Staying Power

Peter Fryer

Description

Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. Stretching back to the Roman conquest, encompassing the court of Henry VIII, and following a host of characters from Mary Seacole to the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, Peter Fryer paints a picture of two thousand years of Black presence in Britain.



First published in the '80s, amidst race riots and police brutality, Fryer's history performed a deeply political act; revealing how Africans, Asians and their descendants had long been erased from British history. By rewriting black Britons into the British story, showing where they influenced political traditions, social institutions and cultural life, was - and is - a deeply effective counter to a racist and nationalist agenda.



This new edition includes the classic introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, in addition to a brand-new foreword by Guardian journalist Gary Younge, which examines the book's continued significance today as we face Brexit and a revival of right wing nationalism.
Foreword by Gary Younge

Introduction by Paul Gilroy

Preface

1. 'Those Kinde of People'

2. 'Necessary Implements'

3. Britain's Slave Ports

4. The Black Community Takes Shape

5. Eighteenth-Century Voices

6. Slavery and the Law

7. The Rise of English Racism

8. Up from Slavery

9. Challenges to Empire

10. Under Attack

11. The Settlers

12. The New Generation

Appendices

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

Sujets

• Minority Studies
• Ethnic Studies
• Social History
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Reino Unido
• African-American history
• Modern history
• General officer
• United Kingdom
• Slavery
• Great Britain
• General
• Discrimination
• Renaissance
• Royaume-Uni
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786803344
• Langue: English

Extrait

Staying Power
Staying Power
The History of Black People in Britain
Peter Fryer
Foreword by Gary Younge
Introduction by Paul Gilroy
This edition first published 2018 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright The Estate of Peter Fryer 1984, 2010, 2018

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3831 6 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3830 9 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0333 7 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0335 1 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0334 4 EPUB eBook



This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Geethik
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
To Emily, Frances, and James
Contents
Foreword by Gary Younge
Introduction by Paul Gilroy
Preface
1. Those kinde of people
Africans in Britannia
Africans in Scotland
Africans in England
Queen Elizabeth s response
A Khoi-khoin in England
2. Necessary Implements
Sugar and slavery
Chattels and status symbols
Pageant performers
3. Britain s slave ports
A profitable business
The slave-merchants of Bristol and Liverpool
London as a slave port: the West India lobby
Competition
Quality control
Black people in the slave ports
The slave ports self-image
4. The black community takes shape
Early black organizations
Black people at work
Asians in Britain
Black musicians
5. Eighteenth-century voices
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw
Phillis Wheatley
Ignatius Sancho
Ottobah Cugoano
Olaudah Equiano
6. Slavery and the law
The legal pendulum
Granville Sharp challenges the slave-owners
The Somerset case
Slavery and the Scottish law
Mass murder on the high seas
The Grace Jones case
7. The rise of English racism
Race prejudice and racism
The demonology of race
Plantocracy racism
Pseudo-scientific racism
8. Up from slavery
The black poor
Resistance and self-emancipation
Abolitionists and radicals
The black radicals
The everyday struggle, 1787-1833
9. Challenges to empire
William Cuffay
Mary Seacole
Ira Aldridge
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Challenges from Asia
The rise of Pan-Africanism
Black workers and soldiers
10. Under attack
Racism as riot: 1919
Claude McKay and the Horror on the Rhine
Defence and counter-attack
Racism as colour bar
Racism as riot: 1948
11. The settlers
The post-war immigration
Racism as riot: 1958
Surrender to racism
12. The new generation
Born at a disadvantage
Police against black people
Resistance and rebellion
Appendixes
A. Letter from Olaudah Equiano to Thomas Hardy, 1792
B. Letter from William Davidson to Sarah Davidson, 1820
C. Letter from Robert Wedderburn to Francis Place, 1831
D. William Cuffay s speech from the dock, 1848
E. J.R. Archer s presidential address to the inaugural meeting of the African Progress Union, 1918
F. Birmingham, the metal industries, and the slave trade
G. Eighteenth-century biographies
H. Visitors, 1832-1919
I. Prize-fighters, 1791-1902
Notes
Suggestions for further reading
Index
Foreword
Gary Younge
The very serious function of racism is distraction, Toni Morrison argued in a lecture in Portland Oregon in 1975:

