Becoming Black in the Era of Civil Rights and Black Power

IN JULY 1967, Stokely Carmichael came to London. A civil rights activist in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Carmichael had gained international fame — or infamy — for his call for "Black Power" at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966, popularizing the slogan that came to define the global politics of radical blackness for over a decade. He visited London at the height of his fame, at the start of a five-month world tour that his biographer describes as "the culmination of his personal desire and political need to forge relationships with global revolutionaries." For black Britons, as the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite later recalled, Carmichael's visit "magnetized a whole set of splintered feelings that had for a long time been seeking a node." Interviewing London's Black Power groups for her undergraduate sociology degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1969, the Trinidadian student Susan Craig found his visit remembered as "the single crystallizing experience which carried them over the threshold into 'becoming Black.' Two years later, the fervour with which Carmichael and his message were received was spontaneously described by many militants as a 'conversion.'" Carmichael was a confrontational black man in London, and, significantly, a Trinidadian by birth. "Here, for the first time, was 'one of us' telling the whites 'where to get off,'" Craig wrote.

Craig's interviewees were not alone in their "conversion" to blackness through Black Power. "The era of blackness in the USA," the Guyanese-born journalist Mike Phillips remembered, "seemed to show us a direction." Indeed, when Phillips interviewed black Britons of Caribbean descent in the late 1990s, he found them time and again identifying televised images of American Black Power with "the time in which they became black." This chapter asks why Carmichael's presence, and the politics he represented, resonated in Britain, and looks at how British activists took up Black Power, and what the consequences were for the reformulation of the politics of blackness, anti-racism, and anticolonialism. It also, though, refuses a reading of Black Power simply as America's "global export." Black Power was forged globally. Those African Americans whose visits to Britain in the mid-1960s accelerated the building of a new black politics were themselves formed by personal histories and political movements that traversed the black Atlantic — in his youth in a Trinidad in the wake of major labor rebellions, Stokely Carmichael grew up with the electrical charge of anticolonialism "in the air"; Malcolm X, who visited Britain before Carmichael, also to great acclaim, had grown up schooled in the Garveyite politics of black internationalism and West Indian anticolonialism. They came to a Britain in which black internationalism had a long history. And black Britain of the mid-1960s had important links with challenges to neocolonialism and racialized sociopolitical orders in other global locations. The Caribbean politics of decolonization, indeed, played a formative part in reconfiguring blackness in Britain. This chapter shows how becoming black in Britain in the global moment of Black Power was transformative, albeit reworking rather than replacing a longer history of transnational black anticolonial and anti-racist politics. That transformation marked the beginning of the "thinking black" that this book examines.

Becoming black in the era of civil rights and Black Power involved a balancing act. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, with whose visits this chapter begins, were influential in Britain precisely because of how they were changing the profile of black politics in the United States, but their pull also threatened to marginalize or erase from view long traditions of activism within Britain, and the long, transnational coordinates of black internationalism. When, on the eve of Carmichael's departure, C. L. R. James sought to capture and explain the energy unleashed by his visit, he underlined Carmichael's presence as integral to how "the slogan Black Power reverberate[s] in the way that it is doing in political Britain; and even outside of that, in Britain in general." This, James insisted, was "a testimony not merely to him but to the speed with which the modern world is moving politically." It marked a conjunctural shift — a point from which, as Hall describes the conjuncture, there was "no 'going back.' [...] The terrain changes." But for James, this did not mean a clean break, or the substitution of one politics for another; rather, it involved a reorganization and repositioning of the resources of black resistance. "I have to add that much that I shall now say to you I knew before," James explained, "but I could never have said it in the way that you will hear, unless I had been able to listen and to talk to the new Stokely, the Stokely that we have been hearing."

The first half of this chapter looks to why Black Power reverberated in Britain when U.S. activists visited in the mid-to-late 1960s. These visits were disruptive and transformative, sharpening the existing tensions within British race politics and promising new futures. The second half the chapter, though, turns to James's other concern — the question of how those things "known before" were now to stand in relation to Black Power. The dominance of events in the United States and the visibility of U.S. activists on the world stage were both enabling and restricting. For many of its adherents, Black Power's draw was that it seemed to offer solutions, whereas older politics appeared compromised or ineffective. But this "diasporic resource" — to borrow Jacqueline Nassy Brown's terminology — was utilized through the unequal power relations of diaspora. Using it also meant carving out a space for oneself in the face of marginalization. American activists came to Britain as familiar figures, but their very familiarity as a result of the British media's ready coverage of U.S. race politics, and the different modes of their political engagement compared to those dominating anti-racist politics in Britain, often served to hide the continuities that existed between black British politics pre– and post–Black Power. It made this longer history of black activism either invisible or harder to recognize as "black." Negotiating this was the balancing act that black Britons had to perform.

AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS AND BLACK POWER IN BRITAIN

Carmichael's London visit was part of a much longer tradition. In the lead-up to the American Civil War, many African Americans traveled to Britain, raising funds and building support in the...