our own affairs. We had our own problems, and it was important we solved them.”118
From the beginning Harambee made a decision that it would seek funding from the state. Unlike the IWA, whose 1978 building of a state-funded welfare center on Soho Road reflected a shift away from the group’s Marxist-Leninist roots, for Harambee using state money was a part of its own radical political rationale, which saw the state as negligent in its duty of care toward black communities. As Andrews conceptualized it, “our theory was that we pay taxes, we are a part of this society,” and therefore it was the state’s responsibility to respond to social problems such as homelessness—if not directly through the provision of adequate services, then indirectly via the funding of locally embedded groups such as Harambee. Although Harambee property was raided by the police three times in the mid-1970s, agencies including the Birmingham Social Services Department, which funded Harambee’s main hostel, clearly valued the group’s ability to work with a section of the community often treated by authorities as impossible to reach.119 In 1975 one funder described the Harambee hostel as “one of the best pieces of self-help work” in the area and saw the group as being “ideally placed to work effectively with young West Indians.”120 From the perspective of those who ran Harambee, accepting state funds did not compromise the group’s emphasis on “togetherness and self-help.”121 To Andrews, at least, calling for the state to fund a group like Harambee was itself a radical position. This was a politics of “self-help backed up with the demand that the state must pay.”122
This attitude was a point of cleavage with the ACSHO, which had been established in Handsworth in 1964 almost a decade before Harambee and three years before a Stokely Carmichael visit to London helped stimulate the expansion of the Black Power movement in Britain.123 The ACSHO became one of the longest-serving black political groups in the country and, like the AYM and the BBS, emphasized the importance of independence from the state. This position was made clear in an article published in the ACSHO’s journal, Jomo, in response to the announcement by the Birmingham City Council in 1989 of funding cuts. For the ACSHO, the cuts were a signal for groups such as Harambee, who had accepted state money, to “learn the bitter lesson of the enemy’s politics.” The ACSHO had been “branded extremists for not wanting to collaborate” but argued that the cuts were an example of the state using its “economic strength to divide and rule” and a validation of the group’s stress on the importance of self-sufficiency. The cofounder of the ACSHO was the Jamaican Bini Brown. If the lesson drawn by the group in 1989 was “never rely on your enemy for liberation,” Brown conceptualized the group’s position even more vociferously: “We don’t like going with our hand begging, begging, begging. If you have to keep on begging somebody for something, what kind of human being are you? You have no dignity. When you’re self-reliant, you do what you do, you’re proud of what you are.”124 The group also refused to talk to mainstream journalists and the growing number of white sociologists who, like Rex and Tomlinson, used Handsworth as a case study for their wider explorations of race and immigration.125 While London-based Black Power groups such as the UCPA and the British Black Panthers were committed to a class-based analysis that left room for alliances with other nonwhite communities, the emphasis within the ACSHO on autonomy stemmed from a version of cultural nationalism that translated into the most ethnically specific politics of any of the organizations discussed in this chapter.126
The ACSHO was formed in reaction to the everyday racism that first-generation immigrants experienced in Britain. “People couldn’t take the pressure of being called ‘wog,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘coon,’ and so on,” Brown recalled. “If you didn’t fight back then you’d suffer serious emotional and psychological problems.” The ACSHO often framed this fighting back in militaristic terms, in keeping with the idiom of Black Power. Just as in the late 1960s Carmichael envisaged an ensuing transnational “‘color clash’” split along binary racial lines, the ACSHO predicted that the collapse of British imperialism and the eventual defeat of apartheid in South Africa would result in the return of “white settlers” to Britain, which would in turn lead to a conflict with an expanded Far Right.127 Emulating the Black Panthers, in which all new members were given “military training” that included introductions to intelligence work and the use of weaponry, the ACSHO presented itself as a quasi-paramilitary organization in which prominent members were given titles such as Minister for Information and Minister of Defense and new recruits were required to go through a process of “re-education.”128 Concurrent with this vanguardist approach, however, the group also provided a practical program that had the aim of “allowing us to survive in this [the British] environment.”129 In one of the first academic surveys of black Handsworth, the black sociologist Gus John described the ACSHO program as “the most hopeful growing-point for an active and relevant community self-help effort” in the area.130 Whereas Harambee’s core focus was on housing, the ACHSO took the lead in the provision of alternative education for Handsworth’s black youth.
The ACSHO supplementary school had been established in 1967 in an atmosphere of growing dissatisfaction among black parents at the way their children were being treated by the educational authorities.131 Two years later in London, a campaign was fought by the North London West Indian Association against the proposed introduction of a “banding” system in Haringey that was designed to dilute the presence of black pupils in schools across the borough and would thus force many to travel significant distances each day. The campaign eventually forced the Haringey Council to abandon its plans, and the support the campaign gained from other black organizations helped put education at the center of the black political agenda.132 The focus was often on the disproportionate number of black pupils who were sent to “educationally subnormal” (ESN) schools for children with low ability or learning difficulties. The potential for pathologizing supposed subnormality was obvious, and by 1972 there were five times the number of black pupils in ESN schools than there were in the mainstream system, with the proportion vastly higher in areas of black settlement. Some pupils who had recently arrived from the Caribbean were immediately identified as ESN without ever having attended a mainstream school.133
These problems were well known anecdotally among black communities. What demonstrated the true extent of them was the publication of How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System (1971), a seminal report by Bernard Coard, a Grenadian teacher, postgraduate student, and future key player in Grenada’s Marxist revolution. Coard proved the discrimination at the heart of the ESN system and highlighted the effects of an ethnocentric curriculum underpinned by the stereotypes and assumptions of British colonialism. British schooling was shown to have made virtually no accommodation to the growing black presence. Teachers conflated a child’s use of the patois dialect with poor ability, and when it came to career planning suppressed aspiration by focusing on manual employment for black school leavers. Where black history was taught it was done so according to a narrative of triumphant colonial expansionism.134 Coard’s research was published by New Beacon Books, the black publisher attached to a radical North London bookshop run by the activist John LaRose, and sold an unprecedented ten thousand copies. At the heart of his recommendations was a call for the black community to set up its own independent or supplementary schools in order to “make up for the inadequacies of British schools” and “teach our children our history and culture.” If the ACSHO school in Handsworth was an early forerunner, Coard’s work resulted in a mushrooming of black supplementary schools across the country.135
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