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black community groups from the mid-1960s, adopting the language of plurality and equality and beginning to play a monetary role in community relations. When the multicultural moment definitively arrived following the 1981 rioting, the Birmingham Labour authority, at least, adopted it ambivalently in light of concerns about the effects it would have on their white working-class vote. Nationally, following the 1985 unrest the government allocated a considerable sum of money to Handsworth, ostensibly with the aim of job creation, though this was met with vocal opposition from others inside government. As discussed in this chapter, there were divisions along ethnic lines in Handsworth, but it is simplistic to suggest that this was solely because of the way in which state funding had come to be distributed. In fact, within many organizations this was a process that was already under way independently from the often-confused reach of the state.

      ANTIRACISM

      In 1970 a group of teachers, academics, and campaigners organized a march on Edgbaston cricket ground, a venue in the south of the city that was due to host a match in a series between England and a whites-only South African team. The march was part of a national Stop the Seventy Tour campaign, led by the activist and future Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain with the support of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). In the event, the protests were a success; the planned matches were abandoned. But the organizers of the Birmingham march—which included local businessman John Plummer; Leslie Mitton, a teacher at a local Methodist College; and John Hick, a prominent lecturer in religious philosophy at Birmingham University—pressed ahead, transforming it into a demand for better community relations. Nine hundred people attended the march, out of which a new organization was born: All Faiths for One Race (AFFOR). From 1974 the group operated out of premises at the corner of Finch Road and Lozells Road in Handsworth, where it continued to be active throughout the 1980s. Initially its members were dismissed as “angry young men intent on stirring up trouble.” Not everyone active in AFFOR was either male or young, Hick later recalled in his memoirs. But it was true “that we were angry—about the injustices of racism.”³⁸

      AFFOR had emerged out of a particular conjuncture with respect to the Left’s engagement with Britain’s black population. As Jodi Burkett has suggested, although an anticolonial stance was at the heart of organizations such as the AAM, this did not mean they stood apart from the wider ambivalence about Britain’s imperial past that had emerged in the context of decolonization. In the 1960s, the focus of such organizations on what was understood as the growing imperial status of the United States and the “little empire” that was seen to have developed in South Africa not only displaced the memory of Britain’s own imperial past but also meant that the experiences of its formerly colonial subjects living in Britain could often be overlooked.³⁹ There was a reluctance, as Stuart Hall has reflected with respect to his own experience in the New Left, to explicitly comprehend the black presence as being the product of a colonial formation.⁴⁰ By the end of the decade, however, the passing of successive race equality acts, immigration legislation and the arrival of Powellism meant that it was virtually impossible for the largely white membership of groups such as the AAM to ignore the domestic race relations scene. As Hain reflected, the prospect of a deterioration in community relations if the South African tour of England were to be allowed to go ahead had become a central plank of the Stop the Seventy Tour’s campaign.⁴¹ In Birmingham the transformation of a protest against a segregated South African cricket team into AFFOR, an agency that would both conduct antiracist campaigning and run services for local black communities in Handsworth, was a signal of this broader direction of travel.

      By the mid-1970s, prompted by the increasing visibility and electoral successes of the NF, a national antiracist movement had emerged.⁴² Like AFFOR, it was led primarily by white activists. A key driver was Rock Against Racism (RAR), a coalition established by the Socialist Workers’ Party that capitalized on the popularity of the punk, reggae, and “two-tone” scenes by staging consciously multiracial festivals featuring both white and black acts. This culminated in a carnival in London in 1978 that was attended by more than seventy thousand people. By this point, RAR had been joined by the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), a group formed in 1977 to give the antiracist movement a formal political voice. Its central aim, through the organization of protests and marches and the distribution of its campaign literature, was to expose and raise awareness of the Nazi sympathies of the NF. Between 1977 and 1979 it was estimated that there were 250 ANL branches across Britain and more than forty thousand members.⁴³

      The ANL, in particular, has been subject to criticism from those who saw its focus on exposing the “sham patriotism” of the NF as accepting the debate on the nationalist terms of the Far Right. For Paul Gilroy, the ANL closed down what were the broader concerns of RAR and honed in on the Nazism of the NF “to the exclusion of every other consideration,” including the NF campaign of street violence and myriad other forms of racial discrimination that black communities faced on a daily basis.⁴⁴ Both RAR and the ANL were relatively quiet in Handsworth. In 1978 there had been a failed attempt to stage a “musical march,” for example, partly due to the divided nature of the local ANL branch and its inability to attract the support of local black communities.⁴⁵ AFFOR, in contrast, continued well into the 1980s. It was undoubtedly at more than one remove from the politics of RAR and the ANL. While AFFOR undertook antiracist campaigning and attempted to uncover the Nazism of local NF members, this was always counterbalanced by a localized politics that was explicitly focused on attempting to meet the varied needs of local black and Asian communities. There could be tensions between these twin ambitions. In 1977 AFFOR summarized its core dilemmas as being “to what extent it should concentrate on casework and to what extent on ‘campaigning.’”⁴⁶ But it was the focus on local casework that was arguably the critical factor in the group’s ability to outlast RAR, the ANL, and other antifascist organizations following the NF’s decline as an electoral force from 1979 onward.

      In 1976 Clare Short, a local activist who like Hain would go on to become a Labour cabinet minister, became director of AFFOR. She characterized the group as a “hub of anti-racist activity” in which the guiding principles were “respect [for] each other’s religious institutions” coupled with an “absolutely uncompromising” position on racism.⁴⁷ The group published articles discussing the nature of fascism and an exposé of a local NF leader’s comments regarding the supposed “swamping” of Britain by “coloured invaders,” comments that echoed those later made by Margaret Thatcher in the run-up to the 1979 general election.⁴⁸ As with the ANL, this tactic of exposing the fascism or Nazism of the Far Right often stemmed less from a desire to counter the effects of racism on minority communities and more from a concerted effort to appeal to as broad a white audience as possible. Thus the author of one AFFOR pamphlet, So What Are You Going to Do About the National Front?, urged “white society” to recognize that “compared with the hurt and bitterness and anger of many black Britons” the distaste white communities felt at the presence of a neo-Nazi party in Britain was “minute.” Other articles published in AFFOR’s quarterly newsletter highlighted the legal problems faced by local ethnic minorities and lobbied the Commission for Racial Equality to expand on its remit in relation to the needs of ethnic minorities across the city.⁴⁹

      Yet unlike either RAR or the ANL, AFFOR maintained a strong connection to a particular locale. The initial decision to base AFFOR in Handsworth was made because it was felt that this was the area in which the group would best be able to make tangible improvements in the lives of black communities. From the perspective of the university campus, where the group’s founding member, John Hick, spent his working life, there was an exoticism to “multi-racial Handsworth” as a place of comparative excitement and turmoil. Situating AFFOR in Handsworth was, one activist wrote in 1979, about “taking sides . . . with the black communities . . . choosing an innercity area and trying to cope with the advantages and disadvantages of such a place.”⁵⁰ While the initial depiction of the group as angry young men was an easy characterization to make, the group’s commitment to developing practical responses to the inequalities experienced by the local population meant that by the 1980s it had undergone a significant transformation from the direct action associated with the Stop the Seventy Tour to being among the most established players on the local race relations scene, regularly obtaining some of the largest funding grants with the most regularity.⁵¹

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