Danni Perry’s flag display at the Royal Opera House sparked 182 performers to sign a solidarity letter that cancelled the Tel Aviv Tosca production, while Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Tel Aviv hotels, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Black British activism after WWI
In the second in a four-part serialisation of his new book, African Uhuru, ROGER McKENZIE outlines the organised resistance to a surge of racism against black workers in law and in the unions as they returned from the war
LOWER RANKS: Black workers were often recruited to work on the railway in jobs that white workers did not want to do
YANA PETTICREW explains what’s behind the strike and how the entire sector rests on super-exploiting an unorganised workforce
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
BILL KIDD MSP says increasing Britain’s nuclear arsenal at this time is dangerous and expensive folly
ROGER McKENZIE asks whether the US’s shift to targeting everyone at once will instil greater co-operation among rising powers
THE summer of 1919 was as red in Britain as it was on the other side of the Atlantic in the US. It was a year of international unrest and fear at the same time as being a time of excitement, hope and radicalism, springing from the new world that had been ushered in by the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Much of Britain’s 1919 black population was made up of seafarers, dock workers and colonial troops returning from doing their duty in World War I.
This should not be taken to conclude that black workers only arrived in Britain after World War I. Far from it. There has been a sizeable black population in Britain since Roman times when soldiers of African descent were sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall. But 1919 witnessed a new phenomenon — organised attacks on a community in Britain based on race.
Prior to World War I trade unions in Britain took the principled position of resisting moves by employers to pay black workers, African or Asian, less than their white counterparts. But this principled position disappeared after the war even though unions in the colonies sought to forge an alliance with them against these racist employer practices.
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