On Thursday 6 August I was a member of the panel for a Zoom discussion on 'Truth & Memory. History and Struggle Against State Organised Racism in Britain' organised in South Shields.
My introductory text
It is an indictment of the way British history has been taught and the closed minds of large numbers of people that the white men who thought they were protecting Earl Grey’s monument in Newcastle did not know that he had been the Prime Minister whose Government passed the Act to abolish Britain’s direct involvement in slavery.
Deprivation Among BAME Communities
Back in 1995 Rene Webb, the President of the West Indian Ex-Service organisation said ‘A society that cannot look after its poor, cannot be expected to look after its black poor.’ This reminds us that state racism is also linked to class. Both the white and the black working class poor live in the so-called deprived neighbourhoods, many of which had been smashed by the Thatcher Government’s de-industrialisation.
Under Tony Blair’s Government the Social Exclusion Unit analysis revealed that 70% of BAME residents lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods. Blair said it would take 30 years to turn this around. The Tories abolished the policies and delivery agencies seeking to ensure that turn around. Tory austerity has made the situation worse. I am not saying that this was done for overly racist reasons, but it does suggest that the impact on race equalities was not considered.
Today's State Racism
Today the most public examples of state racism are the Windrush Generation Scandal, and the abuse of stop and search powers by the police. The only reason we know about the latter is because back in 1994 the Community/Police Consultative Group for Lambeth, of which I was Secretary, persuaded the Labour Opposition and the Government to require a Code of Practice, which included the requirement to keep statistics.
Alongside state racism is the institutional racism embedded into a large range of organisations. There was a massive failure to use the themes of the recommendations for the police in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report to examine racism in those organisations, something I did when I worked for the British Association for Settlements & Social Action Centres.
The COVID Crisis And Black Lives Matter
The COVID crisis and the Black Lives Movement have starkly illustrated the link between the higher incidence of the virus among BAME communities linked to deprivation, and of the extent of the experience of racism. The challenge is massive and a key problem is the way in which British history has been taught in non truthful way, neglecting the Black contribution and downplaying the way in which the British slavery business enriched the wealthy of this country at the expense of the enslaved, and here in Britain the agricultural and working classes. Turning this round has been something activists on Black British history like Hakim have been working on for decades.
Work On North East Black History
As I had already been involved in this work I provided information on North East’s Black History in the early 2000s to the Director of the Shiney Row Resource and Advice Centre, who was concerned at the growing racism in response to the rehousing of refugees. Then I was support worker for the 2007 Tyne & Wear Remembering Slavery and the 20010-13 North East Popular Politics projects.
The former led to the publication of John Charlton’s book Hidden Chains. Because it is out of print I have put together a series of pamphlets on the 2007 project, the slavery business involvements, the abolition movement, the support for emancipation in the USA and the contribution made by people of African heritage.
(These are available as free PDFs downloadable
from the following blog posting:
https://seancreighton1947.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/black-history-update-11-august
Racism in the North East
The incidence of racism in the North East was starkly revealed by David Olusoga’s emotional turmoil in his documentary re-visiting Gateshead where he grew up suffering from racist abuse and racist attacks on his home. Racism continues to be a problem around the country from the testimony of young people about their school experiences, including in the North East, as been featured in The Guardian on 30 July.
The mass unemployment grows in the wake of the COVID economic crisis so could be fertile ground for racist and fascist organisations. It is crucial that there needs to be a major change in schools in the way British history is taught, and a lot of work in every community. Those of us who give talks on slavery and abolition and Black History know that many people say that they have to rethink British history.
The North East Slavery Business Connections
The 2007 project discovered a wide range of links with the slavery business, involving landowners, industrialists and politicians. It started with the many North Easterners who helped colonise North America and the Caribbean. There was investment in plantation ownership and buying enslaved Africans, such as by the Delavels in Florida. There were North Easterners directly involved in slave trading. The Crowley ironworkers at Winlaton made shackles and hoes for the plantations. Coal was shipped to the islands. Robert Carr imported tar from Trinidad. Blocks of sugar came in for processing.
