towns and cities throughout the South as Black Americans organized sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and other forms of mass protest demanding integration, the dissolution of Jim Crow laws, equal opportunity and the rights of full citizenship guaranteed to them by the US Constitution. In addition to bearing witness to the struggles of Black Americans, Black Britons collectively organized in solidarity with the Black freedom movement in America and invoked the iconography and rhetoric of American racial (in)justice to articulate the dynamics shaping the local politics of race that governed the lived conditions of blackness in postwar United Kingdom. In doing so, I argue that by organizing events like the London solidarity march, Black Britons transformed the 1963 March on Washington into a type of discursive capital that wielded a powerful story about race, citizenship, and the dilemmas of blackness that transcended the boundaries of the American nation and engendered the relations that constitute the (re)making of diaspora.⁹

Recently scholarship on the Black freedom movement in America has begun to situate the campaigns for social justice waged by Black Americans throughout the twentieth century in relation to a broader global history of transnational race politics and leftist organizing.¹⁰ However, while historians have helped us to understand the extent to which international audiences, events, and opinions shaped the American racial landscape during the twentieth century, less is known about precisely how the transmission of knowledge about American race relations informed the politics of race in other nations professing similar credos of democracy, universal rights of citizenship, and egalitarianism.¹¹ Locating Black Britons’ March on Washington allows one to consider the stakes involved in the transatlantic circulation of narratives of and about civil rights and Black freedom in America and raises a number of important questions about how these narratives reverberated in the racial geographies of postwar United Kingdom. What did spaces like Birmingham, Alabama, people like Medgar Evers, and events like the March on Washington mean to Black Britons negotiating the particularities of racial politics in the United Kingdom? How did Black Britons appropriate and reconstitute narratives about the experiences of Black Americans to articulate what it meant to be Black and British during the early 1960s? Moreover, what does the history of Black Briton’s symbolic March on Washington unearth about the politics and praxis of diaspora?¹²

To investigate these questions it is necessary to contextualize the evolution of a Black UK solidarity movement in relation to the specificities of the politics of race and nation in the United Kingdom and the United States in the early 1960s. To be sure, because the politics of race, and to be more precise, the politics of white supremacy in both Britain and the United States were inextricably bound to racially charged transnational issues including decolonization, the cold War, third world liberation movements, and international debates over human rights and the eradication of racial discrimination, it is also useful to track how these extant concerns shaped how Black Britons articulated the stakes of what was happening in the United States in 1963 and the implications of those events in the United Kingdom and beyond. Central to considerations of Black Britons’ responses to the Black freedom movement in America, particularly as it pertains to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is the formation of a political lobby known as the Committee of Afro-Asian Caribbean Organizations (CAACO) in the spring of 1963. Spearheaded by Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian native who arrived in the United Kingdom in 1955 after being deported from the United States for her involvement with the Communist Party, CAACO aimed to create a bridge between various Black UK and leftist grassroots organizations in London around the interfacing issues of antiracism and anticolonialism in response to intensifying civil rights campaigns waged by Black Americans. For Black UK activists like Claudia Jones, London’s solidarity march became a defining moment in a local movement intended to articulate affinities between the struggles of Black Americans and Black Britons. Indeed, as this chapter argues, the history of London’s solidarity march on Washington illustrates the extent to which Black UK activists created a transatlantic dialogue about the meaning of Black freedom by invoking and mobilizing the relations of diaspora as a discursive apparatus to make claims about the politics of race and citizenship in the United Kingdom. By tracing the contours of this dynamic, this discussion underscores the extent to which the history of London’s solidarity march offers an instructive point of entry to examine how Black Britons challenged and critiqued the racialized politics of citizenship that were no doubt akin to Jim Crow yet rooted in the particular historical exigencies of British imperial and (post)colonial relations.

* * *

The spring of 1963 marked a watershed moment in the Black freedom movement in America. In April of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined forces with Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to launch a multipronged local protest movement in Birmingham, Alabama, code named “Project C.” Taking a “confrontational” yet nonviolent approach to civil rights advocacy, Project C aimed to provide a template for transforming local communities throughout the South by peacefully demonstrating for the desegregation of public schools, the integration of public facilities, equal employment opportunities for black workers, and improved social services for black residents and low-income neighborhoods.¹³ Less than two weeks after the campaign began, Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed and placed in solitary confinement for defying a state court order to cease all marches in the city. While sitting in solitary confinement, King penned his celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which laid bare the frustrated cry of a movement for social justice that demanded freedom without delay.

In the weeks following King’s arrest, Project C and the escalating racial strife engulfing Birmingham would solicit international attention when dramatic images of black protestors—many of whom were children—pummeled by high-pressure fire hoses and attacked by police dogs under the orders of Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor appeared in print and on the evening news for audiences across the nation and beyond. As the conflict intensified, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   “U.S. Negroes, Your Fight is Our Fight”: Black Britons and the 1963 March on Washington
• 2   “Black Was the Colour of Our Fight”: The Transnational Roots of British Black Power
• Individual Life   A Black Englishman in the Heart of the Confederacy: The Transnational Life of Paul Stephenson
• 3   Caribbean Left: Diasporic Circulation
• 4   Scholar-Activist St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic World of Black Radicalism
• Individual Life   “We All Became Black”: Tony Soares, African-American Internationalists, and Anti-imperialism
• 5   A Heavy Load: The American Civil Rights Movement and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement
• 6   Containing Racism? The London Experience, 1957–1968
• Individual Life   From Manchester to Monroe: The Unexpected Journey of Constance Lever
• 7   “Nobody in This World Is Better Than Us”: Calypso in the Age of Decolonization and Civil Rights
• 8   Stax, Subcultures, and Civil Rights: Young Britain and the Politics of Soul Music in the 1960s
• Individual Life   From Guy Warren to Kofi Ghanaba: A Life of Transatlantic (Dis)Connections
• 9   Violence at Desmond’s Hip City: Gender and Soul Power in London
• 10   Brotherhood, Betrayal, and Rivers of Blood: Southern Segregationists and British Race Relations
• Notes on Contributors
• Index