“Community” in Context

One starting point for this exploration can be found in the rise of “community studies” after the Second World War. As Christian Topalov has emphasized, what were once regarded as “slums” or “disorganized areas” increasingly came in the 1950s and 1960s to be referred to as “communities”; traditional working-class culture was “discovered” by sociologists at the exact moment when the wholesale destruction of working-class neighborhoods was truly on the cards via slum clearance.Footnote ¹⁹ One of the most influential British examples of this sociological work is Michael Young and Peter Willmott's classic sociological study Family and Kinship in East London (1957), published to much fanfare just a year before the riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham. Lise Butler cogently argues that we cannot understand this work without appreciating Young's political intent: to pull socialism away from a concentration on the worlds of male work toward an appreciation of a wider sense of “community” that included women, the domestic, and “traditional” ways of life as the source of civic values—in East London and globally.Footnote ²⁰ In this context, the predominance of young male migration from the Caribbean to Notting Hill was viewed—as has been well documented—in racist terms as a sexual threat but also, in normative sociological terms, as potentially debilitating to communitarian values due to the scarcity of local female-centered networks.Footnote ²¹ For Young, communitarian values could also only truly take root at a particular social scale. He argued in the Labour Party pamphlet “Small Man, Big World” (1949) that active democracy relied on “solidarity among neighbours.”Footnote ²² Young in fact turned to Notting Hill in the early 1970s to pilot the first elected “Neighbourhood Council” as the long-awaited fruition of this 1949 text. Jon Lawrence has strengthened Butler's reading of postwar community studies as a political project by highlighting the surprising ways in which Young and Willmott handpicked the voices of their working-class subjects in order to support an idealized picture of communal relations and extended family networks in the East End. This simplified portrait of a “mutualistic communitarianism” rooted in traditional neighborhoods “underpinned their vision of a less centralist version of postwar social democracy.”Footnote ²³

Alongside debates about the health and future of British social democracy, the politics of community must be placed in another, overlapping set of concerns. Michael Banton's work on East London, The Coloured Quarter (1954), is considered a founding text of British “race relations.” As Jordanna Bailkin reveals, Banton completed it after a stint of fieldwork on rural-to-urban migration in Sierra Leone. When Bailkin interviewed Banton in 2008, he insisted that his sociological research in Britain and Sierra Leone “occupied separate intellectual spheres, and that there was little, if any connection between them.”Footnote ²⁴ But he did recognize that his work in both locations was driven by the central notion of “community studies,” or the desire to study communities in transition.Footnote ²⁵ According to George Steinmetz, British race-relations research reflected an avowed turn away from anthropological research in the colonies, focused on understanding and “protecting” stationary and discrete ethnic cultures, toward what was seen as the far more modern sociological outlook aligned to the challenges of decolonization and nation building and concerned with population movement, urbanization, and the social consequences of capital investment in the developing world.Footnote ²⁶

As scholars of British colonial and US foreign policy have recently shown, the roots of the community-based “thinking small” approach to modernization and social development—the flip side to global, aspatial, top-down strategies of development—can be found in rural modernization projects in the American South and in colonial Africa and British Bengal prior to and just after the Second World War.Footnote ²⁷ Aaron Windel has, for instance, recently tracked the Fabian ideas at work in the rural reconstruction of late British Bengal.Footnote ²⁸ As the radical community worker Majorie Mayo noted in 1975, “The British concocted the term community development out of the attempts to develop ‘basic education,’ later ‘mass education’ and social welfare in the colonies.”Footnote ²⁹ In the 1950s, “community development” began to feature strongly in United Nations development documents and projects, which borrowed extensively from British literature on Africa and India.Footnote ³⁰ The emphasis of these projects was on supporting self-help, on using local know-how, and on local economic and political engagement and decision-making.Footnote ³¹

T. “Reg” Batten is widely recognized as the founder of the professional practice of “community development” in Britain.Footnote ³² The colonial connections in his work are also clear. Batten developed what he called his “non-directive” approach, which emphasized the autonomy and active participation of deprived urban communities, while working as “an avant-garde educationalist” as superintendent in the Education Department in colonial Nigeria in the 1940s.Footnote ³³ As a strategy to overcome the problem of their outsider status—and amidst an emergent nationwide nationalist movement and general strike led by Michael Imoudu in 1945—community workers in Nigeria were to abjure their own power and instead merely provide technical knowledge, working with rather than for the community.Footnote ³⁴ This approach, intended to provide an education in political practice, took time; Batten argued for the need to delay political independence. As he wrote in 1948, “We are interested not only in the fact of independence but also in its quality.”Footnote ³⁵ His vision of fostering “qualitative democratic self-government” in Nigeria through this nondirective method would go on to have a huge impact on social work practices in Britain, particularly via his leadership in the YMCA and a series of influential courses he ran from 1949 to 1972 that trained both international and domestic community workers at the Institute of Education, University of London.Footnote ³⁶ By the 1970s, when issues of autonomy and personal self-determination were increasingly counterposed to the centralization of resources and institutional inertia of welfare state provisions and social planning,Footnote ³⁷ Batten's nondirective approach was embraced as standard practice among a vast number of community development workers (and, interestingly, Methodist missionaries).Footnote ³⁸ Not surprisingly, this inheritance posed problems for the more radical community workers, many of whom looked to developments in American cities in the 1960s for social-work models seemingly untainted by colonialism.

Yet the international, postcolonial dimensions of community development in Britain cannot be reduced to the reproduction of (colonial) paternalism. As Radhika Natarajan's research has revealed, the Jamaican Edmund N. Burke applied twenty years of social-work experience in Jamaica to develop a small community-leadership program to support democratic practice in Nottingham after the riots there. ^{Footnote 39} Likewise, as is discussed below, in Notting Hill, the Guyanese-born social worker Pansy Jeffrey worked within the institutions of the British welfare state, in the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, as well as in a number of neighborhood associations, all the while maintaining strong links to the fight for (anticolonial) socialism in British Guiana (Guyana). In fact, when British troops were sent to British Guiana to depose the elected Peoples Progressive Party in 1953—and imprisoned the party leadership—Jeffrey's husband, Lionel Jeffrey, returned there temporarily to serve as acting secretary of the party. Like his wife, Lionel Jeffrey would go on to be hugely active in antiracist community work in London for decades, with the two of them co-founding the Community Education Trust in 1974.

