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

formed the West African Students’ Union in 1925, with the explicit aim of opposing race prejudice and colonialism.
It was followed in 1931 by the predominantly West Indian, League of Coloured Peoples. This was headed by
an ardent Christian, Dr Harold Moody, and devoted to ‘the welfare of coloured peoples in all parts of the world’
and to ‘the improvement of relations between the races’. But its journal. Keys, investigated and exposed cases
of racial discrimination and in 1935, when ‘colonial seamen and their families’, especially in Cardiff, were being
subjected to great economic hardship because of their colour, indicted ‘the Trade Union, the Police and the
Shipowners’ of ‘cooperating smoothly in barring coloured Colonial Seamen from signing on ships in Cardiff’. (3)
The connections — between colonialism and racialism, between black students and black workers —
were becoming clearer, the campaigns more coordinated. And to this was added militancy when in
1937 a group of black writers and activists — including C.L.R. James. Wallace-Johnson, George Padmore,
Jomo Kenyatta and Ras Makonnen — got together to form the International African Service Bureau.
In 1944, the Bureau merged into the Pan-African Federation to become the British section of the
Pan-African Congress Movement. From the outset, the Bureau (and then the Federation) was uncompromising
in its demand for ‘democratic rights, civil liberties and self-determination’ for all subject peoples.
As the Second World War drew to a close and India’s fight for Swaraj stepped up, the movement for colonial
freedom gathered momentum. Early in 1945 Asian, Africans and West Indians living in Britain came together in a
Subject Peoples’ Conference. Already in February that year, the Pan African Federation, taking advantage of the
presence of colonial delegates at the World Trade Union Conference, had invited them to a meeting at which the
idea of another Pan-African Congress was mooted. Accordingly, in October 1945 the Fifth Pan-African Congress
met in Manchester and, inspired by the Indian struggle for independence, forswore all “gradualist aspirations’
and pledged itself to ‘the liquidation of colonialism and imperialism’. Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Padmore, James —
they were names that were to crop up again (and again) in the history of anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle.
Three years later India was free and the colonies of Africa and the Caribbean in ferment. By now, there was
hardly an Afro-Caribbean association in Britain which did not espouse the cause of colonial independence
and of black struggle generally. Asian immigrants, however, were past independence (so to speak) and the
various Indian Leagues and Workers Associations which had earlier taken up the cause of swaraj had wound
down. In their place rose Indian Workers’ Associations (the name was a commemoration of the past) concerned
with immigrant issues and problems in Britain, though still identifying with political parties back home,
the Communist Party and Congress in particular. So that two broad strands begin to emerge in IWA politics: one
stressing social and welfare work and the other trade union and political activity -- though not exclusively so.
In sum, the anti-racialist and anti-colonial struggle of this period was beginning to break down island and
ethnic affiliations and associations and to re-form them in terms of the immediate realities of social and racial
relations, engendering in the process strong community bases for the shop floor battles to come. But
different interests predicated different unities and a different racialism engendered different though similar
organisational impulses. There was no one unity — or two or three — but a mosaic of unities. However,
as the colonies began to be free and the immigrants to become settled and the state to sanction and insti-
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