One of the key figures was John Graham-Clarke, an important industrialist, who built up his ownership of plantations and had his own fleet of ships to and from the Caribbean. He also became guardian to the children of Jamaican slave owners. His daughter married Edward Moulton-Barrett of Jamaica, while his son James married the daughter of the wealthy Jamaica plantation owner Leonard Parkinson, who had been born in Kirklevington.
There were many awards of compensation awarded to North EastEnders or on their behalf, including. There were Anglican priests like William Smoult Temple, and Rev Edward Cooke, who acted as trustees and executors, and the former Durham vicar who became Bishop of Exeter. There was even ‘a coloured’ woman living in Startforth from Demerara.
You can see the full details of compensation on the database of the Centre for Research into British Slave-ownership.
Abolition Campaigning In The North East
On the abolition side Granville Sharp, who initiated legal action against slave owners in London, worked with Olaudah Equiano the leading black campaigner, and was involved in founding the colony of Sierra Leone. Sharp’s father also supported the movement.
Key to the movement were the Quakers and the Unitarians, the latter led by Rev William Turner. The movement received a boost with the appointment of Shute Barrington as Archbishop of Durham, who supported a number of abolitionist Anglican vicars in the Region. Northumberland’s Charles Grey was a committed supporter from the 1780s, working with Richard Milbanke as Durham County's MP, to achieve the 1807 ban on British involvement in the slave trade. There was mass petitioning and campaigning through to the end of slavery in 1838.
The Quakers, especially, the women, were key activists in the support for emancipation in the USA, raising the money to buy the freedom of Frederick Douglass, supporting William Wells Brown when he campaigned on Tyneside, and employed Henry Highland Garnet to help set up branches of the Free Produce movement to promote non-slave made products. Joseph Cowen who had spoken against slavery at his Scottish University continued to support the cause and was a key figure in the campaign that prevented the British Government recognising the Confederate States.
Obviously a lot more can be said but time does not allow. So a few names from later on: Pablo Fanque, the circus owner, James Durham of the Durham Light Infantry, Arthur Wharton the footballer, Celestine Edwards, the anti-racist campaigner, Charles O’Neal, the Bajan doctor, and in the modern period Ivor Cummings born in West Hartlepool who became a key figure in the Windrush story, and Chris Millard, the community relations activist.
In my work over the last few months with Durham University staff, I have recommended they set up two projects: one to explore the links with Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College, and with the music of the British black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose music was championed particularly in Sunderland, and whose great nephew George was a student activist at the University around 1960, and who went on to be a senior Sierra Leonean diplomat.
Where next?
A possible key is to start using the history of the mass support in the North East through the petitions in dozens of towns and villages against the slave trade and then the slavery system, the welcome to the African-American abolitionist campaigners, and the role of North Easterners in the campaign to stop the British Government supporting the Confederacy in the American Civil War.
Other ways could be through art and culture, including using Thomas Bewick’s kneeling slave image, the 1825 painting showing the Bajan British army soldier Loveless Overton in Newcastle, the poems of James Grainger and others. While work on Black history is an all year activity, the challenge is how to ensure that events in Black History month reach a much wider audience and are solidly based in history, and The International Day on 22 March and Windrush Day on 22 June, and International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition on 23 August.
You Tube Video Of Discussion
www.youtube.com/channel/UCCTPlqRxi5JpCOidczUyQwQ
Some previous blogs on related subjects:
https://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/02/reflections-on-current-state-of-british.html
https://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2014/10/how-far-have-we-come-slavery-civil.html
https://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2011/11/struggle-for-community-empowerment.html
https://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2010/12/it-is-interesting-to-see-how-events.html
Black History and Black Lives Matters News
coverage is posted on my bog site
https://seancreighton1947.wordpress.com
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