Critically, by 1968, community development expertise had begun to shape state investment in Britain's inner cities. That year the government's Urban Programmes Unit, led by the community development worker Muriel Smith, began a series of state-sponsored projects in twelve urban areas.Footnote ⁴⁰ Launched in the wake of Enoch Powell's “rivers of blood” speech, the unit's explicit agenda was to alleviate racial tensions. At its beginning in 1968, its budget was £7 million; by 1980, this had grown to £165 million. That same year, the 1968 Race Relations Act established the Community Relations Commission, tasked with promoting “harmonious community relations” and with supporting a formal network of local Community Relations Councils across the country. Community development in Britain, unlike that in the United States, emerged at this time, as Akwugo Emejulu has shown, “as an institutional practice of the welfare state”—as an institutional effort to democratize that practice.Footnote ⁴¹ We can see this in an influential 1968 study on community work practice, chaired by the doyen of social workers, Dame Eileen Younghusband. Community development, she said, was “part of a protest against apathy and complacency against distant and anonymous authority. It is also part of the whole dilemma of how to reconcile the ‘revolution of human dissent’ into the large-scale organization and economic and social planning … This boils down to how to give meaning to democracy … community work is a means of giving life to local democracy.”Footnote ⁴²

The “revolution of human dissent”—in the case here, the call for racial justice—was to be “reconciled” into the workings of the social democratic state through community work. At the governmental level, “community relations” meant by 1968 “relations within the community between people of different color, race, ethnic or national origin.”Footnote ⁴³ Community workers themselves recognized that community development, community work, and self-help were in many cases “mere euphemisms” for “deeply held concerns and anxieties about public expression of racism.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Good “community relations” came to be viewed, at least at the governmental level, as a liberal means of containing political discontent or, more specifically, reining in both black power and organized racism.Footnote ⁴⁵

By 1968, Notting Hill had been subject to a decade's worth of ad hoc, grassroots community development projects instigated by voluntary agencies, social workers, and left-wing activists both inside and (very self-consciously) outside of the Labour Party. This article now turns to excavating the history of that community work in the years following the Notting Hill riots of 1958. The campaigns of black and white community workers and New Left activists in Notting Hill point to a shared history of collaboration, division, and debate, and a shared concern about the content and workings of social citizenship. It is possible to uncover in the political praxis of activism in Notting Hill distinct efforts to challenge and find solutions to the liberal paternalism and centralization of the social democratic project. It was here, in the inner city, where the limitations of universal social rights were most keenly felt, and where “community development” would be put to the test. Wherever its multiple (ideological and geographic) roots can be found, “community studies” and “community development” were significant companions to the large-scale modernization projects and concomitant social transformations of the postwar world.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this context, a key set of pressing questions emerged: Who represents “the people”? What makes a community? Who decides how to allocate economic resources? In response to these questions, direct action, self-help, and participatory democracy became the (much debated) watchwords of the day.

“Mere Transit Camps”: Antiracism and Tenant Activism, 1958–1960

The white riot against Notting Hill's Afro-Caribbean community is well recognized as a watershed moment in the history of “race” in Britain.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a consequence, political support for restrictions on New Commonwealth immigration found a foothold in public debate, culminating in the 1962 Immigration Act.Footnote ⁴⁸ The events of Notting Hill in 1958 are also widely recognized as an important moment in the emergence of organized black British political consciousness. As a Notting Hill resident, Baron Baker, put it, “Before the riots I was British—I was born under the Union Jack … But the race riots made me realise who I am and what I am. They turned me into a staunch Jamaican.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The autumn of 1958 saw the formation of a number of black British organizations. The Afro Asian Club, the Racial Brotherhood Movement, the Association of the Advancement of Coloured People, and the Coloured People's Progressive Association, for instance, emerged at this time.Footnote ⁵⁰ By the end of the 1958, the Committee for Inter-Racial Unity in West London had been set up, and included representatives from eighteen Trade Union Branches, six Constituency Labour Parties, and several local black organizations.Footnote ⁵¹ As other scholars have shown, antiracist activism and black organizing in London must be placed within a wider history of what Robin Kelley and Stephen Tuck refer to as the “black globality.”Footnote ⁵² Within this framework the political activities of African and Afro-Caribbean migrants living in Britain in the middle years of the twentieth century are woven into wider Cold War histories of colonial liberation and the African American freedom struggle. Significantly activists at the time also emphasized this political “simultaneity” across the black Atlantic.Footnote ⁵³

But the community organizing and activism in Notting Hill has not been, to any great extent, written into the history of the left in Britain. Benjamin Heinmann's 1972 account in The Politics of the Powerless—which depicted as a “total failure” the attempt after the riots by black and white liberal and left intellectuals to mobilize black people at the national level in the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination—has perhaps cast a long shadow.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Notting Hill riots tend to figure in histories of the political right—and tend to be read as a galvanizing force for anti-immigrant sentiment—or they are treated as a critical moment in the transnational history of “Black Britain.” Both approaches leave community activism largely disconnected from histories of the British left, with notable recent exceptions found in the work of Kennetta Hammond Perry, Tank Green, and John Davis.Footnote ⁵⁵

This disconnect is surprising given the degree of activism within Notting Hill following the riots. If Notting Hill became synonymous in public discourse with urban decline, riotous youth, social deprivation, prostitution, and Nandy's “denudation of meaningful relationships,” it also became for over a decade a magnet for a generation of activists.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Edward Pilkington put it, “Philanthropists flocked to Notting Hill after the riots.”Footnote ⁵⁷ According to the Trinidad-born Michael de Freitas, who lived in Notting Hill and who would go on to become an influential figure in the British Black Power movement, “All of them were terribly well-intentioned, quite clueless and full of questions. They wanted to do something for the poor, unfortunate residents of Notting Hill and they were desperate to meet us.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The Kensington Post asked, “Will too many do gooders pave the path to Notting HELL?”Footnote ⁵⁹ Voluntary work was also an aspect of such activity in Notting Hill. “Immigrant welfare,” John Davis persuasively explains, “came to preoccupy the voluntary sector whose future was uncertain in the age of state welfare.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Because the “Beveridgean welfare state was ‘colour blind,’ making no allowance for the disabilities encountered by non-white immigrant groups,” the voluntary sector filled the void; in fact, it was Notting Hill that provided “the main impetus for the expansion of voluntary activity in this field.”Footnote ⁶¹

In early December, alarmed by the riots, the Home Office noted that what was needed was “the creation of groups of people of goodwill who could help to create the atmosphere in which integration could take place.”Footnote ⁶² One important force of “goodwill” that emerged in Notting Hill was, as Tank Green's research has shown, radical Methodism.Footnote ⁶³ A leading Methodist Christian Socialist, Rev. Donald Soper, famously lamented at the Methodist National Conference in July 1958 that he was “in the presence of a dying church”; but in the aftermath of the riots, Soper too found new purpose and even a road to renewal for the church.Footnote ⁶⁴ Using as his model the approach of the East Harlem Protestant Parish Group Ministry, Soper sent three young clergymen (one of whom who had spent two years with the East Harlem Ministry) to Notting Hill to build a multiracial congregation. In 1960, David Mason, a minister from the Notting Hill Methodist Church as well as a local Labour county councilor, founded the radical, nondenominational Notting Hill Social Council.Footnote ⁶⁵ By September 1960, the Migrant Services Division of the West Indies Federation identified seventy-four local groups in London focused on the promotion of better “race relations”; nine of these were focused exclusively on the Notting Hill neighborhood.Footnote ⁶⁶

