LIKE many people in the depths of the winter I have begun to look forward to the warm days of the summer.

But looking ahead this year I am reminded that it will be the 125th anniversary of the “Red Summer” of 1919.

The summer of that year was as red in Britain as it was on the other side of the Atlantic in the United States.

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.

Not only were there major racist attacks in almost every port in Britain where there were black people but these uprisings also took place across the US.

Some 65 towns and cities across the US saw deadly racist attacks against African-Americans.

The widespread nature of the uprisings suggests that something more profound was taking place in 1919 than unconnected incidents of racism. 

More workers were migrating across borders after the great imperialist war ended, which led to a wider use of the new system of international passport controls — which only really started during the war.

The introduction of passports was, of course, destined to be an object used to regulate the movement of some rather than others.

In post-war Britain the black community, whether born in the country or not, were liable to be stopped by the police and expected to produce identification, which might include a passport, or face prosecution.

This targeting of the black community went alongside troops returning from their war duties with resentment and bitterness over the scarcity of employment and directed their frustrations and hostilities against black workers.

Accusations of “stealing” whites’ jobs were accompanied by the tiresome and seemingly age-old charges of black men “stealing” white women from white men — as if women were property. 

The reality was that most members of the black workforce lost their positions to the returning white veterans. 

The plight of returning black veterans was ignored and went largely unrecorded.

Circumstances for many black people were so dire that large swathes of the black community, that had the means to do so, chose to leave Britain. 

Most of the newer immigrants, however, if questioned, considered themselves British subjects, because that was indeed their legal status, and chose, when possible, to remain in Britain.

Economic depression and the accompanying unemployment were persistent and serious problems in the interwar period and were most acutely felt by Britain’s working classes — black or white. 

But the usual divide-and-rule card was played by the ruling classes to divert attention away from the rampant exploitation of the working class.

Black workers were labelled the ones responsible for all the ills facing the white working class. 

This all came to a head in 1919 as black families were attacked in their own homes, at work and in the streets around the towns and cities where they lived.

Most of the black population of Britain was concentrated in Liverpool, south Wales and London, in what were already being described by the gutter press in terms such as “distinct foreign colonies,” and in clear racist terms, in one Liverpool newspaper, as “partly a check against the pollution of a healthy community by undesirables.”

The scale of the attacks on the black population in Britain was astonishing in ferocity and scale. 

Black people literally had to flee for their lives and choose where they were going to make a stand to protect their lives.

It was a lesson learned from slavery and colonialism — where battles had to be chosen and collective resistance built.

But while there were always some individual white collaborators in standing up against racist attacks, there is little evidence of any widespread organised resistance by the white left of 1919 in making common cause with black workers against the vicious assaults that were taking place.

Racism emerged in other ways.

Of course it would have been acute in those workplaces where black and white workers mixed. But even where there was not racial mixing in workplaces racism was a fact of everyday life from white employers or supervisors.

But black people also experienced racism in this period in securing services such as banking.

They could also not readily access good housing or use local pubs and clubs where they were often barred by the proprietors or because of the danger it posed by being on what might be considered “white turf.”

The increasingly visible black professional and student populations were met by a societal colour bar whose inherent racist and discriminatory practices also affected their prospects for progress.

For the growing black community how to stand up to racism became an increasingly important issue.

The lesson from both enslavement and colonialism was that while individual acts of resistance to racism had its place and was a frequent choice for black people, it was self-organisation and collective resistance that were vital.

If unions and the left were missing in action on behalf of black workers, then new institutions needed to be formed within both workplaces and in communities.

Black workers organised their own informal banking systems, worked together to provide accommodation for each other and organised their own entertainment in each other’s homes or friendly premises, although both were liable to police and racist attacks.

In the workplace the black community began to self-organise on both an informal and formal basis.

The formal self-organisation led to formations in the pre-World War II 1930s, such as the League of Coloured Peoples, the Coloured Seamen’s Union and the Coloured Film Artistes Association.

But I believe the resistance by black workers to the attacks of 1919 underlined the importance of self-organisation to the black community.

Without self-organisation within their communities black workers would likely have been routed.

It was though not just a lesson learned from 1919. It was a lesson learned from hundreds of years of collective resistance to enslavement and colonialism.

It has always been the case that black communities have never been able to wait for a knight in shining armour to come to their rescue in the fight against racism. It is a fight that black people, even with white support, have had to lead themselves.