whiteness with neutrality and recognized the cultural capital that this well-funded organization had to offer. AFFOR’s success in obtaining grants undoubtedly demonstrates the way in which the funding system could often favor groups that were better able to speak the language of state multiculturalism—an issue that was the subject of apparent resentment from other local groups.59 And as the Shades of Grey episode indicated, there were tensions between the group’s emphasis on local casework and its wider campaigning stance. Given the moral panic around black street crime and mugging and the fact that Handsworth was already lodged in the national imaginary as a key crucible for such anxieties, AFFOR was undoubtedly naïve in its expectation that an academic who reportedly also had ties to the police would be able to contribute to a meaningful discussion.60 Yet the group was also evidently valued by its clients, who had “almost always tried the normal channels and have come to the point where they do not know what to do next.” As shown in the following discussion, for those groups that maintained an ideological commitment to a unified politics of black, tensions could often be much more pronounced.61
BLACK AS A POLITICAL COLOR? SOUTH ASIAN GROUPS IN HANDSWORTH
In postwar Britain, South Asian politics was dominated by the IWA. Initially set up by Indian peddlers in London and Coventry in the 1930s to agitate for Indian independence, in the 1950s IWAs reemerged with a focus on providing welfare support for the increasing number of Punjabi immigrants who were settling in Britain. The groups were often heterogeneous in their ideological approach, however, and even after the establishment in 1958 of a national organizing body they remained susceptible to splits, particularly over loyalties to an Indian Communist Party that had itself divided into Marxist and Marxist-Leninist factions.62 By the mid-1970s the IWAs had been joined by a newly politicized, younger generation of largely British-born South Asian activists. Although it retained an internationalist perspective, the AYM was much less influenced by the factionalism of far-left politics on the Indian subcontinent. Instead, it was the growth of racist street violence that Asian communities increasingly found themselves subject to that often provided the initial driver. A turning point came on 4 June 1976, when an Asian teenager, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was stabbed to death in a racist attack in Southall, West London, outside a welfare center run by the Southall IWA. The IWA’s response to the murder was perceived by younger generations as hesitant and acted as a lightning rod for wider concerns about IWA democracy and accountability. The formation of the Southall Youth Movement bypassed the IWA and took the lead in organizing the response to the Chaggar case and protests against a perceived lack of police protection. The group’s visibility helped inspire a rapid growth in AYMs across the country. In Handsworth, however, where the IWA maintained a greater level of political independence than its Southall counterpart, the newly established AYM took part in many of the same campaigns and shared broadly similar political perspectives with the older organization.
A key plank of the ideology of both organizations was the adoption of a strategically wide political viewpoint that situated their contemporary activities in Britain alongside both historical struggles against empire and present-day global liberation movements. The IWA’s constitution included a commitment to waging “militant . . . struggle in every possible way against racialism and fascism,” for example, and to “support the national liberation struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples.” Similarly, the AYM pledged to “fight against racism in all its forms” and “to support all anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles.”63 References to historic anticolonial figures featured prominently within each organization. In May 1978, for example, the IWA opened a welfare center at 346 Soho Road, Handsworth’s main shopping street, less than two miles from AFFOR’s base on the Lozells Road. The center was named after Shaheed Udham Singh, the Indian anticolonialist who in 1940 murdered the lieutenant general of the Punjab in retaliation for his ordering of a massacre of more than three hundred people. Singh also featured in AYM literature, including in a 1986 calendar that attempted to situate the group’s activities in Handsworth in relation to historic anticolonial struggles. On one side of the calendar was a photograph of Udham Sing following his arrest for the 1940 murder; on the other was a photograph of a contemporary demonstration that had been organized by the AYM.64
Arguably the most significant convergence between the two organizations was their ideological commitment to black as a political color. Like the early ideology of the British Black Panthers, which was influenced by the radical politics of figures such as the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, within the IWA this came from a particular reading of Marxism. Avtar Jouhl, a senior member of the IWA in Handsworth who drank with Malcolm X on the latter’s 1965 visit to a Smethwick pub, argued that it was important for black and Asian communities in Britain to unite because he understood them to be at the forefront of a wider struggle against capitalism. Immigrant communities were regarded as playing a particularly important role in this struggle, both because of a recognition of the racism of parts of the white working class and from the conviction that black and Asian workers alike could draw directly on their own experiences of struggle against empire and colonialism abroad, as well as against contemporary racism in Britain. Unless black workers “raise their voice the solidarity will not be there. Black people’s unity,” Jouhl emphasized, “is of utmost importance.”65
For the AYM, a unified black identity was necessary because, according to one activist, it would allow “a solidarity to develop in the struggle against the racism of the street.”66 The influence of Black Power on the group was emphasized by the decision of the Southall Youth Movement to use the clenched fist as its logo.67 In the aftermath of the 1985 riots in Handsworth, both the AYM and the IWA were vocal exponents of the need for interethnic unity. Writing in the IWA’s journal Lalkar, for instance, Jouhl warned of a plot to “set the Asians and the Afro-Caribbeans at each other’s throats” and reminded his readers that his organization was “for the unity of the West Indians and Asian communities.”68 Likewise, the AYM’s organ Asian Youth News—which on its masthead also displayed the Black Power clenched fist—called for its readers to see through portrayals of the unrest that presented it as the result of interethnic tensions. The police, the newsletter warned, were “trying to divide our community by making a pretence of sympathy towards the Asian shopkeeper”; people “should not to let this affect relations between Asian and African communities where they live side-by-side.” The AYM denounced the actions of community leaders in the aftermath of the rioting, who they claimed had “strong links within the racist Tory party” and were willing to “sell their communities for the reward of white status and privilege.” The AYM instead urged its readers to see what happened in Handsworth through a global lens. The United States and Europe were seen to “hold the world’s purse strings while our countries in Asia, Africa and South America are wracked with poverty and starvation.” The “black ghettos” of Handsworth, Brixton, and elsewhere, which “our parents and grandparents struggled for years . . . to build” and which in the 1980s had become scenes of violence and looting, should be seen from a geopolitical perspective. They were, the AYM concluded, the inevitable result of the continued “racism of white domination.”69
Unlike the older generations active in the IWA, a significant number of AYM activists were university students and were influenced by political theory—specifically by the writings of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who, having usurped the white establishment of the London-based Institute of Race Relations in the mid-1970s, set about radicalizing both the institute and its journal so that both adopted class-based, anticolonial campaigning stances. Just as Sivanandan viewed the multiculturalist programs of local and national authorities alike as a tool to “blunt the edge of black struggle,” Bhopinder Basi—who was active in the Handsworth AYM throughout the 1980s—understood that “the real purpose behind multiculturalism wasn’t to help us all live together better, but to create the necessary divisions in our communities so that an oppressive process could be maintained.”70 Just as Sivanandan—writing in the Institute’s newly radicalized journal Race and Class—argued that Asian and Afro-Caribbean activists in the 1970s were united over their “parallel histories of common racism,” the Handsworth AYM in 1985 pledged to “work for black
