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

dismissal from the more desirable jobs that the labour shortage of the war years had allowed
them.” 51 In Chicago, which witnessed the most serious American riot of that year,
an increased black population caused pressure on segregated leisure facilities. A black
person swimming in a beach resort area designated for white bathers was killed by a rock
thrown by a white. The precipitating cause of the Chicago riot was the racist police response
to this event. A white police officer refused to arrest the person alleged to have
thrown the rock, while he later arrested a black person at the behest of a white local. 52
The emphasis on the cultural dimension of shared identities and common experiences
among black people in the “black Atlantic” world provides a valuable addition to the debate
on identity and the inter-connectedness of colonial and metropolitan experience. The
international framework of shared experience and the outbreak of collective protest occasioned
by world war forms a wider perspective in which to place the outbreak of the seaport
riots in Britain. This methodological approach is most useful in discussions on repatriation
and the international consequences of the port riots in chapter six. However, this theory
does not overturn the argument that the 1919 seaport riots were underpinned by economic
and social pressures. As Stovall has noted, some historians have contested this cultural approach
to “race” rioting: “the stress on the subjective, culturally driven character of racial
violence has not remained unchallenged, however, as some scholars have re-emphasized
the important, if not exclusive, role of material conditions in generating racial conflict.” 53
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