It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
For the longest time the central distraction for black Britons was insisting on our existence. That we were black was unarguable. That we were in Britain was acknowledged if only to be contested. But the notion that we could be black and British, both from this place and in our bodies, confounded many, if not most.
Britain, we were told, was an essentially white place to which we had only just arrived. We had no history here. The colonial connections that explained our existence were at best opaque and at worst unknown to most, even as they were mythologised in the very statues and monuments that surrounded us. Our past did not come up in curricula or mediated conversation. To the uninformed, ill-informed and misinformed, which included those who charged themselves with curating the national narrative, we came from nowhere and for no good reason.
This had an impact on both our politics and our self-perception. The belief that we have come somewhere , wrote historian E.H. Carr, is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere our view of history reflects our view of society.
Effectively orphaned by the most accessible and partial national story available, many black Britons sought surrogate historical parents elsewhere and found them in America, whose story of racial disenfranchisement and resistance we adopted as our own.
So a book, like Peter Fryer s Staying Power , that starts with the sentence: There were Africans in Britain before the English came here serves as the basis to a transformative understanding not only of the past, but the present and future too. Its scholarship did not simply establish our presence here over the centuries in vivid detail and as a fact, the way in which he told it rooted that presence in a tradition of struggle with a particular and organic relationship to Britain.
That this edition should emerge in the year that marks the 70th anniversary of Windrush, the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell s Rivers of Blood speech and the 25th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence matters. For Staying Power provides us with the necessary tools to unravel the morass of self-congratulation, myth, melancholic nostalgia and hollow, narrowly tailored remorse that tends to underpin scheduled moments of racial commemoration.
With Fryer as our guide, we know that whatever multicultural bonhomie we enjoy now is a product not of Britain s innate genius and sense of fair play, but of bitterly fought struggles in which the political and media class have often resisted progress. We know that in those struggles black people have had allies, as well as enemies, among white Britons and trade unions. And that these struggles were not fought in a vacuum, but were always part of the broader economic, political and social landscape. Fryer shows us that black British history is not a sub-genre of British history but an integral part of it, so tightly woven into the fabric that any attempt to unpick would make the whole thing unravel. With sufficient imagination and solidarity all sorts of Britons can see themselves in this book and spark their own transformative reckoning with who we are and how we got here.
Indeed, had more liberals read it they would have understood events since the financial crisis as consistent with Britain s racial history rather than aberrant to it. The rise of the xenophobic hard-right in a period of economic crisis, ensuring a steady flow of arsenic in the water supply of our political culture, is not new, even if the imperial fantasy in our foreign policy and a domestic agenda guided by austerity, war, closed borders and a permanent state of terror has created a current framework in which it might fester. The nature of exclusion and discrimination may evolve - from race to religion and colour to culture and even language - even as the nature of the resistance and rebellion will evolve with it. We cannot know the destination of those struggles; but thanks to Fryer we are far more aware of their source.
Gary Younge
April 2018
Introduction
Paul Gilroy
Staying Power is a special book. It has to be recognized as something of a historical phenomenon in its own right. After the original publication in 1984, access to the history of black settlement in Britain would never be the same. Peter Fryer s unique breadth, ambition and political integrity established the basic orientation point for historical scholarship on Britain s black communities. Its honesty, clarity, depth and acuity made that insurgent historical narrative available in usable form to a wide and eager readership. Amidst the political and economic debris of the early 1980s riots, Staying Power answered the widespread hunger for a historical narrative which could anchor hopes for more just and more humane treatment of Britain s racialized minorities. In retrospect, it also signalled a decisive step away from the influential African American scripts of race and politics which had been so important in the preceding phase of struggles when ideas of civil rights and black power had enjoyed a global impact.
By showing where the labour and imagination of diverse black people had contributed to the making and re-making of Britain, shaping its radical traditions, social institutions and political habits, Staying Power answered the nationalism and racism that obstructed the paths to authentic inclusion and belonging. In the spirit of that now distant period, the history that Peter Fryer excavated with such evident care was a politically motivated one. It synthesized the life experience of several black settler populations: pre and post 1945. If that appears to be a simpler task today, its obviousness is a measure of his achievement. His book also added substantively to what we knew about our past. The main text, which flattened as it drew closer to the present, consolidated a constellation of key personalities, problems and events. And then, there was another whole world in the book s challenging footnotes and appendices which had unearthed enoug