When Malcolm X took on British Racism
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BY CIARA GARCHA
arshall Street was an unassuming, unexceptional street in Smethwick, in the west Midlands. Its terraced houses were not particularly striking or notable and the declining industrial town it stood in, resembled many others across the country, facing a myriad of social and economic challenges. But Marshall Street was at the centre of a thick hostile local and national race row, which called into question the very nature of what it meant to be British. A visit by Civil Rights activist, Malcolm X, in February 1965, just before his death, ensured that the struggles centred around this Street went global and Smethwick was thrust into the international spotlight. Smethwick’s recent history was intimately associated with racism and white supremacy. As the constituency of former British Union of Fascists leader, Oswald Mosley, the shadow of his hateful politics hung over the town, even as it diversified in the years following the war. Smethwick had an immigrant population of 6.7%, a small figure but significantly higher than the national average of 1%. This substantial immigrant population was contested by large sections of the town’s white residents, whose image of a white British nation was challenged. More recently,
26 BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2021
the parliamentary election for the Smethwick House of Commons seat had been embroiled in bitter racism. Conservative Peter Griffiths won the vote from the incumbent Labour candidate, as dissatisfied residents and voters organised around the slogan: “if you want a n****r for your neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour”. When confronted about the vile phrase, Griffiths defended it as a “manifestation of popular feeling”. Griffiths’ ties to Marshall Street were deeper than the hotly contested 1964 election. As part of the Smethwick Council, he had been at the centre of plans to essentially implement segregation on the streets of Britain. A campaign by many of the white residents on the racially diverse street lobbied for the government to buy up the remaining houses and reserve them only for white residents. The so-called Marshall Plan, intended to make Marshall Plan a white only street, implementing US Jim Crow-style segregation on where people could live. Malcolm X’s visit to the UK was an eclectic, fast-paced trip to notable locations and some of Britain’s largest Black communities. As Graham Abernathy writes, he arrived “eager to explore and publicise the social and political barriers faced by Black people living in Britain” and to “foster transatlantic”
‘...Malcolm X made a point of walking down Marshall Street. The ordinary, rows of terraced housing, caught up in an attempt to introduce social segregation, stood by as one of the most notable Civil Rights activists in the world strode past them.’
cooperation. After a visit to Oxford, which included talking at the Oxford Union, and a stay in London, Malcolm X voyaged outside of these arguably unsurprising locations, into the English midlands, arriving in Smethwick on 12th February. An invitation from the Indian Workers Association, a group formed to mobilise and represent migrants from the Indian subcontinent in the late 1930s, had brought Malcolm X to Smethwick. The intense racism and discrimination faced by both the Black and South Asian communities had caught his attention. In journeying to Smethwick, Malcolm X ventured outside of what may be considered unsurprising locations for his
