Who was Charles Wotten? Remembering the Victims of the 1919 Race Riots.

By Sasha Braham

Trigger Warning: Racial Violence.

The 1919 Race Riots, and its greatest tragedy, the ‘lynching’ of 24-year-old Charles Wotten, are some of the most violent periods of racial upheaval in 20th-century Britain. However, despite the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the increased importance being placed on Black History Month, the history of British race riots and its victims are not taught or publicised enough. While people are often familiar with Civil Rights campaigns and racial violence in America, the violence against people of colour in Britain and the racist legacy of the British Empire are somewhat forgotten. I hope to share a small aspect of the truly shocking history of race relations within the UK and its lasting impact on British society today.

On the 5th of June 1919, Charles Wotten was stoned to death on the Queen’s Dock in Liverpool. Not much is known about Wotten other than that he was a 24-year-old ship’s fireman from Bermuda. After serving in World War I, he was discharged from the Royal Navy and remained in Liverpool in a boarding house on Upper Pitt Street.

A day before Wotten’s murder, a group of Scandinavians brutally stabbed a West Indian man, John Johnson, near Upper Pitt Street. In retal iation, the following day, friends of John son confronted the Scandinavians, and a fight broke out. This sparked a wave of racial vi olence targeted at Black, Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian and South Asian individuals. Large white mobs filled the streets, and the police began to raid everywhere that was Black-owned or known to house Black workers, including boarding houses.

As Wotten escaped from police searching his boarding house, he was chased by an angry white mob of 300 to the Queen’s Dock, and while the police stood and watched, Wotten was chased into the river and pelted with stones and bricks until he died. The actions of this mob can be seen to have echoed the Ku Klux Klan’s lynchings of African American men.

Following Wotten’s death, racial violence engulfed Liverpool, known for its Black population, and a white mob of 10,000 pursued any black person they could find. Black workers were fired by their employers and Arab and Chinese homes and businesses were attacked and set ablaze.

At the inquest into Wotten’s death, the coroner decreed that the cause of Wotten’s death was drowning but stated that there was no evidence as to how he got into the water. Despite several police officers being present, no arrests were made for the murder of Wotten. This was a cover-up that Liverpool’s Black community did not forget.

Charles Wotten’s death is a story of great injustice and pain for his ancestors. Remembering Wotten and other victims of the race riots is helped by The Great War to Race Riots archive, which contains the personal testimonies of Black servicemen and workers stranded in Liverpool, facing the plights of racism and unemployment. The research of this project was invaluable to the book, Great War to Race Riots, which crucially offers a voice to Black servicemen that have been previously forgotten. The 1919 Race Riots were a consequence of mounting racial tensions in seaports across the UK. Following WWI, the economic downturn brought social, economic, and political anxieties for union-backed white workers and demobilised white servicemen. This economic tension grew into resentment against Black and minority communities and businesses, which white groups saw as foreign competitors for jobs and the attention of white women, and therefore a threat to Britain’s post-war national identity. Black workers were violently targeted, and many were left destitute after cities introduced ‘colour bars’ in many industries and white workers refused to work with Black workers.

The standpoint of the British government after these riots is a truly shocking revelation concerning the extent of institutionalised racism within the UK. Following the riots, the British government labelled Black workers as the ‘problem’, rather than the white rioters, and intensified its repatriation scheme, offering to remove colonial citizens from Britain out of fear of a ‘black backlash.’ Between 1919 and 1921, an estimated 3,000 Black and Arab seamen were removed from Britain under the repatriation scheme.

The British government’s decision to treat immigrants in this ‘draconian’ way sustained racism, reclassifying Black people, Asians, and Arabs as ‘aliens.’ Even a century on, the British government maintains such an attitude to immigrants, evidenced by the 2018 Windrush Scandal which highlighted that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens were wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights. While the government has apologised publicly for these ‘mistakes’ these schemes were intentional and present the lasting influence of institutional racism impacting society.

The identity of Wotten and the victims of the 1919 riots should not be forgotten; the violence they faced highlights the importance of the British Empire’s legacy of discrimination and prejudice. The poor response of the British government and the rioter’s mentality to attack immigrants that ‘stole their jobs’ is pertinent to modern-day societal issues such as Brexit, which witnessed an upsurge in reports of racist abuse and serves as a scary reminder of how far we as a society must progress in order to stop alienating minorities.