The Changing Face of Liverpool 8

"Four hundred years of shackles and chains, four hundred years of racist names and

institutionalised racist games, Slavepool's history has got to change"

From "Slavepool" by Eugene Lange AKA Muhammad Khalil

My mate, the late and inspirational, John Hill once described Liverpool-born Black people as Puzzle People. He had touched on the puzzling question of identity in the City of Liverpool.   Negro in the 1940s, Second Generation Immigrants in the 1950s,  Mixed-Race in the 1960s, Coloured/Half-caste in the1970s, Afro Caribbean in the 1980s,  Ethnic Minority in the 1990s  and to be found somewhere on an Ethnic Monitoring Form in the Millennium. You can be, politely, described as any of the above at any given time or era in Liverpool. Confused? This article endeavours to explore the so-called Identity Crisis in Liverpool from a Liverpool-born Black perspective.

When I considered which direction this article should take I found that it was so emotional that I had to express some feelings and experiences, rather than provide an academic overview of identity in Liverpool. The latter is more than adequately addressed by Dr. Ray Costello in his excellent overview of this subject on page.

I was born and raised in the Granby area of Liverpool 8 with an African father and a White mother. We were born in the slums of Liverpool 8. As a teenager in the early 1960s I considered myself as one of the ‘Shines'. Obviously intended as a derogatory remark. It was one term used to describe Liverpool Blacks and was fitting with the racist Scouse humour of the time. Here's an example: Question - Where is the cleanest street in Liverpool? - Answer: Upper Parliament Street where there is a Shine on every corner!

Let's be honest... Black people rarely get to hear the ‘jokes' made against us by White people. This so-called ‘joke', despite its racist connotations, made a young Toxteth kid feel a little pinch of pride. Yeah, don't mess with the Shine boys. All I could see and hear around me was courageous stories of older Black guys fighting with the Bullring, Earle Road, Scotland Road, Park Road, and most roads outside of the Granby Street area of Liverpool. These were my role models. Let us not forget that this was a time when ‘10 Little Niggers' by Agatha Christie and Uncle Toms Cabin could be found in most Junior schools. Basically if you were in the wrong place at any time you had to be a good fighter or a fast runner.

In 2005 the horrific racist murder of Anthony Walker could have been any of our Black teenagers in the wrong place, in this case a Huyton bus stop.

FROME SHINES TO HALF-CASTE

Little had changed by the time I became one of the older boys. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh. It was now almost 1970 and we were now being called Half-Caste and we continued in the tradition of fighting racism head on. The term half-caste in many ways distinguished us from our fathers only in the sense that we spoke the Scouse ‘language'; we were here to stay and mostly stood up for ourselves. It also isolated us from from Black people outside of Liverpool. Terms like ‘Yellow Man' ‘half breed' and ‘red' were familiar terms within a growing Black population. As a 12 year old I recall being told about the ‘mad African' who struttered around Upper Stanhope Street waving a paper and shouting extremities about ‘half-caste' people. We used to consider him as an object of fun. One day I actually listened to what he was saying and it summed up the dilemmas faced by Black kids of our generation; "You half-caste. You are from nowhere. You were born in the middle of the Ocean". Our fathers took a different view. They considered us as English, ignoring the skin pigmentation. Why did they not teach us African?  We deployed ‘back slang' instead. The African community was more elderly and holding on to the last strand of the institutions they had created; The Ibo, The Federation, The Crew Club, The Sierra Leone, The Nigerian and The Yoruba. They saw themselves as returning to Africa one day, not with us, and saw no reason why their sons and daughters could not assimilate into the indigenous population since we were born in Liverpool, England, not Freetown Sierra Leone. Unlike their sons and daughters they had no fight in Britain. It was here Africans had arrived from slavery, colonialism, poverty and wars and in many ways they tried to shield us from racism, in order to ensure a good quality of life. They were polite, courteous, believed in education and, in some ways, were too appreciative of Britain for allowing them an opportunity in a country that had occupied Africa. This is not to ignore the African blood that was shed in two World Wars.  Fortunately we knew the reality of Liverpool and English history.  Our foot was in all camps in regard to Africa, language and Liverpool culture. We could not be hoodwinked too easily. We know racism -  be it subtle or overt. In any past life we could have been slaves in Africa, on the Masta's Plantation, targets of the KKK in America, rioters in Watts, or Rodney King, categorised in apartheid South Africa or joining the Mau Mau resistance.

