Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

cultural and linguistic frameworks within Asian communities.⁹⁶ Sondhi described what he saw as the ARC’s typical client:

      Just imagine a villager coming from India, who had not even been to the big cities in India like Delhi, and comes straight out of a rural way of life to a big city in England . . . finding themselves [living] next door to people they had never before seen in their lives. Not just the English, but the Caribbeans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, and the Pakistanis if you were Indian, and visa versa. People never really developed an in-depth understanding of [the significance] of different cultures.⁹⁷

      The ARC attempted to fill this perceived gap by providing services that were specifically tailored to the needs of different Asian communities “through the use of their own mother-tongues, with a deep understanding of the religious, cultural and national aspirations of the people it serves.”⁹⁸ On the first day the ARC opened, Sondhi recalled, “forty people lined up outside. Soon we had 500 visitors a week. Suddenly we had created a little cocoon, a little oasis in which people could move around with ease. We had opened the floodgates.”⁹⁹

      The ARC offered advice and assistance on issues relating to social security, debt, immigration, nationality, asylum, and housing, and provided practical help with letter reading and form filling. It also responded to broader issues within Asian communities and, perhaps indicating the success of the campaigns waged by the BBS, ran a hostel in Handsworth for female victims of domestic abuse. In the early 1980s the ARC also began to respond to the increasingly important issue of elderly homelessness within South Asian communities. Running counter to assumptions often made by local authorities about the durability of Asian family care networks, the problem had grown partly due to the perennial lack of adequate housing. The ARC responded by collaborating with a housing association to set up an eleven-bed, self-contained hostel specifically for the Asian elderly on St. Peter’s Road, Handsworth. The ARC was the subject of significant criticism from within Asian communities for “bringing shame on the community” by revealing the problem, though for the ARC such concerns were superseded by a commitment to responding to the practical issues that faced Asian communities. Although the claims made by one caseworker that the group’s approach was simply to “respond to what is required” downplayed the radicalism of attempting to tackle such potentially controversial issues, it is undoubtedly striking that in comparison with other organizations, the ARC lacked an explicitly ideological agenda.¹⁰⁰ In Handsworth, the AYM and the BBS consciously refused to accept any form of state funding or involvement in their activities. The ARC, in contrast, from the outset survived on grants from the state and various charitable bodies. Although the ARC “celebrated the ethos of self-help,” its commitment to providing services for the Asian population led it to the conviction that funding was essential.¹⁰¹ In 1979 the ARC received funds from, among others, the City of Birmingham Social Services Department, the Inner-City Partnership, and the Barrow-Cadbury Trust. By the early 1990s the group was receiving grants of over £100,000 from Birmingham City Council.¹⁰²

      There was, however, no clear correlation between the decision of a group to accept state funding and the emergence of ethnicity in its politics. The AYM and the BBS refused to accept any form of state funding and subscribed to the ideology of black as a political color. Yet practically, these groups often engaged in the provision of services and campaigns that were primarily about responding to a particular set of issues as they were experienced by a particular community. From the perspective of the ARC, there was a recognition that reliance on state funding made it vulnerable. In a memo from the early 1980s, for example, it was noted that the “grants are barely paying [the staff] salaries” and that there was a need to expand its income source by approaching other charitable organizations.¹⁰³ Yet this reliance did not make the ARC weaker than any other organization operating in Handsworth. In one sense, perhaps, this is a story of a convergence between groups who saw their primary remit as campaigning and those who focused on service provision. By the 1980s such distinctions had become difficult to maintain. When in the late 1970s the IWA embarked on its project to build the Udham Singh Welfare Centre, it made the decision to do so with the benefit of state monies. This was perhaps a recognition of the direction of travel in which the group was already moving. By the later 1970s the IWA was beginning to leave the Marxism-Leninism of its past behind as it gravitated more closely to the Labour Party.¹⁰⁴ In the same way that AFFOR was able to marry its practical services with a wider antiracist agenda, the IWA’s political commitments began to match more closely the services it now provided. It increasingly became preoccupied—both practically and ideologically—with ethnically distinct issues. Like the ARC, the IWA and its Udham Singh Welfare Centre remained active in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The AYM and the BBS, by contrast, where tensions between ideology and practice were much more pronounced, had by the end of the 1980s ceased to exist.

      AFRICAN CARIBBEAN POLITICS

      Alongside its African Liberation Day, which it held annually from 1977, the ACSHO maintained an internationalist line of vision that attempted to draw events from across the black diaspora into the everyday lives of the group’s constituents. The group was based at 104 Heathfield Road, a short walk from the Villa Cross pub at the junction with Lozells Road and the nearby Acapulco café (outside which the incident that sparked the 1985 riots took place), an area known locally as black Handsworth’s front line. In December 1972, in the context of rising anxieties about the presence of radical black activism in Britain, a Sunday Telegraph correspondent attempted to visit the ACSHO headquarters. The journalist characterized the ACSHO as Black Power emanating from a terraced house and had obtained a copy of the group’s newspaper, which, it was reported, married allegations of discrimination locally with updates on the progress of anticolonial movements in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.¹⁰⁵ By the end of the decade, in the context of anticolonial victories in Portuguese Africa, the ACSHO turned its attention to events in the south of the continent. It received visits from representatives of the South African Black Nationalist group the Pan African Congress as well as the Zimbabwe African National Union, the future ruling party of independent Zimbabwe.¹⁰⁶ There was also a humanitarian strand to the ACSHO agenda. Under the banner of the Marcus Garvey Foundation, a subsidiary charity run by the ACSHO, the group raised funds to help the victims of Hurricane Gilbert, which in 1988 had killed more than forty people in Jamaica. It also sent fifty tons of medical supplies to help in the response to the Ethiopian famine and made a gift of twenty-five hundred pencils and exercise books to schools in Burkina Faso, where the ACSHO also directed funds toward a new orphanage and hospital. This was a vision of Pan-Africanism rooted in Handsworth through the familiar humanitarian call for charity: “Spare a thought for the starving and the needy,” the ACSHO urged its followers. When “you see our street collectors in Britain’s city centres, pubs, parks and on your doorstep . . . give whatever you can.”¹⁰⁷

      As a means of generating solidarity across the Atlantic and throughout the diaspora, these tactics were almost as old as Pan-Africanism itself. For example, the London-based League of Coloured Peoples, established in 1931, encouraged its members to make a practical difference in the lives of those elsewhere in the black globality by raising money for the victims of natural disasters, including a major hurricane strike in British Honduras in 1938. And just as Heathfield Road was used by the ACSHO as a base for cultural activity as well as political mobilization, in 1931 the West African Students Union (WASU) opened a hostel on Camden Road, north London, which not only acted as a destination for sojourners looking for accommodation but also became a meeting point where residents of black London could enact “black internationalist solidarity . . . as much over a spicy rice dish and on the dance floor as through political organising.”¹⁰⁸ The global outlook of such organizations went hand in hand with a concern to remedy the daily discrimination their constituents faced in the metropolis. The need for a hostel of the kind set up by the WASU was crystallized when in 1929 Paul Robeson was refused service at a prominent London hotel, causing a significant public scandal.¹⁰⁹ The incident rang true for the black residents of 1930s London, just as it would have for Handsworth’s black population in the postwar period. As black Britain grew, the pervasiveness of the inequity that faced it became apparent. Like other groups, black organizations such as the ACSHO matched their globalist ideologies with practical attempts to respond to what had become obvious was British institutionalized