Black and British

When, in recent years, I have been assured that such dolls, and the words ‘golliwog’ and ‘wog’, are in fact harmless and that opposition to them is a symptom of rampant political correctness, I recall another incident. It is difficult to regard a word as benign when it has been scrawled onto a note, wrapped around a brick and thrown through one’s living-room window in the dead of night,

John Hawkins, a ship owner and trader from Plymouth, became the pioneer of the English triangular slave trade. Hawkins was the younger son of the trader William Hawkins, who had sailed to the West African coast in the 1530s. He was also the cousin of Sir Francis Drake and to some extent was Drake’s mentor.

To the modern observer one key feature of the Age of Discovery is that Europeans could continue to harbour beliefs in medieval myths even in the face of observed and verifiable reality.

any tour of those cities late on a Saturday night, when the Victorian cult of respectability has been partially dissolved by a tsunami of cheap beer and hooch, reveals the British street returned to the age of Hogarth and John Bull. The early twenty-first century’s binge-drinking culture is a milder version of the eighteenth-century gin craze, re-enacted with alcopops and ‘two-for-one’ happy hour offers.

There is still a misconception that slavery was restricted to the colonies of the Caribbean and North America, and while there is no question that the full-blooded brutality of plantation slavery was a colonial phenomenon, unfreedom and the sale of black human beings was a feature of British life between the 1650s and the close of the eighteenth century.

In 1787, four years after the Zong affair and the year in which the black poor of London departed for the new colony of Sierra Leone, the abolitionist movement was formally born. Its place of birth was a printing shop at 2 George Yard, London, a building long ago demolished. There, on 22 May, twelve men gathered together. The minutes taken of this little assembly recorded that, ‘At a Meeting held for the Purpose of taking the Slave Trade into consideration, it was resolved that the said Trade was both impolitick and unjust.’ This group of twelve – nine Quakers and the rest Evangelical Anglicans – formed themselves into the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Historians have calculated that between 1787 and 1792, 1.5 million people in Britain signed petitions against the slave trade, when the national population was just 12 million.

In March 1792 the Danish government abolished the importation of enslaved Africans into the Danish colonies. Denmark was only a minor player in the Atlantic slave trade but she was the first to abandon it, a little-remembered historical detail about which the Danes remain rightly proud.

But the Christian message itself, when introduced into societies in which the majority of human beings were the property of others, was radical enough to prove profoundly destabilizing. The concept of the soul and the belief that all souls were equal before the eyes of God did not sit comfortably with the practice of chattel slavery or the maintenance of racial hierarchies. The biblical stories of redemption, of a Promised Land and salvation seemed to speak directly to the slaves, and offer them the hope that their plight might be ended.

In the early morning of the Emancipation Day one of the most unusual funerals in British history took place. In the grounds of a nearby school a grave had been dug. A coffin was then brought forward into which were placed the instruments of slavery; a pair of shackles, a chain, a whip and an iron collar. A crowd assembled and in the dawn light the coffin was lowered into the earth, Jamaican soil into which the bodies of around a million slaves had been interred over the previous three centuries. The congregation sang their hymns and gave their cheers and the flag of freedom, with the Union flag set into its corner. A headstone placed above the grave read, ‘Colonial Slavery died 31 July 1838, Age 276 years’.29

Another powerful performer and firm favourite among British audiences was Henry ‘Box’ Brown. A slave from Virginia, Brown saw his three children and their mother, then pregnant with a fourth, sold to an owner in North Carolina, slave marriages having no basis in law. The loss of his family inspired a determination to escape. His ingenious plan, which was devised and executed with the assistance of two free accomplices, one white, the other black, was for Brown to hide in a wooden mail crate and have himself literally mailed from Richmond to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania. The box was just three feet long and two feet wide, and marked as ‘dry goods’. In March 1849, twenty-seven hours after entering the box, and having narrowly escaped suffocation, he arrived in Philadelphia, at the home of a sympathetic Quaker abolitionist. ‘I had risen as it were from the dead’, Brown later wrote. He came to Britain in October 1850 and went on tour.