A critical development in the history of the British left was the growth of black organizations and institutions in Notting Hill, which Perry tracks in London Is the Place for Me. The setting up of the West Indian Gazette by the Trinidadian communist Claudia Jones provided, for example, a key political space to make visible and debate black people's struggles for equality in Britain, connecting these struggles to global movements across the Black Atlantic.Footnote ⁶⁷ Jones and the editorial team's response to the racist violence in Notting Hill was to organize an important precursor to the Notting Hill street carnival, which aimed to raise money for a legal defense fund for black people caught in the riots. Reproducing the Trinidadian tradition of carnival, the festival's costumes, dancing, singing, black women's beauty contest, and steel band all provided critical opportunities for Afro-Caribbean residents in Notting Hill to share pride in their common Caribbean heritage.Footnote ⁶⁸ This cultural celebration—this act of “transplant[ing] our folk origins to Britain”—was for Jones always political: as she famously put it, “a people's art is the genesis of their freedom.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Cultural celebration was locally also a radical act of survival. Black people continued to face the threat of physical attack in the area. At the time, Notting Hill was a stronghold for Colin Jordan's White Defence Leagues and Oswald Mosley's Union Movement. It continued to be, as Raf de Leon of the Coloured People's Accommodation Bureau put it, a “place of fear.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in the area in 1959, nine months after the white riots, and the lack of any indictment for that murder, further underlined the persistent dangers that people faced.Footnote ⁷¹

Perry emphasizes the unique political perspective and agency of Afro-Caribbean activists in the wake of the riots. Their concerns about the broad presence of racism across British society, including within the Metropolitan police, opened up a fundamental divide between black and white community workers and commentators in Notting Hill. The latter, Perry argues, tended to rely on the “mystique of anti-racism” in their responses to the white riots. This “mystique” rendered “racial conflict” as “the reckless actions of ‘irresponsible youths’” within “a broader context of degenerate conditions characteristic of working-class urban life in particular neighborhoods in Nottingham and West London.”Footnote ⁷² Here, “sexual relations (real and imagined) between Black men and White women, housing shortages, and employment” were the root causes of the violence.Footnote ⁷³ Rather than recognize the pervasive presence of “common-sense” racism and the limits of equal citizenship across British society and state institutions, white activists focused on emphasizing tolerance and liberalism as distinctly British national traditions. In such a telling, the cause of the violence was not racism in British society but rather the consequences of a fractured community, social deprivation, and moral decline.

Reverend Soper's opening remarks for the Migrant in the Community conference hosted by the Notting Hill Social Council in 1962 began with the assertion that “the real problem was not the colour question but the economic one.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Soper's focus was, like that of many other community workers, on social deprivation in the area, but his explanation of racial violence did not rely on an act of willful amnesia. Instead, he insisted to an audience of academics, activists, social workers, and clergymen that any discussion of the migrant in Notting Hill had to start with “the sorry story of slavery” and the “emotional background of slavery.”Footnote ⁷⁵ West Indians, he explained, were “the residual legatees of European paganism and exploitation.” It was now time, he argued, to “impress upon the community the need for extension of the Welfare State, particularly in the field of housing,” as a critical step in embracing the “immense opportunity … to create a community spirit.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While Perry's critique offers an important interpretative framework to understand many of the contemporary responses to the riots, it does not treat these responses as political acts in themselves. To be sure, the myth of tolerance failed to recognize deep structural inequalities, pervasive racist beliefs, and everyday experiences of racial violence in Notting Hill. But it was also a constructive liberal discourse that sought to produce white working-class identification with an antiracist ideal.Footnote ⁷⁷ By the end of the period under consideration, this welfarist vision of solving racism—by fighting deprivation and emphasizing an imagined tradition of tolerance—proved increasingly untenable. Even more, failures to directly combat racism in the area would prove the undoing of any “community spirit” across race.

Yet in the late 1950s, Notting Hill was recognized as both a site of social conflict and a potential “constituency of change.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Confronting those questions proved a rallying point for activists on the left. Such efforts escape easy political definition. Because the local Labour Party and its candidate, George Rogers, stood in 1959 on a platform of immigration restrictions, the politics of antiracism (in opposition to Oswald Mosley's 1959 fascist campaign in the area) could not be contained by local party political divides. As Hall put it the first publication of the New Left Review in 1960, “Notting Hill is for the moment beyond Party politics.”Footnote ⁷⁹

An uncertain, incipient politics can be seen, for instance, in the work of a central figure in community work in the area, the longstanding Labour London county councilor for North Kensington, Donald Chesworth. A self-described “World Federalist,” Chesworth's socialist internationalism and antiracism were miles away from the racist restrictionism of the local Labour MP. His commitment to an international vision of social welfare stood in contrast to understandings of social welfare that we see among many Labour voters and articulated across the political spectrum at this time, in which social welfare was less a human right than a political victory won from the government by the “English people” through sacrifices in the world wars.Footnote ⁸⁰ Later, Chesworth became what could be described as a sort of postcolonial missionary, working—after Notting Hill—to build an agricultural school in Tanzania with Bishop Trevor Huddleston, setting the minimum wage in Mauritius as an advisor to the International Labour Organisation, and visiting and raising funds for Bengalis during their war of independence as the chairman of the War on Want.Footnote ⁸¹ In Notting Hill, in the immediate aftermath of the riots, Chesworth worked alongside the Austrian sociologist Richard Hauser and the Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist Amy Ashwood Garvey on a project aimed at mitigating racial tension. The fruits of their collaboration can be discerned from a Special Branch report:

Chesworth, Hauser, and Garvey were soon joined by a group of younger radicals from outside the district, led by George Clarke, activist for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By the summer of 1959, Special Branch reported on the activities of volunteers from the “Universities and Left Review Club, (another Left wing organisation not previously mentioned in these reports) … In ‘Peace News’ of 3rd July it was stated that members of the Club had offered to help the people living in Notting Hill.”Footnote ⁸³

