The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

13. Britain, the American South, and the Wide Civil Rights Movement

243 13 Britain, the American South, and the Wide Civil Rights Movement Clive Webb Here are two incidents that seem familiar to any student of the civil rights movement. First, white police officers use dogs to dispel black people from the streets in a city where racial confrontation has attracted international media attention. Second, demonstrators gather in the nation’s capital in support of “Jobs and Freedom” for African Americans. To most readers, these snapshots appear to describe respectively the civil rights demonstrations that occurred during May 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, and the March on Washington that took place three months later. In the context of this essay, however, they refer to events on the other side of the Atlantic: namely, a race riot in the British East Midlands city of Nottingham in August 1958 and a sympathy protest in London held simultaneously with the March on Washington.1 The transatlantic connections between the struggles for racial equality in Britain and the American South are the focus of this essay. It assesses the ways in which the southern civil rights movement provided an interpretative framework for understanding the race problems that afflicted the United Kingdom in the decades following World War II. Britain had long defined itself as an exemplar of racial progress, not only domestically but also internationally. British political commentators buttressed this selfmythologizing by contrasting the supposed liberalism and tolerance of their own country with the racial discrimination and violence of the United States, especially the Jim Crow South. The racist reaction to the arrival in Britain of unprecedented numbers of Caribbean migrants, the most dramatic expression of which was a series of racial disorders in the late 1950s 244 Clive Webb and early 1960s, threatened the comforting illusion that the nation was immune to the racial bigotry and brutality that had for so long beset the southern states. The southern civil rights struggle had a significant influence in shaping public policy on race relations in Britain during these years. It had an effect on the growth of organized protest by both racist reactionaries and liberal reformers and also helped shape the legislative reforms enacted by the British government to improve conditions for the migrant population. In recent years the concept of a “long civil rights movement” has gained increasing credibility among scholars of the African American freedom struggle. Historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Glenda Gilmore place the direct-action protests of the 1950s and 1960s in a longer tradition of activism that dates back to the interwar era.2 This essay assesses whether it is appropriate to broaden our understanding of the geographic as well as temporal dimensions of the African American crusade for racial equality . The civil rights movement was as wide as it was long in the sense that African Americans provided a crucial stimulus to the British campaign for racial equality. Yet there were limitations to the diffusion of American influences on the United Kingdom. Although some aspects of the southern civil rights movement transferred to Britain, albeit with necessary adaptations to local context, others became lost in translation somewhere across the ocean. British activists undoubtedly drew inspiration from the other side of the Atlantic, but the different racial dynamics of the United Kingdom ultimately negated the growth of a southern-style grassroots movement based on a strategy of nonviolent direct action. White racists in Britain also drew inspiration from the other side of the Atlantic but were similarly unable to build a mass-based movement. The limitations of southern influences are therefore revealing of the distinctiveness as well as the similarities of race relations on either side of the Atlantic. It is important to stress from the outset that transatlantic influences worked in both directions, at least in terms of the political advantage that southern segregationists took of the rise of racial tensions in Britain. White southerners historically had a cordial attitude toward the British. This opinion had survived despite Britain’s abolitionist movement having spearheaded international condemnation of southern slavery and the British government refusing to grant diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy during the American Civil War.3 The military alliance between Britain and the United States during World War II fostered a renewal of affection. To a Britain, the American South, and the Wide Civil Rights Movement 245 certain extent practical considerations influenced southern attitudes, Britain remaining one of the largest importers of southern trade exports. This...