was this diasporan consciousness manifest in Handsworth, and what does its presence tell us about the experience of being black in 1980s Britain? How did this consciousness impact Britain’s key sites of postwar black settlement, of which Handsworth was only one prominent example? And what can an exploration of the specifics of such a locale tell us about the nature of postcolonial Britain? In this book’s reconstruction of 1980s “black Handsworth,” these are the questions that provide its guiding focus.
Black Handsworth emerged in the context of what has become the familiar story of postwar migration. The 1948 British Nationality Act was a key legislative marker that in theory granted equal citizenship to all subjects across the empire, even if the act was a politically expedient attempt to respond, following the 1947 partition of India, to the growing specter of imperial decline. Prewar black activists in Britain and specifically London often based their campaigns for racial equality on a demand for citizenship rights that materially advanced the status of black populations across the empire. The passage of the 1948 act meant that when the postwar generation became only the latest example of a long-standing tradition of black subjects settling in the imperial “mother country,” they did so as British citizens who could make assertive claims about their right to be there on an equal footing with longtime residents of the metropole.7 By 1961, 10 percent of the Handsworth population, or some 2,656 residents, had been born in the “New Commonwealth,” with the vast majority coming from the Anglophone Caribbean. Within a decade, largely as a result of the arrival of migrants from the Indian subcontinent and those Asian communities that had been expelled from East Africa in the late 1960s, this number had almost doubled, to 5,407, or almost 20 percent of the local population.8 Taking into account their British-born children, in 1985 close to 60 percent of the Handsworth population was of African Caribbean or South Asian descent.9
By this time, Handsworth had become well established in the popular imaginary as one of Britain’s “race relations capitals.”10 This occurred in the context of the growing notoriety of the British midlands more generally and was closely aligned to an acute sense of disorientation among Britain’s body politic as those who had previously been heavily invested in the status of empire struggled to come to terms with its loss and the simultaneous presence of one-time colonial subjects “at home.”11 An early forerunner was the 1958 riots in Nottingham in the east midlands, during which gangs of white youths attacked members of the growing black community in the St. Ann’s district of the city (events that were quickly followed by similar disturbances in the Notting Hill area of London).12 Six years later, in the 1964 general election, the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths won a shock victory over shadow foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker in Smethwick, a racially mixed constituency a short drive from the center of Handsworth. Griffith’s overtly racist campaign unsettled the political establishment and for a time helped make Smethwick a watchword for what had apparently become Britain’s heightened climate of racial tension.13 This was magnified when in April 1968 Enoch Powell made his often-cited race relations speech at a central Birmingham hotel, using the complaints of his white constituents in nearby Wolverhampton as the basis for a near-apocalyptic vision of racial violence played out on the streets of Britain’s inner cities. His Birmingham speech cemented Powell’s position as one of the country’s most prominent, self-anointed spokespeople on race. By the end of the 1960s, to a backdrop of strikes in protest against his sacking from the shadow cabinet, Powell was advocating the establishment of a new ministry for the repatriation of immigrants.14
Handsworth itself was properly transposed into the national imaginary with the moral panic over black street crime or “mugging” that, with the enduring influence of Powell and a marked growth in electoral support for the neo-Nazi National Front (NF), followed a particularly violent attack in the Villa Road area in November 1972. Through the close involvement of one of its students in Handsworth, the case captured the attention of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the influential research unit that had been established in 1964 by the literary critic Richard Hoggart as a space—attached to Birmingham University in the south of the city—for the scholarly research of popular culture.15 Spearheaded by the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall, who in 1951 had made his own journey across the Atlantic to study at Oxford and by the early 1970s had replaced Hoggart as the CCCS director, a team of researchers argued that street crime in areas like Handsworth was functioning as a lightning rod for much more fundamental anxieties about the fracturing of the postwar consensus, the end of empire, and a more general sense of British “declinism.” The understanding of mugging as a supposedly “black,” specifically male crime built on earlier anxieties around black masculinity and, it was argued, was a signal that race had become the prism through which the engulfing sense of crisis was mediated.16 This was increasingly marshaled by a nationalistic “new” right, which presented its law and order agenda as the solution to the nation’s ills.17 In an essay published in the run-up to the 1979 general election, Hall outlined what he saw as the connections between the mugging panic and the rise of what he called Thatcherism, and suggested that many of the themes articulated in their most extreme form by Powell and the NF had become a key element of the Conservative Party’s new authoritarian agenda.18 With the passing of the 1981 British Nationality Act, which effectively abandoned the core principles enshrined by its predecessor some three decades earlier, and with the 1982 conflict with Argentina, the extent to which Thatcher was able to disavow Britain’s imperial past while simultaneously stirring up patriotic, proto-imperialistic sentiment became clear.19
The status of the black inner city as a violent and near-pathological threat to “British ways of life” was secured following two outbreaks of major rioting at the beginning of the 1980s and again in 1985. Although the unrest in 1981 included Handsworth, the most serious events were in Brixton in south London, which prompted a public inquiry led by Lord Scarman, the former head of the Law Commission.20 But the outbreak of further unrest four years later seemingly confirmed the idea that Britain’s inner cities were in a profound state of crisis, and that race was the primary interpretive mechanism for what was thought to be at stake. The rioting in Handsworth—which took place in September 1985 and was concentrated around the Lozells Road, less than a mile away from the Handsworth Cultural Centre on Hamstead Road—left an estimated £15million worth of damage to property, scores of injuries, and the deaths of the two Asian proprietors of the Lozells Road Post Office. For Margaret Thatcher, reflecting on the events some weeks later, any suggestion that the social conditions of such areas were a contributing factor in the rioting was misleading. Unemployment may “breed frustration,” she declared, but it was “an insult to the unemployed to suggest that a man who doesn’t have a job is likely to break the law.”21 Instead, West Midlands Police constable Geoffrey Dear suggested Handsworth’s rioters had been “driven on by bloodlust,” while to the Conservative member of Parliament (MP) Nicholas Fairbairn, the reasons for what had happened were simple: “The West Indians are lazy, the Asians are enterprising. . . . [T]he West Indians are jealous of the Asians.”22 Others argued that the riots offered further evidence that Britain’s inner cities, having already undergone a process of “white flight,” were destined to follow an American trajectory of urban race relations.23 Handsworth was conceptualized as the “bleeding heart of England,” a front line in what had become a “war on the streets.” Following subsequent disturbances on London’s Broadwater Farm estate and again in Brixton, in the view of another police chief the 1985 unrest constituted “‘the worst rioting ever seen on the mainland.’”24
Inevitably such narratives ignored black perspectives in areas like Handsworth and what it meant to live race at the level of the community and the locale. As historians have come to assess this period, moreover, the emergent historiography has been shaped by a concurrent emphasis on ideological and political developments and the series of social and economic crises that increasingly dominated British political life. In many ways, as has been argued, the enduring emphasis on the implications of Thatcher’s election as Conservative Party leader in 1975, and her three successive general election victories beginning in May 1979, has contributed to a characterization of the period often confined to Thatcher’s own political terrain.25 Black