Activists associated with the early New Left arrived in Notting Hill in 1959. While the Labour Party was, according to Tony Benn, “completely missing young people” at the time, the London Left/Universities and Left Review Club at the Partisan Café in Carlisle Street, Soho attracted “five or six hundred” to its weekly meetings and was, by 1960, part of a wider network of thirty to forty Left Clubs scattered across the country.Footnote ⁸⁴ Hall looked back at these clubs in 2010 as a response to the Labour Party's limitations, remembering the “lack of tight organizational structure, the loose conception of leadership, the flat hierarchies, the absence of membership, rules, regulations or ‘line’ … [and] emphasis on self-organization and participatory politics.”Footnote ⁸⁵ To him, the clubs signified a “new kind of socialist entity: not a party but a ‘movement of ideas.’”Footnote ⁸⁶

Alongside political mobilization around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in an effort to solve what Hall called the “question of agency” and “develop a new political practice,” New Leftists went out into the city.Footnote ⁸⁷ They followed the path of young liberal reformers before them—university students had, for example, manned East London's Toynbee Hall with its “World Settlement Movement” for generations—but now they had new political purpose that would, in the 1960s and 1970s, become radical community work.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the first edition of the New Left Review, Stuart Hall described what the Universities and Left Review Club found in the neighborhood of Notting Hill in 1960:

In Chesworth's unpublished book manuscript “The Anatomy of Notting Hill,” written in the early 1960s, he insisted that the source of many of the district's problems, described by Hall above, came down to dislocation and poor housing conditions.Footnote ⁹⁰ For Chesworth, the root cause of many of the social tensions of Notting Hill lay in an exploitative landlordism of the sort epitomized by the soon to be notorious Perec Rachman. The 1957 Rent Act removed rent controls from unfurnished accommodation rated at more than £40 per year. Below that level, rent increases were limited to twice their gross annual value, but if the tenancy changed in any way, the property became decontrolled and rents could be increased.Footnote ⁹¹ In Notting Hill, Rachman and his associates became experts in utilizing the terms of the act to increase their profits, capitalizing upon and in some instances exacerbating hostility between white and black residents to achieve their aims.Footnote ⁹² The 1957 Rent Act had, Chesworth argued, destabilized social life in Notting Hill, resulting in “very important social effects”: “The working out of the Rent Act and the spiralling of rents in many districts has meant that hosts of long established families have been compelled to move from their traditional communities. The new-comers have little sense of belonging, there is little neighbourliness and hardly any community participation. Indeed many areas have become mere transit camps, all of which has in areas such as Notting Hill, been an important contribution to community malaise and breakdown.”Footnote ⁹³

Chesworth argued that the solution to this culture of transience was communally owned housing. Chesworth's words on “neighbourliness” tie housing policy directly to the future of communitarian values, to the very basis of the social democratic experiment. Notting Hill, as an extreme case of modern transience and in-and-out migration, became a sort of laboratory for how to develop that “spirit of common responsibility.” Mobilizing around the problem of rent then became one important focus of community activism. Chesworth was the first to attempt to organize Rachman's tenants, and as a consequence, his flat at 59 Cambridge Gardens became a hub of activity.Footnote ⁹⁴ This was, Hall remembers, the Universities and Left Review Club's “first experience of local community politics.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Chesworth's personal orbit encompassed a variety of individuals contributing to community activism in the Notting Hill. Chesworth shared his Cambridge Garden flat with a young Quaker man, Peter Reed, and they were soon joined by Keith Lye. Lye had “recently returned from working as a geographer and surveyor in East Africa and having saved a little capital, determined to spend a few months helping out in Notting Hill. Peter [Reed] had spent his National Service in the Army during the Mau Mau troubles, which had led him firmly into the pacifist camp.”Footnote ⁹⁶ After his work in Notting Hill, Lye would go on to be heavily involved in the antiapartheid movement in the United Kingdom as deputy director of the Africa Bureau. Lye's and Reed's decisions to be involved, in any capacity, with the issues facing Notting Hill underline the relationship between white antiracist activism in Britain and politics of decolonization. Even more, this antiracist activism might be framed in light of what Nicholas Owen refers to as the political “redundancy” or unclear role of white anti-imperialists in the processes of decolonization.Footnote ⁹⁷ In Notting Hill, Chesworth also developed a lifelong friendship and working relationship with Huddleston, who had recently returned from serving as Anglican bishop of Sophiatown, South Africa, and was working in the area with a youth group. Pansy Jeffrey, the Guyanese social worker and nurse, who was also close friends with the Guyanese-born radical black publishers Eric and Jessica Huntley, would work closely with Chesworth over the years, including on the Notting Hill Social Council. Jeffrey was appointed by the mayor of Kensington in 1959 to work for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau after the riots, where, she remembered, “it soon became the norm that any black or Asian face would be directed to her regardless of their problem.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Another flatmate at Cambridge Gardens was Alexio Zihute, a student from Southern Rhodesia. Zihute, eighteen years old at the time, shared a room with a student from Zanzibar and another from Southwest Africa.Footnote ⁹⁹ As Zihute remembers, people constantly knocked on their door for help twenty-four hours a day. “Somebody had been kicked out of a flat. Somebody had nowhere to go. Somebody's father was being rough with him. The Irish, the West Indians, they all would knock on the door.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Michael de Freitas was another figure operating in these circles who moved between a criminal sphere and community activism. Zihute, the son of a chief whose tribe had raised funds to send him to college, tried to avoid the streets occupied by gangs in Notting Hill and remembers being afraid of de Freitas when he visited the Cambridge Gardens flat, because he carried a gun.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Chesworth recalled his first meeting with de Freitas: “One Sunday … they brought along someone who looked like a cross between a pirate and a gangster, bearded, with a ring in one ear, at least slightly charismatic, who told an extraordinary story of having worked as a rent collector for Rachman.”Footnote ¹⁰² In 2012, Hall recalled meeting de Freitas:

