with Lozells Road and the nearby Acapulco café (outside which the incident that sparked the 1985 riots took place), an area known locally as black Handsworth’s front line. In December 1972, in the context of rising anxieties about the presence of radical black activism in Britain, a Sunday Telegraph correspondent attempted to visit the ACSHO headquarters. The journalist characterized the ACSHO as Black Power emanating from a terraced house and had obtained a copy of the group’s newspaper, which, it was reported, married allegations of discrimination locally with updates on the progress of anticolonial movements in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.105 By the end of the decade, in the context of anticolonial victories in Portuguese Africa, the ACSHO turned its attention to events in the south of the continent. It received visits from representatives of the South African Black Nationalist group the Pan African Congress as well as the Zimbabwe African National Union, the future ruling party of independent Zimbabwe.106 There was also a humanitarian strand to the ACSHO agenda. Under the banner of the Marcus Garvey Foundation, a subsidiary charity run by the ACSHO, the group raised funds to help the victims of Hurricane Gilbert, which in 1988 had killed more than forty people in Jamaica. It also sent fifty tons of medical supplies to help in the response to the Ethiopian famine and made a gift of twenty-five hundred pencils and exercise books to schools in Burkina Faso, where the ACSHO also directed funds toward a new orphanage and hospital. This was a vision of Pan-Africanism rooted in Handsworth through the familiar humanitarian call for charity: “Spare a thought for the starving and the needy,” the ACSHO urged its followers. When “you see our street collectors in Britain’s city centres, pubs, parks and on your doorstep . . . give whatever you can.”107
As a means of generating solidarity across the Atlantic and throughout the diaspora, these tactics were almost as old as Pan-Africanism itself. For example, the London-based League of Coloured Peoples, established in 1931, encouraged its members to make a practical difference in the lives of those elsewhere in the black globality by raising money for the victims of natural disasters, including a major hurricane strike in British Honduras in 1938. And just as Heathfield Road was used by the ACSHO as a base for cultural activity as well as political mobilization, in 1931 the West African Students Union (WASU) opened a hostel on Camden Road, north London, which not only acted as a destination for sojourners looking for accommodation but also became a meeting point where residents of black London could enact “black internationalist solidarity . . . as much over a spicy rice dish and on the dance floor as through political organising.”108 The global outlook of such organizations went hand in hand with a concern to remedy the daily discrimination their constituents faced in the metropolis. The need for a hostel of the kind set up by the WASU was crystallized when in 1929 Paul Robeson was refused service at a prominent London hotel, causing a significant public scandal.109 The incident rang true for the black residents of 1930s London, just as it would have for Handsworth’s black population in the postwar period. As black Britain grew, the pervasiveness of the inequity that faced it became apparent. Like other groups, black organizations such as the ACSHO matched their globalist ideologies with practical attempts to respond to what had become obvious was British institutionalized racism on an industrial scale. And as the ARC recognized with the establishment of its hostel for the Asian elderly, housing proved to be one of the most enduringly problematic issues.
The inequalities that faced black and Asian immigrants in the housing sector had been well known for some time; the sociologists John Rex and Robert Moore, in their influential 1967 study of the Sparkbrook district of Birmingham in the south of the city, positioned immigrant communities as a separate underclass worse off than their fellow occupiers of Britain’s inner-city slums.110 Black and Asian communities were often forced to rely disproportionately on the private rental sector, where, as a result of the unscrupulous practices of “shark” landlords, poor conditions continued to belie postwar narratives of increasing affluence.111 Yet the experiences of organizations operating on the community level suggested that within the immigrant underclass there were significant variations that required particular responses. In 1974, for instance, the black teacher and part-time social sciences student Beresford Ivan Henry completed a dissertation based on field research he had undertaken with Harambee, a Handsworth-based organization that had been established two years earlier to attempt to deal with black homelessness. If groups such as the IWA and ARC found that the familial structures often presumed to be present in Asian households were often irrelevant when it came to the problem of elderly homelessness, Henry suggested that the conservative religiosity of some black parents and the growing disillusionment of black youth in the education and employment sectors had led to young people becoming “alienated from parental or home situations” and in some cases being “rejected from their families” altogether.112 Some reports suggested that as many as a fifth of local black teenagers could be classified as homeless.113 Like the ACSHO, Harambee maintained a globalist, Pan-Africanist stance; the group’s name was taken from the Swahili word for “all together.” But this did not correspond with an interethnic politics based around black as a political color; the commitment to service provision in Handsworth and the particular way in which issues such as housing and homelessness were manifested meant that, like the ACSHO, Harambee focused its priorities elsewhere.
Harambee’s organizational emphasis was encapsulated in the fact that it originally called itself Black Social Workers, though many of its members were also trained teachers and lawyers. Maurice Andrews, an immigrant from Jamaica who cofounded the group and was himself a former social worker, cited a “phenomenal tension” within black households, particularly in instances where marriages had broken down and children were living with a stepparent. Andrews recalled that teenagers as young as fourteen were being evicted from their family homes and sleeping in parks or with friends in bed-sits. Harambee’s ambition was to develop a “positive initiative in order to begin to retrieve the situation.”114 The group obtained funds to purchase a three-story property on Hall Road, a few hundred yards from the “front line” at the Villa Cross pub. This was turned into a hostel that catered not for visiting sojourners or for elderly Asians, but for local black youths specifically. Addressing this issue had become a central feature of Black Power politics following its emergence in Britain in the late 1960s. One of the first hostels for homeless black youths was the so-called Black House in North London, which opened its doors in 1969 and was run by the controversial Trinidadian activist Michael X’s Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS).115 In Handsworth, Harambee’s intention was not only to house and feed homeless black youths, but also to make them “feel more aware of themselves, their situation and the role they can play in society,” as well as “offer opportunities to black adults to regain the trust of the younger generation.” According to the group’s 1974 annual report, there were three stages to Harambee’s interventions: first, an initial rescue operation took black youths off the streets by providing them with short-term accommodation; second, longer-term homes were allocated, often in partnership with local authorities; and finally, an educational program with the overall aim of making young people “more socially aware and self-reliant” was provided. Within seven days of the hostel’s opening all fifteen places in the house had been filled by local homeless young people. By March 1974, seventy young people had stayed at the Harambee hostel, for periods ranging from one night to ten months.116
Throughout the long 1980s Harambee expanded its activities in response to what it saw as the needs of the local black community. It purchased other disused properties in Handsworth and turned them into hostels for black youths, setting up its own housing association to provide low-cost housing in the area. Harambee established an advice center that broached the issue of tensions between police and black communities by offering free legal guidance, and ran a black studies course for residents at its hostels; a nursery was opened to cater for the children of black single mothers, and the group also ran a supplementary Saturday school for older children, which in the mid-1970s became the focus of local newspaper attention because of its status as an “‘exclusive West Indian organisation.’”117 These services were named not after South Asian revolutionaries like Udham Singh but African Caribbean figures such as Marcus Garvey and Harriet Tubman. In the 1970s one of its members summarized its ideology as being “‘influenced by Pan-Africanism, African socialism, and parts of the black power
