Mixed Race Studies

The Liverpool-Born Black Community

Diverse Magazine
2009

Dr. Ray Costello

The history of The Liverpool Black Community seems to have been strangely ignored in the dialogue on asylum seekers and immigration by government pundits.

The Liverpool Black Community is distinguished from others by its continuity, some black Liverpudlians being able to trace their roots in Liverpool for as many as ten generations. This community dates back to even before the American War of Independence, which caused numbers of free Black Loyalists to settle in London and the growing township. Early settlers ranged from freed slaves and black servants to the student sons and daughters of African rulers, who had visited the port from at least the 1730s.

Liverpool’s Black community is some three centuries old, but, incredibly, still faces difficulties of identification. Although not all of the Liverpool Black Community is of dual heritage, the majority of those born in Liverpool are. Much of the difficulty of identification of the Liverpool Black Community lies in the fact that, from its beginnings, the Liverpool Black population has, indeed, been a mixed race community, the result of more male settlers than female; freed Black American soldiers arriving in 1782 after the American War of Independence, to be followed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by African and West Indian sailors, soldiers and workers.

The very definition of a “mixed-race” society is fraught with difficulty, and this is one of the problems of acknowledgement, even in Liverpool. All the current terms are inadequate: The term “half-caste” has long been discredited, but even newer terms; “mixed-race” and “dual heritage” have their own problems. “Dual heritage” suggests a child living with the supposed ‘dilemma’ of each parent having a different culture or background. This may not be the case in many Liverpool children with both European and African genes, as any intermarriage may have taken place generations ago. Thus, a child who appears to have 50/50 genes may not have one black and one white parent, but could be the product of a community which became a distinct multi-racial community literally centuries ago, just as Mexicans and many Central and South Americans have now evolved from being considered half Native American (or ‘Indian’, as they were wrongly called) and half Spanish to distinct ethnic identities…

Read the entire article here.

The Changing Face of Liverpool 8

Diverse Magazine
2009

Dave Clay

Four hundred years of shackles and chains, four hundred years of racist names and institutionalised racist games, Slavepool’s history has got to change
“Slavepool” by Eugene Lange AKA Muhammad Khalil

My mate, the late and inspirational, John Hill once described Liverpool-born Black people as Puzzle People. He had touched on the puzzling question of identity in the City of Liverpool.   Negro in the 1940s, Second Generation Immigrants in the 1950s,  Mixed-Race in the 1960s, Coloured/Half-caste in the1970s, Afro Caribbean in the 1980s,  Ethnic Minority in the 1990s  and to be found somewhere on an Ethnic Monitoring Form in the Millennium. You can be, politely, described as any of the above at any given time or era in Liverpool. Confused? This article endeavours to explore the so-called Identity Crisis in Liverpool from a Liverpool-born Black perspective.

When I considered which direction this article should take I found that it was so emotional that I had to express some feelings and experiences, rather than provide an academic overview of identity in Liverpool. The latter is more than adequately addressed by Dr. Ray Costello in his excellent overview of this subject on page.

I was born and raised in the Granby area of Liverpool 8 with an African father and a White mother. We were born in the slums of Liverpool 8. As a teenager in the early 1960s I considered myself as one of the ‘Shines’. Obviously intended as a derogatory remark. It was one term used to describe Liverpool Blacks and was fitting with the racist Scouse humour of the time. Here’s an example: Question—Where is the cleanest street in Liverpool?—Answer: Upper Parliament Street where there is a Shine on every corner!…

…FROME SHINES TO HALF-CASTE

Little had changed by the time I became one of the older boys. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. It was now almost 1970 and we were now being called Half-Caste and we continued in the tradition of fighting racism head on. The term half-caste in many ways distinguished us from our fathers only in the sense that we spoke the Scouse ‘language’; we were here to stay and mostly stood up for ourselves. It also isolated us from from Black people outside of Liverpool. Terms like ‘Yellow Man’ ‘half breed’ and ‘red’ were familiar terms within a growing Black population. As a 12 year old I recall being told about the ‘mad African’ who struttered around Upper Stanhope Street waving a paper and shouting extremities about ‘half-caste’ people. We used to consider him as an object of fun. One day I actually listened to what he was saying and it summed up the dilemmas faced by Black kids of our generation; “You half-caste. You are from nowhere. You were born in the middle of the Ocean”. Our fathers took a different view. They considered us as English, ignoring the skin pigmentation. Why did they not teach us African?  We deployed ‘back slang’ instead. The African community was more elderly and holding on to the last strand of the institutions they had created; The Ibo, The Federation, The Crew Club, The Sierra Leone, The Nigerian and The Yoruba. They saw themselves as returning to Africa one day, not with us, and saw no reason why their sons and daughters could not assimilate into the indigenous population since we were born in Liverpool, England, not Freetown Sierra Leone. Unlike their sons and daughters they had no fight in Britain. It was here Africans had arrived from slavery, colonialism, poverty and wars and in many ways they tried to shield us from racism, in order to ensure a good quality of life. They were polite, courteous, believed in education and, in some ways, were too appreciative of Britain for allowing them an opportunity in a country that had occupied Africa. This is not to ignore the African blood that was shed in two World Wars.  Fortunately we knew the reality of Liverpool and English history.  Our foot was in all camps in regard to Africa, language and Liverpool culture. We could not be hoodwinked too easily. We know racism—be it subtle or overt. In any past life we could have been slaves in Africa, on the Masta’s Plantation, targets of the KKK in America, rioters in Watts, or Rodney King, categorised in apartheid South Africa or joining the Mau Mau resistance…

Read the entire article here.