De Frietas meant that he was part of Notting Hill's new criminal underground; Hall knew that he was probably involved in local prostitution as well as the eviction of black tenants who could not pay their rent.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ De Freitas started his political life as the Universities and Left Review Club's inside man: “He introduced us into places in Notting Hill to which we'd previously had no access, and activists from the Universities and Left Review Club went to stay with some of ‘his’ people, who, we discovered, kept huge Alsatian dogs, although whether on duty as agents of protection or intimidation remained a mystery.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the West London Rent Tribunal on 27 May 1959, de Freitas and two others had their rents reduced, significantly enhancing the credibility of the campaign.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In the ensuing months, more than two hundred other applications were successfully brought. However, as the Universities and Left Review Club group began to formally organize tribunal applicants, their outsider status and political naiveté were painfully exposed. Following a public meeting in December 1959, the Powis and Colville Resident's Association was set up with the aim of fighting for better housing in the area and getting private squares opened up for public use. As Jan O'Malley notes, “From the start the association was determinedly multi-racial … however very few black people attended the first meeting, allegedly because of threats of eviction if they attended.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In subsequent elections to the association's committee, former communist and local trade unionist Bill Richardson was elected chairman, while Trinidad-born Lloyd Hunte was elected secretary.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The allegation of intimidation keeping tenants away from the meeting led to a decision to canvass all the houses associated with Rachman. De Freitas provided a list of over one hundred Rachman-owned houses. Soon after, Lloyd Hunte reported that there was a plan to evict all the current tenants and convert the houses into unfurnished flats so as to avoid the limited security provided by the law to furnished tenants. The association decided to counter this plan with a mass application to the rent tribunal for the security of all the tenants. The success of the plan came to depend on the leadership and connections of de Freitas. Within a month, twenty tenants had applied to the tribunal, but one by one, these applications were withdrawn, presumably under pressure from Rachman or his agents. Then Rachel Powell, the Universities and Left Review Club's secretary, discovered the keys to a large number of Rachman-owned properties in the basement of Lloyd Hunte's father, Vernon Hunte, a former policeman in colonial Trinidad.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Both father and son—along with de Freitas—were still working for Rachman to ensure that the association did not truly challenge Rachman's interests.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In March 1960, Hunte Jr. and de Freitas were excluded from the association, but the damage had been done.

Members of the Universities and Left Review Club, realizing how deeply involved they had been in aiding Rachman, and newly conscious of their outsider status, withdrew. This time in Notting Hill signaled, for Hall, his “first political lesson in black diasporic politics.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Notting Hill was, he explains, a place where an “underground, diasporic ‘colony life’ was beginning to flourish … a black expressive culture”; but it also represented a “volatile, complex moment in the birth of new racial politics in Britain”—when the “more respectable” generation of black residents in Britain of the immediate postwar years, students, anticolonial intellectuals, and middle-class professionals, gave way to “a very different social and political milieu.”Footnote ¹¹² Like other leading black activists in Notting Hill, such as Claudia Jones, Pansy Jeffrey, and Amy Ashwood Garvey, Hall was an outsider by social class. In explaining why Garvey's Association of the Advancement of Coloured People was short lived, Jeffrey simply explained, “Her politics belonged to the thirties.”Footnote ¹¹³

Hall continued to contribute to national campaigns for racial equality at the national level, editing the New Left Review until 1962 and from there becoming the driving force behind the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Other players in the story persisted in their grassroots work in Notting Hill, albeit in a changing context. Chesworth helped to set up the Social Council with Rev. David Mason from the Notting Hill Methodist Church in late 1960, leaving Britain in the early 1960s to pursue social development work in Mauritius and Tanzania before returning in the 1970s to work with the Bengali community in Tower Hamlets as the warden of Toynbee Hall.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Zihute, meanwhile, went on to gain a postgraduate degree in international economics under Gunnar Myrdal at the University of Stockholm in the 1960s, becoming an urban planner with the Commonwealth in Lagos and working for a short period to oversee land redistribution in newly independent Zimbabwe.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Back in Notting Hill, the committee that had worked to organize Cochrane's funeral, including Claudia Jones, Frances Ezzrecco, and Amy Ashwood Garvey, would go on to consult and pressure the Home Office to provide better police patrols in the area.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Jones died in 1964, but her work as an activist would come to influence radical black British activism for decades to come. Pansy Jeffrey spent the next thirty years working for the people of Notting Hill, setting up the West Indian Mothers’ Club in 1960, founding the Pepper Pot Club for elderly people of Caribbean descent in 1980, and serving on or founding dozens of other local and national committees dedicated to improving the lives of working-class black people in the area. During the early to mid-1960s, it was the work of organizations such as these that took up the baton of social action in North Kensington—with “social work” remaking itself into “community development” as the decade wore on.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Becoming a Neighbor: Social Work, Community Development and the New Left

The immediate aftermath of the Notting Hill riots saw a variety of attempts to understand and build “community” in the area. From the early 1960s to the 1970s, Notting Hill remained a sort of living laboratory for community workers, who continued to focus on the need to break down the divide between “us and them.” It was at this time and in this sense that community development could take on a radical political meaning. Even more, it was at this time in Notting Hill when the constructive relationship between formal social work and New Left activism was most visible.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While, as Lise Butler has shown, “community studies” was a concept that was deeply tied to debates about the future of British socialism, likewise we cannot fully understand the history of the New Left in Britain without turning to the archives of community workers in Notting Hill and other neighborhoods across the country. There we see efforts to develop a “new political practice.”Footnote ¹²⁰

The first experiments in community development in the district emerged out of the North Kensington Family Study survey of the early 1960s. The study committee included leading figures in the social-work profession such as social psychologist Marie Jahoda and Dame Eileen Younghusband. Younghusband had recently published her influential report on the profession that endorsed community development approaches alongside case and group work.Footnote ¹²¹ With a grant from the City Parochial Foundation, the committee employed Pearl Jephcott to survey the district of “Notting Dale” between May 1962 and November 1963.Footnote ¹²² Concentrating on twenty multi-occupancy houses, Jephcott collected data through ethnographic methods and via the analysis of information on housing conditions and welfare provision. She found both of these inadequate and placed particular focus on the need to “involve the local residents in the plans for action.”Footnote ¹²³ Jephcott could point to the success of three small “self-help” programs initiated as part of the survey: new modern paper-sack refuse bins for multi-occupied houses, a Christmas parcels scheme for pensioners, and outdoor play-groups for infants.Footnote ¹²⁴ As Jephcott concluded, “The history of the two play groups … pointed to certain essentials in these early experiments in self-help. Some person from outside was needed to focus vague ideas, to initiate cooperative action, and to take the ultimate responsibility for a matter like handling money. It was also plainly desirable that, in this society where people move about so much, this key person should remain with the group for some time.”Footnote ¹²⁵

From 1965, one such key person was the community development worker Ilys Booker. With a background in adult education in her native Canada, Booker arrived in North Kensington with fifteen years of experience working with community groups on London council estates and with Danilo Dolci in southern Sicily. Drawing on these experiences, she was keen to emphasize the differences between community development and other forms of social work: “This new kind of worker is not referring to family or personal problems; nor has the worker been sent by the Authorities (as the community would see it) … Instead, the new kind of social worker comes into the community and becomes a resident and neighbour; talks to people about the neighbourhood, listens to what people say about it and asks questions of a different kind.”Footnote ¹²⁶

She found Jephcott's report a useful way in. “She asked in what way the area was troubled … When the problem was identified, she had to help people discover the structure of their community. The tendency was to see all power as outside the neighborhood, i.e., in the town hall, in the southern part of the borough. Nearly all her work was carried out in dialogue in the streets and shops, at the school gates and in the launderette … The basic problem was that people did not believe they could do anything.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In the Social Council, Rev. David Mason, Pansy Jeffrey, and others also sought to become “neighbours” in the area and give residents a sense of the power of local problem-solving by holding open monthly meetings.

