A Cry in the Streets

Though the British colonials spread the color bar throughout their empire, at home the British have clucked over racism in South Africa, given a friendly welcome to Negro G.I.s and enjoyed a feeling of moral superiority over Little Rock. But last week England discovered for itself the queasy sensation of racial tension.

It had been coming on a long time, but while full employment lasted, there was no serious trouble. Some whites looked askance at the 130,000 West Indian Negroes who have poured into London and the industrial Midlands since the war, and complained of their un-English habits of nursing babies in public, living six and eight to a room, dancing and singing in the streets. But the Negroes, mostly Jamaicans, readily found jobs as laborers, furnacemen in foundries, dishwashers, transport workers--all the jobs that, as a Ministry of Labor official explained, "our people find too hot and dusty." A few of the newcomers did well enough to buy small terrace houses and flashy autos.

What discrimination there was seemed mainly social. Rooming houses openly proclaimed "No colored." Hotels were "full" to Negro applicants. Restaurants often refused to serve them, some pubs segregated Negroes in one room, whites in another. Dance halls all over the Midlands would quietly bar any Negro who did not bring his own partner. Said a ballroom manager: "We're not against them, we just don't want any trouble."

Foreign Scandal. Within the past year came the recession and layoffs. As the last hired, Negroes were the first fired. In Nottingham, a textile city of 312,000, where Negroes constitute less than 1% of the population, they make up 20% of the unemployed. Fist fights between whites and Negroes have become a common Saturday night feature in Nottingham's slum district around St. Ann's Well Road, an area noted for petty crime, poverty and prostitution. Last month a gang of white Teddy boys jumped a West Indian laborer and beat him with fists and clubs. A few nights later, another white gang beat up and robbed two Negro workers. The white wife of a colored man was jeered and spat upon by neighbors. Nottingham's Conservative M.P., Lieut. Colonel J. K. Cordeaux, told a mass meeting that it was a "scandal" that "foreigners" should come to Britain and drive up in cars to collect welfare benefits.

Emptied Pubs. The pubs on St. Ann's Well Road last week were filled with edgy whites and Negroes. At Chase Tavern a young Negro drew angry mutters when he entered with a white girl. At closing time a band of Negroes came down the road. As they neared the pub, one of several white loungers called: "What are those black bastards looking at us for?" With shouts of "Get them!" the Negroes descended, knives flashing, left two white men writhing on the ground. Within minutes, as nearby pubs emptied, fighting became general. Negroes and whites smashed bottles, grabbed up sticks and bricks and anything else handy. Said one woman: "They knocked me into a shop doorway, and I felt something sharp cut into my arm. My husband and his friend were on the ground with a pile of colored men on them. A taxi swerved onto the pavement and scattered the blackies. When my husband got up he was holding his back, and I saw there was a knife in it."

Police unlimbered fire hoses and tried to scatter the milling crowd. Gangs of white men swept through the dim red brick side streets, beating up every colored man they encountered. Said a Jamaican: "It wasn't safe to have a black skin that night." But what dismayed most Britons was that the Nottingham riot was not an isolated outbreak. On the same night in London, white hoodlums roamed the Netting Hill district, beating up Negroes. Five Teddy boys, all under 23, were found guilty of raiding a Negro-owned cafe in Shepherd's Bush, and causing "malicious damage."

Moral Sentiments. Britain's newspapers last week were filled with troubled editorials, particularly after two Nottingham M.P.s called for restriction on non-white immigration as the best remedy. Snapped the Manchester Guardian: "The generous conception of granting British citizenship throughout the Commonwealth is far too important an idea to be scrapped because of a few thugs in Nottingham." The conservative London Daily Telegraph conceded that prejudice "still persists in a strongly emotional form whereever it involves sex and the family. That ... is a commonplace fact in South Africa and in the Southern states of the U.S. It is new to us in the British Isles. In view of our high moral sentiments about color equality, it shocks and horrifies us."

In Nottingham, an emergency interracial meeting placed the blame on "irresponsible individuals, white and colored," but was unable to devise any remedy other than a pious hope for greater "tolerance and understanding." St. Ann's Well Road tried to go back to normal. In pubs the domino and dart games were resumed, and player pianos banged out old tunes. Plain-clothes detectives, trying to fix the blame for the riot, got nowhere with clannish cop haters of both races. The prospects for the future were perhaps best expressed by a wounded white man who told police: "Leave it to me--I'll fix them myself."

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