was recorded as guilty.88 The BBS “fought a campaign for her within our own communities,” drawing attention to comparable cases involving white women in which the defendant was acquitted on the basis that she was acting in self-defense.89 The group was eventually successful in persuading a judge to overturn Begum’s conviction on the grounds that she was not granted access to an adequate translator.90
Such campaigns had some impact on the outlook of male-dominated organizations. Anandi Ramamurthy has shown how both the Bradford and Manchester AYMs supported the BBS with respect to the Begum case and also took part in the concurrent Black Wages for Housework campaign. The Birmingham AYM, in contrast, was perceived as being particularly macho and often attacked the BBS on the basis that its membership was supposedly too middle class and out of touch with the experiences of black and Asian workers.91 But by the mid-1980s the Birmingham AYM was at least paying lip service to the importance of gender politics, devoting a section of its Asian Youth News to exploring the status of women both in Britain and across the Indian subcontinent to mark International Women’s Day.92 The campaigns by women activists to persuade larger, male-dominated organizations to recognize the specific inequalities that women faced might be seen as part of a continuum that took in the demands made by women workers at Grunwick and elsewhere for adequate trade union recognition. If the class-based attacks on the BBS from without were eminently familiar to the spectrum of feminist activities in this period, internally it was the issue of ethnicity that was rendering these activities increasingly fraught. The focus on campaigning against deportations had contributed to tensions, particularly given that unlike other organizations the BBS did have a number of African Caribbean members. As has been pointed out, although there were cases that affected Afro-Caribbeans, this was a demographic that even in the 1960s made up a minority of actual deportee cases. By the 1980s, the fact that Asian communities were most at risk of deportation—coupled with the traumatic experiences of Asian women in particular when attempting to navigate Britain’s increasingly racist and sexist immigration laws—meant that this issue resonated most clearly among the South Asian members of the BBS.93 There was reportedly increasing disillusionment among the few African Caribbean members that other issues were not being taken seriously. There was a perception, Guru admitted, that the group was only about “tackling south Asian women’s issues.” Increasingly, rifts had developed within the BBS, and its few African Caribbean members left the group. Shortly afterward, the BBS folded.94
In 1976 an organization was established in Handsworth explicitly to provide ethnically specific services to Asian communities. In contrast to the stress Sivanandan and others would place on black unity, according to Ranjit Sondhi, one of its cofounders, the ARC was established because of a commitment to the importance of an “autonomous and physically distinct base” for Asian community activity.95 As Anil Bhalla, who worked at the ARC during the 1980s, explained, organizations like AFFOR often lacked either language skills or cultural awareness and therefore had only a limited attraction in the context of the heterogeneous cultural and linguistic frameworks within Asian communities.96 Sondhi described what he saw as the ARC’s typical client:
Just imagine a villager coming from India, who had not even been to the big cities in India like Delhi, and comes straight out of a rural way of life to a big city in England . . . finding themselves [living] next door to people they had never before seen in their lives. Not just the English, but the Caribbeans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, and the Pakistanis if you were Indian, and visa versa. People never really developed an in-depth understanding of [the significance] of different cultures.97
The ARC attempted to fill this perceived gap by providing services that were specifically tailored to the needs of different Asian communities “through the use of their own mother-tongues, with a deep understanding of the religious, cultural and national aspirations of the people it serves.”98 On the first day the ARC opened, Sondhi recalled, “forty people lined up outside. Soon we had 500 visitors a week. Suddenly we had created a little cocoon, a little oasis in which people could move around with ease. We had opened the floodgates.”99
The ARC offered advice and assistance on issues relating to social security, debt, immigration, nationality, asylum, and housing, and provided practical help with letter reading and form filling. It also responded to broader issues within Asian communities and, perhaps indicating the success of the campaigns waged by the BBS, ran a hostel in Handsworth for female victims of domestic abuse. In the early 1980s the ARC also began to respond to the increasingly important issue of elderly homelessness within South Asian communities. Running counter to assumptions often made by local authorities about the durability of Asian family care networks, the problem had grown partly due to the perennial lack of adequate housing. The ARC responded by collaborating with a housing association to set up an eleven-bed, self-contained hostel specifically for the Asian elderly on St. Peter’s Road, Handsworth. The ARC was the subject of significant criticism from within Asian communities for “bringing shame on the community” by revealing the problem, though for the ARC such concerns were superseded by a commitment to responding to the practical issues that faced Asian communities. Although the claims made by one caseworker that the group’s approach was simply to “respond to what is required” downplayed the radicalism of attempting to tackle such potentially controversial issues, it is undoubtedly striking that in comparison with other organizations, the ARC lacked an explicitly ideological agenda.100 In Handsworth, the AYM and the BBS consciously refused to accept any form of state funding or involvement in their activities. The ARC, in contrast, from the outset survived on grants from the state and various charitable bodies. Although the ARC “celebrated the ethos of self-help,” its commitment to providing services for the Asian population led it to the conviction that funding was essential.101 In 1979 the ARC received funds from, among others, the City of Birmingham Social Services Department, the Inner-City Partnership, and the Barrow-Cadbury Trust. By the early 1990s the group was receiving grants of over £100,000 from Birmingham City Council.102
There was, however, no clear correlation between the decision of a group to accept state funding and the emergence of ethnicity in its politics. The AYM and the BBS refused to accept any form of state funding and subscribed to the ideology of black as a political color. Yet practically, these groups often engaged in the provision of services and campaigns that were primarily about responding to a particular set of issues as they were experienced by a particular community. From the perspective of the ARC, there was a recognition that reliance on state funding made it vulnerable. In a memo from the early 1980s, for example, it was noted that the “grants are barely paying [the staff] salaries” and that there was a need to expand its income source by approaching other charitable organizations.103 Yet this reliance did not make the ARC weaker than any other organization operating in Handsworth. In one sense, perhaps, this is a story of a convergence between groups who saw their primary remit as campaigning and those who focused on service provision. By the 1980s such distinctions had become difficult to maintain. When in the late 1970s the IWA embarked on its project to build the Udham Singh Welfare Centre, it made the decision to do so with the benefit of state monies. This was perhaps a recognition of the direction of travel in which the group was already moving. By the later 1970s the IWA was beginning to leave the Marxism-Leninism of its past behind as it gravitated more closely to the Labour Party.104 In the same way that AFFOR was able to marry its practical services with a wider antiracist agenda, the IWA’s political commitments began to match more closely the services it now provided. It increasingly became preoccupied—both practically and ideologically—with ethnically distinct issues. Like the ARC, the IWA and its Udham Singh Welfare Centre remained active in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The AYM and the BBS, by contrast, where tensions between ideology and practice were much more pronounced, had by the end of the 1980s ceased to exist.
AFRICAN CARIBBEAN POLITICS
Alongside its African Liberation Day, which it held annually from 1977, the ACSHO maintained an internationalist line of vision that attempted to draw events from across the black diaspora into the everyday lives of the group’s constituents. The