Tracking the theoretical foundations of the welfare state, Jose Harris notes that “inculcating citizenship [was] the ultimate goal of social welfare” as far back as the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹²⁸ Importantly, this liberal education in citizenship was not just a matter of stimulating “active citizen-participation” but was also an ideological process—involving the encouragement of “ethical imperatives” and “individual altruism.”Footnote ¹²⁹ In a youth worker's 1969 report for the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, we see something of the ideological tensions at work in trying to become “a neighbor” to a (white, teenage) group. The youth worker, as he put it, “must maintain his own identity while being acceptable to young people. Some … members of the community may well identify the worker with the young people and he may find himself defending some of their attitudes while not himself agreeing with them.”Footnote ¹³⁰ He then recounted a conversation with the white teens on “black people” and his feelings about it:

The youth worker then reflected on the conversation: “A deep sorrow. Depression beyond words. We never crack this one. We set the café alight sometimes with discussions. Everyone joins in. Walk in the door, what's on the agenda tonight lads. Politics, religion, sex, everything. Terrific. Excitement. Laughter. Jim terrified we're going to tear the place down. Then this. A sullen silence. Them against me. I will not hate my fellow men and I nearly hate you for hating black people. What is it, where is it, how can it be reached, undone? Deep despair.”Footnote ¹³² The young people's “sullen silence” signaled a key political moment in the history of British social reform and in the history of the British left. White aggression within the community would dog the construction of a “community spirit”—and the community worker's “neighbourly” place within in it—throughout the 1960s and beyond.

By the second half of 1966, while Booker was engaged what she called the “slow and painful”Footnote ¹³³ work of becoming “a neighbour,” two other groups of outsiders arrived in Notting Hill with two distinct approaches to social change—and two understandings of their role within it. One group was the Young Christian Workers, which carried out what it described in its internal campaign literature as “a very PERSONAL CAMPAIGN” starting in July 1966 in Notting Hill.Footnote ¹³⁴ The Young Christian Workers was a radical Roman Catholic lay organization with a global missionary reach, with cells from Soweto to Detroit to Singapore.Footnote ¹³⁵ Its Notting Hill campaign included five “Inquiries,” which involved the group engaging with short quotations from the Bible or a Christian text and a set of “Actions” that each Young Christian Worker was expected to accomplish in preparation for the next Inquiry. Doug Rossinow has charted the influence of the social gospel tradition of Christian liberalism within the American New Left, which he argues provided groups such as the YMCA-YWCA “with a straightforward defense of political liberalism, with adult models of responsible dissidence, and with an institutional base for protest activity.”Footnote ¹³⁶ The prevalence of Christian community workers in British cities points to a parallel story. Notting Hill's multiracial Methodist Church, like the Young Christian Workers, emphasized the concept of koinonia of the early church, which it understood as a radical form of Christian fellowship “with all possible barriers broken down between people”—including the walls of the church. To this end, the Methodist Team Ministry supported close fellowship through a network of “house churches” that were particularly popular among congregants from West Africa and the Caribbean, with evening worship, Bible study, and sometimes political discussion in individuals’ homes.Footnote ¹³⁷ At the heart of the New Left was, as Rossinow argues, an existential “search for authenticity”; this was seen as essential to developing a culture of democracy and an imagined third way between communism and anti-communism.Footnote ¹³⁸ This “search for authenticity” can be seen, too, in the Young Christian Workers’ insistence that their Christian values had to be made real: “We must do something or cease to call ourselves Christian … we must help our new neighbours … and indeed seek their help.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The first Inquiry asked, “What is our attitude towards coloured people? What are our reasons for this attitude?” They turned to 1 John (Epistle) 3:18: “My little children, let us not love in word nor in tongue, but in deed and in truth.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ For the fourth Inquiry, the Young Christian Workers were to attend a social event run by a black organization and were then asked to discuss as a group, “Did we enjoy the Social Event? Did they accept us? How did we accept them? … compare your ideas and attitudes now, are they any different from the time when you started the campaign?” Christian radicals like the Young Christian Workers and members of the Methodist Team Ministry recognized that, in order to combat racism, they themselves required radical transformation.

The other group that emerged in Notting Hill in 1966, the Community Workshop, framed their intervention in the language of social research but also with an emphasis on “action.” Establishing themselves in a house on St. Ervans Road, the driving force behind the Community Workshop was one-time nuclear disarmament activist George Clark. As Clark told a meeting of the Notting Hill Social Council, “The Community Workshop recognized a distinction between social amelioration, into which category statutory welfare provision and most social agencies fitted, and social reconstruction, which was the aim of the Community Workshop. This was based upon what people in the neighbourhood could do for themselves … The research work of the group would not be subject to merely formal definitions; they were interested in exploring new forms of action research.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

Clark had been involved in housing activism in Notting Hill six years earlier as the secretary of the Universities and Left Review group. He had recently returned from the United States, where he had been inspired by the wave of community organizing there in the mid-1960s.Footnote ¹⁴² His return to London signaled a renewed attempt by the New Left to engage in urban politics. The Community Workshop movement grew out of both the failures of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the renewed interest in community organizing generated by the War on Poverty programs in the United States.Footnote ¹⁴³ Local action, they believed, could stimulate a new international activism. As Jan O'Malley explains, “How we presented it was that we were trying to open up democratic control and decisions that affected people and to help organize people who needed to resist bad conditions in the hope that by getting more confidence in controlling the most immediate things in their everyday life, people would then have more confidence to challenge international issues.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The cooperation of this group of younger, middle-class activists with social workers and Christians working in the area was to result in the most ambitious program of social research and social action seen thus far in North Kensington: the Summer Project of 1967.