In 1836 Jim Crowe was the comic persona and dance routine of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white New Yorker who had emerged as an actor and comedian in the 1820s. It was later in the nineteenth century that the name Jim Crow was appropriated as shorthand for the system of segregation and violent repression that condemned African Americans to spend a century in the wilderness, between the Civil War of the 1860s and civil rights campaigns of the 1960s.

By 1860 cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports.2 The geography of the Industrial Revolution was shaped by the requirements of cotton. The North-West of England, the region that came to dominate the industry, was blessed with numerous fast-flowing rivers in which waterwheels could be built and from which power could be drawn.

In 1792, the year that Parliament rejected William Wilberforce’s second Abolition Bill, an event three thousand miles away set the stage for the next step in the expansion of the Lancashire cotton industry. That year Eli Whitney, a school teacher in Savannah, Georgia, invented a simple hand-cranked machine that separated the useless cotton seeds from the valuable cotton fibres. Two simple metal rollers, each mounted with rows of metal teeth, drew out the seeds with astonishing ease. This process had previously been done by hand and was one of the bottlenecks that slowed down the cultivation and harvesting of raw cotton. Whitney’s cotton-gin – ‘gin’ being short for engine – increased the speed at which seeds could be separated from fibres by a factor of eight.

Around a million slaves were moved from North to South. Others were marched across America, chained together in coffles, in the same way that their ancestors had been marched to the slave-trading rivers on the African coast. As more and more Upper South slave owners cashed in on the cotton boom, many thousands of slaves were shipped to the slave markets of Louisiana on Mississippi river boats. These slaves were literally ‘sold down the river’ to work on Deep South plantations.

On the eve of the Civil War the most valuable commodity within the whole American economy was the four million enslaved Africans. The majority were in the Deep South and almost half of them were employed in the cultivation of cotton. The South had grown so rich from its cotton boom that by the 1860s it enjoyed the highest per capita income on earth – $16.66.9 There were more millionaires in the Mississippi Valley in 1860 than anywhere else in the United States.10

Three decades after abolishing slavery and half a century after abolishing the slave trade Britain was, economically speaking, up to her neck in Southern cotton slavery. Here the barriers between black British history and mainstream history break down. The Africans who grew and picked the cotton that landed in enormous bales on the docks of Liverpool, although they never set foot on British soil, are as much a part of our story as any black migrant.

When Karl Marx looked at Britain as she was in the early 1860s, he saw the nation dependent upon two systems of slavery. ‘As long as the English cotton manufacturers depended on slave-grown cotton,’ he wrote, ‘it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic’.

For all her ‘moral prestige’, post-emancipation, anti-slavery Britain had ignored the calls of abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson and remained economically complicit in American slavery. In the 1860s the poor people in the English North-West paid a heavy price for that hypocrisy.

A pub in Bristol displayed a notice that read ‘Only blacks served here’ and when the landlady in another bar was confronted by white Americans who were angry that coloured customers were served their drinks and treated as equals, she responded, ‘Their money is as good as yours, and we prefer their company.’9

One of the most significant outcomes of the Second World War was that it made racism less acceptable, not everywhere and not instantly, but in ways that in the long term proved hugely significant. The biological, Social Darwinian racism that had emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, out of which the Nazis’ racial theories had arisen, was widely repudiated after 1945, as was the view that race was an appropriate or even meaningful concept around which societies could be organized.

The general election that returned Winston Churchill to 10 Downing Street in October 1951 resulted in a Conservative government that was every bit as uncomfortable with West Indian migration as the Labour government of Clement Attlee. One member of Churchill’s Cabinet, the Marquess of Salisbury (formerly Viscount Cranbourne), warned of the risk that the arrival of large numbers of black people posed a threat to ‘the racial character of the English people’. In 1954, during lunch at Chequers with the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, Churchill expressed his concern that if West Indian migration continued ‘we would have a magpie society: that would never do’. A year later Harold Macmillan reported in his diary, with some incredulity, that Churchill thought ‘Keep Britain White’ might make an appropriate slogan with which to fight the upcoming election. In the aftermath of the Second World War such appeals to racial sentiment were widely regarded as unacceptable.