In June 1948, HMT Empire Windrush, a British-owned ocean liner arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex, with approximately 500 passengers traveling mainly from Jamaica and Barbados. As imperial citizens, they were legally entitled to move to the British metropole. The arrival of the Windrush has since taken on a large symbolic purchase in British and Black-British historical memory; it is the foundational moment of the Black-British community. Fortuitously, one of those on board was the aptly named Lord Kitchener (real name Alwyn Roberts), a popular Calypso singer. In homage to his arrival in the imperial “Motherland”, Lord Kitchener composed his song “London is the Place for Me”. The complexities of Kitchener’s Black British imperial identity are shown by his lyrics: “Well believe I am speaking broadmindedly/I am glad to know my Mother Country/I’ve been traveling to countries years ago/But this is the place I wanted to know/Darling, London, that’s the place for me” (1-2).
Kennetta Hammond Perry’s London is the Place for Me, in addition to taking its title from Kitchener’s song, seeks to understand how the broader Windrush Generation drew on their imperial identities, engaged in discourses of race, struggled with problems of discrimination and anti-Black violence, and resisted efforts to deny their rights to settle and work in Britain. Though much has been written about Windrush and its legacies from the perspective of mainstream (White) Britain, Hammond Perry instead seeks to recover the voices and politics of Black Britons themselves, whilst also placing their histories in broader currents of decolonisation and transnational debates over race, citizenship, and Black political activism. She begins with the longer history of Black subjecthood within the British Empire, discussing how, even prior to Emancipation, Black men, and women in British holdings like Jamaica or Barbados were contesting, challenging and redefining the meaning of freedom. With Thomas Holt’s seminal work on The Problem of Freedom as an obvious reference point, this discussion provides a strong historical opening for her discussion of post-1945 Black citizenship. Critically engaging with a vast array of secondary literature throughout, Hammond Perry’s narrative follows the trajectory of Black Britons, from Jamaica, through their journeys of migration, and then on to the various struggles over citizenship and the right to belong that ensued from the late 1940s onwards.
Her chapter on “Migration, Citizenship, and the Boundary of Belonging” places post-war migration in “a long history of claim making” through which Afro-Caribbean peoples worked to redefine and reimagine “the racial contours of British citizenship” (49). A process that was obviously complicated by the Atlee government’s policies of decolonisation, this act of “claim making” required a redefining of Britain’s global imperial status (57-58). The focus straddles the macro- and the micro-historical: in one of the most innovative turns in the book, Hammond Perry makes an intriguing use of “vernacular photography” as a means of gaining an insight into the desire for the respectability of Black Britons. In a careful reading of this seemingly trivial source material, she shows how migrants used family photos to negotiate their own representation, thus contesting the White British perception that migrants were exclusively male or were a source of social trouble: “Trendy clothing and chic styling suggested that one had money to buy new clothes, attend to grooming, purchase more than the bare necessities, and actively participate in consumer culture in Britain. An upright posture or poised demeanour communicated an air of confidence, coolness, and ultimately a sense of self-assuredness about one’s status” (74). This also had a gendered component, as “images of Black family life” (78) served to challenge the stereotype that the Windrush migrants were predominantly single men. Indeed, subsequent chapters investigate the prevalence of racialized stereotypes in supposedly multicultural Britain as well as the myriad responses of Black Britons to this racism. Thus, Hammond Perry’s analysis undermines comforting visions of what she terms “the Mystique of British Anti-Racism” (89). As Britain negotiated its new post-1945 status—a shadow of its former Imperial self in a Cold War world dominated by the United States—domestic White elites sought to project a comforting image of British racial tolerance. News stories of “race riots” in London or Nottingham in the later ‘50s stripped away this image and “held the power to potentially compromise the nation’s moral leadership on a world stage.” (91). She again picks up on the role that gender played in these racialized debates. Both Black West Indian men and White working-class “Teddy Boys” were accused of embodying “deviant masculine personas” (110). Hammond Perry shows the work that imagining racism as solely being the preserve of “deviant” Teddy Boys did for White British society: “In this scenario, racists stood trial for a type of anti-Black racism that was seared into the hearts and minds of a small White few and not embedded in the structure of a nation whose racialized imperial history had wedded Whiteness to the most privileged forms of British national identity’ (121).
The subsequent chapter, recounting the murder of Antiguan migrant Kelso Cochrane in May 1959 discusses grassroots responses to anti-Black racism and the ways in which those responses resisted the idea that racism was the preserve of few fringe elements, instead of laying the blame on British society more generally. Hammond Perry links the posthumous activism on behalf of Cochrane to issues of representation already explored in the book: “As stories of ‘race riots’ equated the Black male ‘immigrant’ with Britain’s increasing ‘colour problem’, images of Kelso Cochrane, a groom, a working man, a family man in an intimate relationship with a Black woman whose progeny would not upset conventional racial boundaries, made a compelling case for the induction of Black men into the body politic” (145).
Chapter 5, “Exposing the Racial Politics of Immigration Controls”, examines the background to, and debates over, the Commonwealth Immigration Bill of 1962 that began the process of removing the right of Black imperial citizens to live in Britain. Much of Hammond Perry’s discussion focuses on those who dissented from the government’s line on race and migration: “Whereas much of the scholarly debate about the racial politics surrounding the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 tends to focus on the racist intent of Conservative policy makers … it is important to highlight the ways in which voices of dissent—regardless of their inability to thwart the bill’s passage—mattered in terms of the ways in which the bill was viewed and interpreted both domestically and abroad” (163) The final chapter investigates how the kinds of organisations that sought to work with the state, which had been central to debates over the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, found themselves increasingly at odds with more militant groups who drew on a transnational Black Power ideology. Hammond Perry devotes most of her attention here to the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), an ultimately short-lived group that sought to build alliances with both South Asians and White allies.
Hammond Perry ends with a discussion of the 2011 riots in England, which allows her to highlight the relevance of her work for more contemporary British debates about race, citizenship immigration and the country’s place within broader international currents (as well as the ways in which these debates are often divorced from Britain’s imperial historical context); a fitting end for a meticulously researched and engaging work that challenges much of the received historical narrative about Black migration to Britain and much of the received wisdom about the nature of British identity. This is a book with a serious contemporary relevance.