The Summer Project and the Limits of White Radicalism

The Community Workshop decided to build a coalition with established groups in order to organize a massive housing survey. To this end, the organizing committee was made up of some by-now familiar names: Rev. David Mason and Donald Chesworth of the Social Council were chair and vice-chair, and Pansy Jeffrey and Ilys Booker were members, as were Mason's fellow Methodist ministers Norwyn Denny and Geoffrey Ainger. Notting Hill Adventure Playground leader Pat Smythe joined Mike Rustin, John O'Malley, and George Clark from the Community Workshop, while the working group included the local Labour councilor and future MP Bruce Douglas Mann.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As one Community Workshop member, Michael Rustin, observed, “The idea for the Summer Project arose initially in March amongst members of the Notting Hill Community Workshop. It evoked for them the inspiration of the legendary SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] Mississippi Summer Projects, and had promise of giving an enormous impetus to their work in Notting Hill and to the whole concept of direct community action in England.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ According to the Times, this coalition amounted to two hundred students and “an astonishingly varied group of professionals, political party workers, and rival voluntary agencies.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The project had three programs: the setting up of a housing register, the establishment of two emergency play areas, and the establishment of three neighborhood centers, in Golborne, Colville and Powis, and Lancaster Road. In all, over six thousand households were surveyed by hundreds of volunteers, mainly students. The data was crunched by a group from the University of Sussex's Social Research Unit led by John Dearlove and presented in eye-watering statistical detail in an “interim” report in 1969. The headline findings found that one-sixth of households in the survey area were overcrowded: that there had been significant in-migration from other parts of London and the southeast; and that households headed by Afro-Caribbean, Irish, and African tenants were significantly more likely to be overcrowded than were other households. It found that “for a West Indian or African in Notting Hill,” it was “virtually impossible to get better accommodation than a three room flat,” and most lived in one or two rooms, paying as much as £8 per week for one room. Meanwhile, white residents in the area could get a five-room flat for as little as £4.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ According to the Times, the research revealed that “overt signs of a tolerance born of necessity since the race riots that disrupted Notting Hill 10 years ago” were “only skin deep.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Disagreements about the approach to the project among those working on it reveal tensions within the New Left at this time—particularly on how to counter racism.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ For starters, Rustin saw “an important dialogue” taking place at the pre-project conference, between Michael De Freitas—now known as Michael Abdul Malik—and Stuart Hall. Malik (De Freitas) had become increasingly political in the 1960s, especially after he met and traveled with Malcolm X on his UK speaking tour in 1965. Hall and Malik seemed to embody, for Rustin, two versions of “alternative politics (and identities) in relation to the West Indian in Britain,” with Hall signaling a path of potential accommodation with white activists and Malik representing the emerging voice of black power radicalism.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Hall noted at the conference that racist “solutions” and scapegoating emerge when communities are not able to solve their own social problems; he hoped the Summer Project—unlike the activism of the Universities and Left Review Club in the area years before—would produce a “creative community approach.”Footnote ¹⁵² In this spirit, Richard Hauser proposed organizing on a street-by-street basis and mobilizing around what people were “angry enough … to take action on.”Footnote ¹⁵³ However, George Clark argued against this strategy, “on the grounds that they were all sitting on a racial powder keg in Notting Hill and to organize a project in this way would be tantamount to setting a match to it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ As Tank Green has compellingly shown, the Summer Project took Clark's approach; student volunteers undertaking the housing survey were discouraged from arguing with white residents who blamed the ills of the neighborhood on black people.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Rustin surmised: “There was a degree of fear that an active stand on behalf of the West Indians would alienate the rest of the community.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The project, Malik and others argued, was simply not radical enough. Green outlines its limitations: “Not only was there general anxiety in respect of the white, middle-class students from outside the community crossing social boundaries in order to deal with local working-class people of all racialised identities, but there was also fear that a ‘racial incident’ would be provoked either by Caribbean residents in order to embarrass the project, or by white residents if they were asked to give voice to their opinions as to what should be acted upon.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Clark argued that the collecting of information on housing discrimination itself would work to counter racism, dispelling the myth that black people “take all the houses.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ To this, Patricia Philo, a black reporter for the Kensington Post, responded, “Black people in North Kensington … do not need statistics to know that they are not getting a fair deal. They meet and talk to each other, and they know they almost never come across anyone who has got a council house or a white collar supervisory job—and they know lots of their friends who pay as much if not more than then English for rotten houses or mortgages and can't get the kind of job for which they are qualified.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As O'Malley lamented, “In May [the Summer Project] was seen as a weapon of community struggle. By November it was seen as a specialist housing research body giving individual advice to tenants and landlords, with no relation to community struggle.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Critically, data (even vast amounts of it) could not sufficiently give voice to the experience of racism. A black radical woman, Lee Ackbar, insisted at a teach-in to mark the end of the Summer Project that white liberals needed to stop speaking for black people; Roy Sawh, who would the following year run as a Black Power candidate in the local by-election, similarly called for an end to white intervention in black lives.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The Summer Project's findings were used by local groups and MPs to pressure successive governments into reforming the Rent Acts to protect furnished tenants, but the project fundamentally failed to produce Hall's “creative community approach.”Footnote ¹⁶²

By the end of the Summer Project, the bitterness between Clark and others in the Community Workshop had hardened into open conflict. In the Golborne ward, community action centered on the Social Rights Committee, which was dominated by Clark. In part, this committee fulfilled a social welfare function similar to that of the Booker's experiment in community development: they organized a playgroup, provided camping holidays for local children, and arranged Christmas parcels for pensioners. However, they also had innovative ideas about local democracy, and in 1971, with the help of influential advocates such as Chesworth and Michael Young, they established Britain's first elected Neighbourhood Council.Footnote ¹⁶³ Ultimately, with limited resources, the Golborne Neighbourhood Council was dependent on the largesse of established and much more powerful representative bodies like the Conservative-controlled Borough Council in order to get anything done. Further, the very novelty of the Golborne Neighbourhood Council and its schizophrenic stance of sometimes criticizing and sometimes cooperating with the Borough Council left local people struggling to tell the two organizations apart. The judgment of Jan O'Malley, one of Clark's former comrades in the Community Workshop, was scathing: “Such is the logic of institutionalization and incorporation of initially radical initiative by the authorities.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴Against the Golborne Neighbourhood Council's approach, another force of local community activism continued in the guise of the Notting Hill People's Association. This group was consistently more oppositional to the local state, seen, for instance, in their use of targeted squatting to call attention to property speculation and to put pressure on the Borough Council and the Greater London Council to compulsorily purchase properties.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Their approach signaled an increasingly tendency, found also within radical black organizations, to see participation with the local state as essentially counterrevolutionary.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

It is clear that during the 1960s and early 1970s, the practice of community development underwent radical shifts. This was achieved by the determined work of several generations of New Leftists, such as Stuart Hall, George Clark, and Jan O'Malley; radical Christians like Rev. David Mason; Labour Party stalwarts such as Donald Chesworth; and social workers like Ilys Booker and Pansy Jeffrey. Importantly, however, these individuals remained divided on how to confront the issue of racism in Notting Hill. As was well recognized by all Notting Hill's community workers by the 1970s, there were multiple communities in Notting Hill, sharing the same space but experiencing “the hidden hand of the market” and “the very visible hand of the state” in unequal ways on the basis of race.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The question of which “community” Notting Hill's community organizations were to represent remained a vexed one.

