Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

was never off AFFOR’s organizational agenda. In the aftermath of the 1971 Immigration Act, for example, the group provided assistance with the act’s new requirement that family members obtain work permits before entering the United Kingdom. Following the establishment of the Asian Resource Centre (ARC) in 1976 (discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter), the emphasis shifted to providing social security advice, though in practice AFFOR continued to deal with a wide range of cases. As was made clear in the group’s 1977–1978 annual report, “One cannot turn away individuals who turn to you for help. . . . [T]he door remains open and people arrive when they choose to arrive with problems ranging from social security, to immigration, to conflicts with the police, the need for a job, a divorce, a death certificate, etc.” AFFOR’s community worker described having to represent an elderly Asian man who had been refused reentry into the United Kingdom on the grounds that his face looked too young for his passport photograph; helping a recently widowed black woman who was unable to pay her energy bills following the death of her husband; and enabling a man whose union was on strike to gain access to benefit money. By the 1980s the group was also becoming increasingly active in local education. In the context of belated attempts by local authorities to introduce better provisions for ethnic minority pupils, AFFOR ran workshops for local teachers on “multicultural education” and on the effects an ethnocentric perspective could have in the classroom.⁵²

      The group’s focus on local issues generally chimed with its wider campaigning program, but there were also tensions. A moment of crisis came in the mid-1970s when AFFOR campaigned for an inquiry into the increasingly fraught relationship between police and the black community in Handsworth, with the ambition of bringing the issue to a wider audience. The campaign eventually resulted in John Brown, an academic at the Cranfield Institute of Technology and a supposed expert on police-community relations, receiving sponsorship from both AFFOR and the Barrow-Cadbury Trust to conduct an investigation, whose results were published in 1977 as Shades of Grey.⁵³ In the event, the report exacerbated the already-fraught climate of anxiety around black youth, the inner city, and street crime. It fudged the issue of police harassment, focusing instead on what Brown described as a “hard-core” group of black youths who had “taken on the appearance of followers of the Rastafarian faith” and were notionally responsible for the high crime rates in the area—the victims of which, Brown suggested, were often white elderly women. As Paul Gilroy has argued, Shades of Grey often deployed Powellian imagery that painted a pathological picture of the supposed inadequacies of black familial structures as the cause of the growth in crime, a narrative that inevitably captured significant media attention. In the aftermath of the report’s publication, for example, the Birmingham Evening Mail ran a series of features under the banner “Terror Gangs Shock,” and the report also captured the imagination of the national media.⁵⁴ The emphasis Brown placed on groups of black youths merely shifted the terms of the debate from a focus on an individual black mugger to what was perceived to be a growing collective threat. In effect, it was a precursor to what would, particularly following the rioting that in September 1985 engulfed the very street on which AFFOR was based, become the dominant narrative around the black inner city.⁵⁵

      AFFOR immediately disowned Shades of Grey and ordered a new investigation into policing in Handsworth. The group obtained a small grant, sufficient to buy a tape recorder and a transcribing machine, and commissioned Carlton Green, a local bus driver, to interview members of the black community about their relationships with the police. The result was Talking Blues, a forty-seven-page pamphlet summarizing local opinion. Twenty-two hundred copies of Talking Blues were sold in the first year, and copies were distributed to senior officers in the West Midlands Police. Its aim, Clare Short wrote, was to “attempt to communicate . . . the experiences, frustrations and sense of bitter injustice of black people concerning police behaviour.” Five years later, the group produced a follow-up, this time detailing the black community’s disillusionment with the education system.⁵⁶

      If the Shades of Grey episode was an illustration of the pitfalls involved in AFFOR attempting to remedy local issues by bringing them to the attention of wider, often white audiences, locally the group’s ability to respond to the needs of both black and Asian communities was its strength. The ANL’s brand of antiracist politics hinged on a patriotic reading of Britain as a country with a historic respect for freedom, democracy, and difference. While this may have proven successful in the eventual hampering of the NF’s electoral appeal, it was a platform that further demonstrated the extent to which the memory of colonialism had been disavowed in Britain, on the Left as well as the Right. Moreover, it left little room for serious engagement with the diversity of issues faced by Britain’s black and Asian communities. AFFOR, in contrast, attempted to respond directly to these issues. For instance, the group ran “language recognition” classes for teachers on Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and Patois, as well as an “interpretation and translating service.” In light of a local unemployment rate four times the national average in the mid-1980s, the group produced leaflets in four Asian languages to promote awareness about how to claim unemployment support.⁵⁷ In many ways, AFFOR’s embeddedness in the community and willingness to campaign on a range of social issues meant that it was less a part of the ANL’s brand of antiracism than of the radical social work movement that emerged out of the post-1968 era of experimentalism and that emphasized the need for solidarity with clients in defense of the wider community.⁵⁸

      Unlike many of the radical black organizations that operated alongside AFFOR in Handsworth, the group’s ability to work with clients across ethnic communities did not arise out of any ideological commitment to black as a political color. Rather, local clients perhaps associated AFFOR’s whiteness with neutrality and recognized the cultural capital that this well-funded organization had to offer. AFFOR’s success in obtaining grants undoubtedly demonstrates the way in which the funding system could often favor groups that were better able to speak the language of state multiculturalism—an issue that was the subject of apparent resentment from other local groups.⁵⁹ And as the Shades of Grey episode indicated, there were tensions between the group’s emphasis on local casework and its wider campaigning stance. Given the moral panic around black street crime and mugging and the fact that Handsworth was already lodged in the national imaginary as a key crucible for such anxieties, AFFOR was undoubtedly naïve in its expectation that an academic who reportedly also had ties to the police would be able to contribute to a meaningful discussion.⁶⁰ Yet the group was also evidently valued by its clients, who had “almost always tried the normal channels and have come to the point where they do not know what to do next.” As shown in the following discussion, for those groups that maintained an ideological commitment to a unified politics of black, tensions could often be much more pronounced.⁶¹

      BLACK AS A POLITICAL COLOR? SOUTH ASIAN GROUPS IN HANDSWORTH

      In postwar Britain, South Asian politics was dominated by the IWA. Initially set up by Indian peddlers in London and Coventry in the 1930s to agitate for Indian independence, in the 1950s IWAs reemerged with a focus on providing welfare support for the increasing number of Punjabi immigrants who were settling in Britain. The groups were often heterogeneous in their ideological approach, however, and even after the establishment in 1958 of a national organizing body they remained susceptible to splits, particularly over loyalties to an Indian Communist Party that had itself divided into Marxist and Marxist-Leninist factions.⁶² By the mid-1970s the IWAs had been joined by a newly politicized, younger generation of largely British-born South Asian activists. Although it retained an internationalist perspective, the AYM was much less influenced by the factionalism of far-left politics on the Indian subcontinent. Instead, it was the growth of racist street violence that Asian communities increasingly found themselves subject to that often provided the initial driver. A turning point came on 4 June 1976, when an Asian teenager, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was stabbed to death in a racist attack in Southall, West London, outside a welfare center run by the Southall IWA. The IWA’s response to the murder was perceived by younger generations as hesitant and acted as a lightning rod for wider concerns about IWA democracy and accountability. The formation of the Southall Youth Movement bypassed the IWA and took the lead in organizing the response to the Chaggar case and protests against a perceived lack of police protection. The group’s visibility helped inspire a rapid growth in AYMs across