antifascist organizations following the NF’s decline as an electoral force from 1979 onward.
In 1976 Clare Short, a local activist who like Hain would go on to become a Labour cabinet minister, became director of AFFOR. She characterized the group as a “hub of anti-racist activity” in which the guiding principles were “respect [for] each other’s religious institutions” coupled with an “absolutely uncompromising” position on racism.47 The group published articles discussing the nature of fascism and an exposé of a local NF leader’s comments regarding the supposed “swamping” of Britain by “coloured invaders,” comments that echoed those later made by Margaret Thatcher in the run-up to the 1979 general election.48 As with the ANL, this tactic of exposing the fascism or Nazism of the Far Right often stemmed less from a desire to counter the effects of racism on minority communities and more from a concerted effort to appeal to as broad a white audience as possible. Thus the author of one AFFOR pamphlet, So What Are You Going to Do About the National Front?, urged “white society” to recognize that “compared with the hurt and bitterness and anger of many black Britons” the distaste white communities felt at the presence of a neo-Nazi party in Britain was “minute.” Other articles published in AFFOR’s quarterly newsletter highlighted the legal problems faced by local ethnic minorities and lobbied the Commission for Racial Equality to expand on its remit in relation to the needs of ethnic minorities across the city.49
Yet unlike either RAR or the ANL, AFFOR maintained a strong connection to a particular locale. The initial decision to base AFFOR in Handsworth was made because it was felt that this was the area in which the group would best be able to make tangible improvements in the lives of black communities. From the perspective of the university campus, where the group’s founding member, John Hick, spent his working life, there was an exoticism to “multi-racial Handsworth” as a place of comparative excitement and turmoil. Situating AFFOR in Handsworth was, one activist wrote in 1979, about “taking sides . . . with the black communities . . . choosing an innercity area and trying to cope with the advantages and disadvantages of such a place.”50 While the initial depiction of the group as angry young men was an easy characterization to make, the group’s commitment to developing practical responses to the inequalities experienced by the local population meant that by the 1980s it had undergone a significant transformation from the direct action associated with the Stop the Seventy Tour to being among the most established players on the local race relations scene, regularly obtaining some of the largest funding grants with the most regularity.51
Throughout its existence local casework was never off AFFOR’s organizational agenda. In the aftermath of the 1971 Immigration Act, for example, the group provided assistance with the act’s new requirement that family members obtain work permits before entering the United Kingdom. Following the establishment of the Asian Resource Centre (ARC) in 1976 (discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter), the emphasis shifted to providing social security advice, though in practice AFFOR continued to deal with a wide range of cases. As was made clear in the group’s 1977–1978 annual report, “One cannot turn away individuals who turn to you for help. . . . [T]he door remains open and people arrive when they choose to arrive with problems ranging from social security, to immigration, to conflicts with the police, the need for a job, a divorce, a death certificate, etc.” AFFOR’s community worker described having to represent an elderly Asian man who had been refused reentry into the United Kingdom on the grounds that his face looked too young for his passport photograph; helping a recently widowed black woman who was unable to pay her energy bills following the death of her husband; and enabling a man whose union was on strike to gain access to benefit money. By the 1980s the group was also becoming increasingly active in local education. In the context of belated attempts by local authorities to introduce better provisions for ethnic minority pupils, AFFOR ran workshops for local teachers on “multicultural education” and on the effects an ethnocentric perspective could have in the classroom.52
The group’s focus on local issues generally chimed with its wider campaigning program, but there were also tensions. A moment of crisis came in the mid-1970s when AFFOR campaigned for an inquiry into the increasingly fraught relationship between police and the black community in Handsworth, with the ambition of bringing the issue to a wider audience. The campaign eventually resulted in John Brown, an academic at the Cranfield Institute of Technology and a supposed expert on police-community relations, receiving sponsorship from both AFFOR and the Barrow-Cadbury Trust to conduct an investigation, whose results were published in 1977 as Shades of Grey.53 In the event, the report exacerbated the already-fraught climate of anxiety around black youth, the inner city, and street crime. It fudged the issue of police harassment, focusing instead on what Brown described as a “hard-core” group of black youths who had “taken on the appearance of followers of the Rastafarian faith” and were notionally responsible for the high crime rates in the area—the victims of which, Brown suggested, were often white elderly women. As Paul Gilroy has argued, Shades of Grey often deployed Powellian imagery that painted a pathological picture of the supposed inadequacies of black familial structures as the cause of the growth in crime, a narrative that inevitably captured significant media attention. In the aftermath of the report’s publication, for example, the Birmingham Evening Mail ran a series of features under the banner “Terror Gangs Shock,” and the report also captured the imagination of the national media.54 The emphasis Brown placed on groups of black youths merely shifted the terms of the debate from a focus on an individual black mugger to what was perceived to be a growing collective threat. In effect, it was a precursor to what would, particularly following the rioting that in September 1985 engulfed the very street on which AFFOR was based, become the dominant narrative around the black inner city.55
AFFOR immediately disowned Shades of Grey and ordered a new investigation into policing in Handsworth. The group obtained a small grant, sufficient to buy a tape recorder and a transcribing machine, and commissioned Carlton Green, a local bus driver, to interview members of the black community about their relationships with the police. The result was Talking Blues, a forty-seven-page pamphlet summarizing local opinion. Twenty-two hundred copies of Talking Blues were sold in the first year, and copies were distributed to senior officers in the West Midlands Police. Its aim, Clare Short wrote, was to “attempt to communicate . . . the experiences, frustrations and sense of bitter injustice of black people concerning police behaviour.” Five years later, the group produced a follow-up, this time detailing the black community’s disillusionment with the education system.56
If the Shades of Grey episode was an illustration of the pitfalls involved in AFFOR attempting to remedy local issues by bringing them to the attention of wider, often white audiences, locally the group’s ability to respond to the needs of both black and Asian communities was its strength. The ANL’s brand of antiracist politics hinged on a patriotic reading of Britain as a country with a historic respect for freedom, democracy, and difference. While this may have proven successful in the eventual hampering of the NF’s electoral appeal, it was a platform that further demonstrated the extent to which the memory of colonialism had been disavowed in Britain, on the Left as well as the Right. Moreover, it left little room for serious engagement with the diversity of issues faced by Britain’s black and Asian communities. AFFOR, in contrast, attempted to respond directly to these issues. For instance, the group ran “language recognition” classes for teachers on Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and Patois, as well as an “interpretation and translating service.” In light of a local unemployment rate four times the national average in the mid-1980s, the group produced leaflets in four Asian languages to promote awareness about how to claim unemployment support.57 In many ways, AFFOR’s embeddedness in the community and willingness to campaign on a range of social issues meant that it was less a part of the ANL’s brand of antiracism than of the radical social work movement that emerged out of the post-1968 era of experimentalism and that emphasized the need for solidarity with clients in defense of the wider community.58
Unlike many of the radical black organizations that operated alongside AFFOR in Handsworth, the group’s ability to work with clients across ethnic