Black Power and the “Essence of Community”

While the postwar concept of “community” was always in a sense a political idea tied to the promise of decentralized socialism and (postcolonial) self-government, it gained its most distinct political expression around calls for greater black representation. In the summer of 1968, a new community newspaper, Spectre, hit the streets of North Kensington. It was produced by the Inter-Racial Council for Kensington and Chelsea, which had been established two years earlier to “foster understanding and goodwill among all citizens of the borough” through education, challenging discrimination and promoting the development of community projects.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ According to the council's executive secretary, the Trinidadian social worker James Cummings, there was no shortage of community projects, but most were fundamentally flawed. He noted that “something is lacking in Notting Hill, though it has been worked over heavily by social workers.” He then offered a familiar criticism: “People come and try to help the community, and set up social services of one kind or another … They mean well, and they do good, mostly. But they've no roots in the neighbourhood. Others do not regard the black man as a self-respecting individual.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Six months later, Spectre’s editors returned to Cummings's theme, framing the argument in striking terms:

Here, the persistence of white paternalism has been added almost explicitly to William Beveridge's list of social evils.Footnote ¹⁷¹ These “Bugs” were the white liberals who were not from the community but chose to speak for it; here the divide between the social object and the “do-gooder” had been politicized by race. The editorial's argument reflects a particular moment of radicalization, as Black Power discourse began to question the often uneasy alliances built between black and white community activists, as well as the paternalism intrinsic to community work.Footnote ¹⁷² While the call to “exterminate the bugs” was indicative of a heightened Black Power consciousness, it also spoke of frustrations at the outside interventions of “well-meaning” middle-class professionals involved in social work and left politics.

Since the Second World War, middle-class black professionals like Pansy Jeffrey and Amy Ashwood Garvey had been tasked with representing the “immigrant perspective” at both the local and national level. But by the late 1960s, this very limited form of representation was being challenged by black radicals. The Inter-Racial Council had itself recently undergone a radical transformation, from a white-led, integrationist, “strictly non-political committee” to, in 1968, a radical black-led organization.Footnote ¹⁷³ The catalyst for this transformation was a large public meeting held by the Inter-Racial Council with the mayor of Kensington in February 1968. Frank Bailey, a Guyanese-born trade unionist turned mental health social worker, was one of only three black people on the board of the Inter-Racial Council. At a large public meeting, he broke from his “strictly non-political” script and outlined the various ways that black people experienced institutional racism, from police harassment to the discriminatory practices of local employers. The mayor opposed Bailey's use of the term “black” and even threatened to leave. Black Power supporters heckled from the audience, calling both Bailey and Cummings “Uncle Toms.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ A founding member of the Universal Coloured People's Association, India-born Ajoy Ghose, told the Notting Hill audience, “Integration means giving up our rights and cultures for the brutal western society. If we follow that, they will rule us again.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In the months that followed, a number of board members stepped down, and the Inter-Racial Council emerged as a radical voice in Notting Hill; as Green argues, the Inter-Racial Council effectively “decolonised from within.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶

In 1982, Guyanese-born Mike Philips offered a compelling account of the rise of black-controlled community groups and institutions. In it, Philips presented an alternative picture of “community.” He saw black churches as an early model of black autonomy in Britain, describing them as “the essence of community” with their “network of beliefs, habits, and customs” and their shared recognition of the “charismatic leadership of a man or a woman.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Critiquing the word separatist as a label that treats black autonomy and authority as a threat,Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Philips reframed its emergence in the context of limitations of New Left community organizing in Notting Hill. As he put it, the role that most of the community workers tried to adopt, “that is, ‘a source of information and expertise, a stimulator, a catalyst and an encourager,’ soon came to be seen … from the other side as a function of their status as a part of the authority structure.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Social research was viewed as a tool of (colonial) control.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Even more, most community workers in Britain were, he explained, “young, white and middle class”; this meant that “in most cases it was actually impossible for them to recognize what ‘identity’ might mean to a group of middle-aged West Indians and Asians.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Philips's personal memory as a young black activist in the area is telling:

Despite the shifting strategies of New Left community workers, the focus of both “the middle-class reformer” and the “working-class activist” remained, he argued, on working “to ‘integrate’ black communities into the structure of the local (working-class) community around them” and “curing blacks’ supposed social and cultural isolation.”Footnote ¹⁸³ “The local communities were to be brought, by engaging in ‘radicalising’ activities such as rent strikes, squatting, tenants’ rights campaigns, and so on, to realise their common position, and in a wave of solidarity move towards attacking their conditions by applying various kinds of pressure to the authorities and agencies that controlled them … [But] none of these activities or the way that they were structured reached the root of the feelings of the black community about their position.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Further, black people's problems, such as systemic racism in the educational system, often “transcended the ‘local community’ framework.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ “Community” came to be defined around the “root of the feelings … about their position,”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ beyond any one locality.

A forty-five minute Radio 4 broadcast in April 1969, narrated by Stuart Hall, compiled by the Pakistan-born Dilip Hiro, and produced by the socialist documentary maker Charles Parker, presented the rise of Black Power as one transatlantic story, with the recorded voices of people “in the noisy ghettos of Harlem and Washington D.C., and in the ‘colonies’ of Birmingham and Wolverhampton.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ As one immigrant explained in the broadcast, the experience of living in Britain produced a new understanding of history: “I was born in Jamaica, Manchester. You hear about slavery but you didn't sort of put it together and put yourself within, you know, you wouldn't think it happened to people who you're sort of descended from. You know, you hear about slavery and thought it was about some other people that I don't know about. But coming to this country you get to realise that you're part of slavery.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸Hall, nearly three decades later, noted that this “recovery of lost histories” was “an enormous act of … imaginary political re-identification, re-territorialisation and re-identification, without which a counter-politics could not have been constructed.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ It was central to building a new sense of community and speaking “the language of that which is home in the genuine sense.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰

As another voice on the 1969 Radio 4 broadcast put it, the struggle of Black Power involved “rebuilding and re-defining our culture which has been taken from us and destroyed since the days of slavery.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ A voice recorded by Hiro explained further, “Black people must work for equality and not betterment. Because working for betterment, you have do-gooders in the struggle, who are assuming what is good or a bit better for the black man. They can only think of his betterment, but they will always dread the thought of his equality.”Footnote ¹⁹² “You know,” a voice added, “we're not going to stay in the back any longer.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Here, the limits of a welfarist approach to antiracism—focused on ameliorating social problems—are clear; here “community” has become more than a unit of deprivation and social need.