Fryer - Staying power: the history of black people in Britain

Staying Power

Peter Fryer was born in Yorkshire in 1927. His interest in black history began in 1948, when as a reporter he was sent to cover the arrival at Tilbury of Jamaican workers on the Empire Windrush. He has written several books, including Hungarian Tragedy; Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery; and The Birth Controllers. He died on 31 October 2006.

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staying

power

The History of Black People in Britain

PETER FRYER

Introduction by
Paul Gilroy

This edition first published 2010 by Pluto Press
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Copyright The Estate of Peter Fryer 1984, 2010

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3073 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3072 3 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1462 9 PDF
ISBN 978 1 7837 1463 6 EPUB
ISBN 978 1 7837 1464 3 Kindle

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To Emily, Frances, and James

Contents

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 Fryers unique breadth, ambition and political integrity established the basic orientation point for historical scholarship on Britains 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 Britains 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 books challenging footnotes and appendices which had unearthed enough material to fuel a library of new monographs. A smaller, companion volume which related Britains internal history of conflict around race to an account of its colonial crimes appeared a few years later.

Fryers intervention was no dry scholastic exercise. His approach was rigorous and detailed but never idly contemplative, disinterested or dispassionate. After all, its courageous author was a libertarian leftist whose political sensibilities had been shaped by reporting on the post-45 experience of Britains postcolonial settlers from the Caribbean and then refined by the world-historic 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination. He would not object to being called an antiracist though it is only fair to add that his humane and worldly, revolutionary wisdom could not be contained under so narrow a heading. Staying Power seems to have been a labour of that cosmopolitan, revolutionary lovean ethically infused effort designed to articulate its authors hopes for an internationalist variety of class politics in which the damage done by racism had been thoughtfully acknowledged and then repaired with an eye on the future. This was no trivial undertaking and Fryer showed that it would only be possible if the colonial and imperial history of Britain could be completely re-worked on a different scale. Staying Power was the cornerstone of that reparative project. If Britain could face up to the blood-stained past that had made it the worlds dominant power and work that history through, it could become a different, better place. More than that, the struggle against the racism which had grown from slavery could then be recognized as a strategic battle, fundamental to the health of the countrys ailing democracy.