Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

certain issues (for example, working conditions, children’s education, religious observance)
as, say, Indian, Pakistani or West Indian and on other issues, which addressed common racial
oppression and class exploitation, as Black. (They were not categories in opposition to one
another or seen then as exclusive.)(17) Thus the Black People’s Alliance, set up in 1968 as
a response to Powell and his aftermath, was exactly an alliance under a Black umbrella of
Indian Workers’ Associations, the National Federation of Pakistani Associations, the West
Indian Standing Conference as well as the uCPA and the more uncompromising RAAS (Racial
Action Adjustment Society, formed following Malcolm X’s 1965 visit to the uK18) and others.
And a few books were now emerging on Black Power, though not perhaps always the
most reliable of texts, for Black Power was generally regarded by the media as a frightening
sort of extremism, and Black leaders (all male) enjoyed playing up to the stereotype. First
there was The Black Man in Search of Power: a survey of the black revolution across the
world (1968) written and published by the London Times News Team, a sensationalist, rather
conspiratorial account. Then the self-publicist leader of RAAS wrote as Michael Abdul Malik,
with the help of ghost-writer John X, the highly readable autobiography From Michael de
Freitas to Michael X (1968)19 followed by Obi Egbuna’s more thoughtful but still very personal
version, Destroy this Temple: the voice of Black Power in Britain (1971).(20) Roy Sawh’s
1968 essay ‘Black Power in Britain’ appeared in Justice First edited by Lewis Donnelly (and
later republished with a number of other pieces by or on Sawh in From Where I Stand: black
people want to hear and white people fear by Hansib Publishing in 1987). And students were
beginning to take Black Power on as a thesis topic.(21)
The tendency to personalise the Black fight begun by Michael X, Obi Egbuna and Roy
Sawh when writing about racism and political action was to colour a number of other works
to emerge in the 1970s – for example, Black England by Rudy Narayan (1977), Britain, the
Black Man and the Future (1972) and How Black Power Overcame Fifty Years of Oppression
in Britain 1945–1995 (1998), both by Vince Hines, and A Savage Culture by Remi Capo (1981).
But two books from the early 1970s manage to combine the existential with the political
and each have chapters on Black Power: Because they’re Black by Derek Humphry and
Gus John (1971) and Black Britain by Chris Mullard (1973). Shattering illusions: West Indians in
British politics (1986) by Trevor Carter (Communist Party member and Black activist), though
part personal testimony, was a later heartfelt political attempt to chart the fight for equality,
including a section on Black Power. The first and still the seminal text to situate Black Power
historically was by A. Sivanandan who, in 1981, in the wake of the inner-city ‘riots’, wrote
the 10,000 word essay ‘From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles
in Britain’ still available in Catching History on the Wing (2008).(22) His analysis, situating
black activism within both the larger class struggle and as a protest against state racism, has
stood the test of time. It has necessarily made its mark on key works that came after, such
as Peter Fryer’s path-breaking book which starts with the black presence under the Romans,
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