Philanthropic racism in Britain: The Liverpool university settlement, the anti-slavery society and the issue of ‘half-caste’ children, 1919-51

Immigrants & Minorities
Volume 3, Issue 1 (1984)
Pages 69-88
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1984.9974570

Paul B. Rich

The history of racial ideology in Britain has focused mainly on extreme groups of the political right. Less attention has been paid to more ‘respectable’ forms of racism. This paper attempts to redress the balance. It concentrates upon two groups, the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement and, with particular reference to Liverpool and Cardiff between 1919 and 1951, examines their attitudes towards Britain’s ‘half-caste’ population.

The history of racial ideology in Britain has tended mostly to focus upongroups on the extreme right-wing fringe to the exclusion of what may be termed ‘middle opinion’. This rather narrow range of analysis, centred around the yardstick of fascism and its political variants, can lead to the downplaying in certain aspects of British racial attitudes which can be seen to represent a continuation, in a somewhat different guise, of Victorian racial ideas. It was Hugh Tinker who originally suggested this possible linkage between more modern British race attitudes and what he termed ‘neo-Victorianism’, though the thesis has been given no substantial institutional anchorage. This article, therefore, proposes to look at one particular set of institutional links between the Victorian era and the more modern arena of race relations in the 1920s and 1930s by looking at the role of the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement in the debate on ‘half-castes’ in the seaport towns of Liverpool, and to a lesser degree Cardiff, between the wars.

This issue is of importance to students of race in Britain for a number of reasons. Both the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement had roots in the Victorian philanthropic concern with the lower social orders and the less privileged. Though the anti-slavery movement had its heyday during the middle of the nineteenth century before and after the American Civil War of 1861-5, it left a strong legacy in middle-class liberal thought in Britain which was to enjoy a renewed upsurge on the issue of ‘forced labour’ in the Belgian Congo during the Edwardian years through the campaign of E.D. Morel and the Congo Reform Association. Similarly, the university settlement movement was a product of middle-class concern with the lower class—especially in London—in the 1880s as rising class consciousness and residential separation between classes made older and more paternalistic methods of social control increasingly ineffective. Both these Victorian movements carried on in…

Read or purchase the article here.

Love in black and white

Electronic Precinct
University of Liverpool
August 1998

Muriel Fletcher and Margaret Todd, (second and third from left, middle row) with students and staff of the School of Social Science 1926-27
Source: University of Liverpool

Two students who graduated from this University in 1927 play important roles in the film ‘Love in black and white’, which will be broadcast as part of the “Windrush” series. One graduate, Muriel Fletcher, wrote a report about mixed marriages in dockland Liverpool which laid the foundation for 50 years of stigmatisation. The other, Margaret Todd, later Simey, spent time in the Caribbean and, on her return to Liverpool, became a champion of the black community.

The programme was made by Liverpool producer/director Bea Freeman, who is herself a Liverpool graduate and one of the University’s first ‘Second Chance’ students.

‘Fifty years ago, the Fletcher report stigmatised white women who married black men. Now, white women who have been happily married to black men for half a century get their chance to tell their story. It is a story of the stigma and discrimination which they, their partners and their children suffered’, she said…

Read the entire article here.

The Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports or simply, The Fletcher Report of 1930 was a report sponsored by the Liverpool [England] Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children in December, 1927.  The report, released on 1930-06-16, was written by Muriel E. Fletcher a 1920 graduate of the University of Liverpool’s School of Social Science.  She was at that time employed as a probation worker and given the task to investigate the socioeconomic plight of ‘half-castes’.  The social research played particular attention to the family structure of the [so-called] “half-caste” population in Liverpool¹.

The Fletcher Report was written in response to the social tension created by the increased population of black (African) seamen who, via colonization—were deemed British citizens—and their “half-caste” (‘mixed-race’) children of their unions with white (English) women.  This tension culminated with the Liverpool anti-Black riots of 1919.   The report was based on a mere fraction the authors’ purported sample size and had little, if any, concern for the actual well-being of  ‘mixed-race’ children and their families. The report was imbued with the racist “hybrid degeneracy” pseudoscience of the day.  Besides the fact that the Fletcher Report stigmatized ‘mixed race’ individuals for decades, the report owns another ignominious spot in race relations in that it embedded the pejorative term “half-caste” into the British lexicon.

The report is available at the Library of the University of Liverpool (Reference Number: D7/5/5/5).  See: http://sca.lib.liv.ac.uk/ead/html/gb141unirelated-p4.shtml#uni.10.09.01.05.05.02

¹Mark Christian, “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21 Issue 2-3, (2008):  213 – 241.

…The ‘mixed’ population is now the fastest growing ethnic group in Britain. While the substantial increase in the size of this group is a recent phenomenon, population mixing has happened throughout the 20th century and earlier. By the 1920s there were settled mixed race populations in a number of British seaports, including Liverpool and Cardiff, brought about in part by visiting African and Asian seamen, and significant communities in other cities including London and Manchester.

University of Kent, “‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study”, News Release, (May 15, 2008).