Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

chapter.¹²⁶

      The ACSHO was formed in reaction to the everyday racism that first-generation immigrants experienced in Britain. “People couldn’t take the pressure of being called ‘wog,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘coon,’ and so on,” Brown recalled. “If you didn’t fight back then you’d suffer serious emotional and psychological problems.” The ACSHO often framed this fighting back in militaristic terms, in keeping with the idiom of Black Power. Just as in the late 1960s Carmichael envisaged an ensuing transnational “‘color clash’” split along binary racial lines, the ACSHO predicted that the collapse of British imperialism and the eventual defeat of apartheid in South Africa would result in the return of “white settlers” to Britain, which would in turn lead to a conflict with an expanded Far Right.¹²⁷ Emulating the Black Panthers, in which all new members were given “military training” that included introductions to intelligence work and the use of weaponry, the ACSHO presented itself as a quasi-paramilitary organization in which prominent members were given titles such as Minister for Information and Minister of Defense and new recruits were required to go through a process of “re-education.”¹²⁸ Concurrent with this vanguardist approach, however, the group also provided a practical program that had the aim of “allowing us to survive in this [the British] environment.”¹²⁹ In one of the first academic surveys of black Handsworth, the black sociologist Gus John described the ACSHO program as “the most hopeful growing-point for an active and relevant community self-help effort” in the area.¹³⁰ Whereas Harambee’s core focus was on housing, the ACHSO took the lead in the provision of alternative education for Handsworth’s black youth.

      The ACSHO supplementary school had been established in 1967 in an atmosphere of growing dissatisfaction among black parents at the way their children were being treated by the educational authorities.¹³¹ Two years later in London, a campaign was fought by the North London West Indian Association against the proposed introduction of a “banding” system in Haringey that was designed to dilute the presence of black pupils in schools across the borough and would thus force many to travel significant distances each day. The campaign eventually forced the Haringey Council to abandon its plans, and the support the campaign gained from other black organizations helped put education at the center of the black political agenda.¹³² The focus was often on the disproportionate number of black pupils who were sent to “educationally subnormal” (ESN) schools for children with low ability or learning difficulties. The potential for pathologizing supposed subnormality was obvious, and by 1972 there were five times the number of black pupils in ESN schools than there were in the mainstream system, with the proportion vastly higher in areas of black settlement. Some pupils who had recently arrived from the Caribbean were immediately identified as ESN without ever having attended a mainstream school.¹³³

      These problems were well known anecdotally among black communities. What demonstrated the true extent of them was the publication of How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System (1971), a seminal report by Bernard Coard, a Grenadian teacher, postgraduate student, and future key player in Grenada’s Marxist revolution. Coard proved the discrimination at the heart of the ESN system and highlighted the effects of an ethnocentric curriculum underpinned by the stereotypes and assumptions of British colonialism. British schooling was shown to have made virtually no accommodation to the growing black presence. Teachers conflated a child’s use of the patois dialect with poor ability, and when it came to career planning suppressed aspiration by focusing on manual employment for black school leavers. Where black history was taught it was done so according to a narrative of triumphant colonial expansionism.¹³⁴ Coard’s research was published by New Beacon Books, the black publisher attached to a radical North London bookshop run by the activist John LaRose, and sold an unprecedented ten thousand copies. At the heart of his recommendations was a call for the black community to set up its own independent or supplementary schools in order to “make up for the inadequacies of British schools” and “teach our children our history and culture.” If the ACSHO school in Handsworth was an early forerunner, Coard’s work resulted in a mushrooming of black supplementary schools across the country.¹³⁵