TRADITION OF SELF HELP AND RESISTANCE

The 1970s was to see Liverpool-born Black people accelerate the traditions established by such institutions as the African Church Mission, Stanley House Community Centre and the Liverpool Community Relations Council with the emergence of  locally inspired groups such as the; Young Panthers, Liverpool Black Organisation, Liverpool Black Sisters, L8 Action Group, Adult Education Centre (Charles Wootton), South Liverpool Personnel, LARCAA, MARA and a host of Liverpool Black inspired organisations. There was a call for the introduction of Black Studies to the school curriculum and an on-going struggle for equality in employment, education and social justice. Black music reinforced identity: ‘Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud', ‘Young Gifted and Black', ‘Message to a Blackman'. Liverpool-born Black people were at the forefront of creating change. Numerous reports and research clearly exposed the extent of racism in Liverpool, including ‘Separate but Special', ‘Gifford Report' and ‘They Haven't Done Nothing Yet'. Have any of these issues been adequately dealt with today?  Police and community relations were at an all time low as the ‘specially trained' Merseyside Police Task Force" muddied the waters of racial harmony.  Just as the1980s approached, Martin Young (BBC Listener) was to play a role in profiling the Liverpool-born Black community. Mr.Young visited the City with the sole intention of writing an article on the work of the Merseyside police, he had no race brief.  His subsequent conclusions were to firmly put the issue of identity of Liverpool-born Black people into focus. Here are some excerpts from the Listener article on the trials and tribulations of the Merseyside Police:

"Less poignant, by far, is the other major social problem they face: the half-caste problem.

Policemen in general and detectives in particular, are not racialist, despite what many Black groups believe. Like any individual who deals with a vast cross-section of society, they tend to recognise that good and evil exist, irrespective of colour or creed. Yet they are the first to define the problem of half-castes in Liverpool. Many are the product of liaisons between Black seaman and white prostitutes in Liverpool 8, the red light district. Naturally they grow up without any kind of recognisable home life. Worse still, after they have done the rounds of homes and institutions they gradually realise that they are nothing. The Negroes will not accept them as Blacks, and whites just assume they are coloureds. As a result, the half-caste community of Merseyside - or, more particularly, Liverpool - is well outside recognised society".

Martin Young - BBC Listener Magazine - November 2nd 1978

So that was the view... It resulted in a mass demonstration through Liverpool City Centre on November 25th 1978 and a fruitless ongoing debate, since nobody would admit to providing the comments, while Mr. Young quietly slipped back to London. Most believed that this was the view of the Liverpool police force. The damage had been done and another episode, that no doubt contributed towards the ferocity of the1981Toxteth riots, was recorded.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES MONITORING FORM

No doubt you have noted that I have been using the term Liverpool-born Black. It is not for me to determine the racial identity of Liverpool-born Black people. As far as I'm concerned I'll continue to live my life as a Black man, proud of my family heritage. I am in no doubt that we are a unique people with a history that has not been told. Today the sons and daughters of inter-racial marriages are sometimes lighter in complexion, and get little history outside the family home. As we move towards ‘third and fourth' generation Black kids born in Liverpool there are many views of how they may describe themselves. Obviously they have lighter pigmentation, in reality they face the same dilemmas of those pioneering Liverpool-born Blacks of the past. Today regeneration, refugees, asylum seekers and the gentrification of Granby has seen more Black people dispersed across the city; it is no surprise that racist attacks are on the increase. It is fitting that we should end with the ‘non' debate on Monitoring forms. There is a school of thought that monitoring insures the exclusion of Black people from employment rather than increase the numbers! Who Monitors the Monitors? For example where do we fit into the Monitoring Form of the following monitoring form?

So who are we? Maybe Langston Hughes summed it all up:

What Happens to a dream deferred

does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun

Or fester like a sore

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode

Harlem by Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... C: wait...