[cont]

Description:'Police Rushed to Quell a Hostel Riot'

Here, in 1949, we have an incident which the Birmingham Gazette describes as ‘racial rioting.’

The incident was clearly very serious. In brief, the disturbance took place on the night of the 8th of August, 1949 at the Causeway Green Hostel near Oldbury. The majority of the Poles were in Birmingham as part of the European Volunteer Workers scheme. This scheme was a deeply discriminatory one, and given the Poles’ status as ‘aliens,’ they could be directed to and kept within certain, undermanned, and frequently undesirable sectors of employment.

The ‘rioting’ essentially consisted of Polish attacks on Jamaican men. There were over 200 Poles in the Camp and only 65 Jamaicans. The Poles, armed with sticks, stones and razors, attacked the West Indian quarter. Three Poles and one Jamaican, a later article saying two Jamaicans, were hurt and a large amount of damage was done. An article in the Birmingham Post (10/08/49) spoke of the necessity to repair 350 windows.

One resident claimed that violence between the Poles and West Indians took place frequently. In light of the press’ description of the events as comprising attacks by Poles on an outnumbered group of Jamaicans, the labelling of the event as a ‘racial riot,’ implying a clash of two equally-matched sides, is clearly problematic.

The issue of interracial relationships seems to have been important. With several Poles telling the Birmingham Gazette that, ‘they resented Jamaicans taking young girls into the hostel.’ The newspaper certainly uses quotations which feed into stereotypes of black hyper-sexuality, and white women who display an interest in black men as having loose morals.

One quotation: ‘It is not safe for our wives and children to be out after dark’ shows how one speaker seems to believe that men should act out a similar relationship of patronage towards women, as they should towards children. The passage also feeds into stereotypes of black and migrant criminality and over-sexuality. A further quotation: ‘It seems that girls of 14 or 15 who hang about the hostel at night are the cause of most of the fights’ is clearly an expression of sexism. The quotation shifts the blame for patriarchal male attitudes towards women, onto women themselves. This expression also constructs white women who convey an interest in black men in a problematic way, implying a slack sense of morality.

The piece also features an important comment about the institutionalised nature of racism. One Jamaican man exclaimed: ‘We are nomads. If we move, the same sort of thing will happen.’ Clearly for this commentator, racism did not constitute an aberrant lapse from a broadly held liberal consensus. Racism was much more widespread and institutionalised within British society. Indeed this was a time when much of the globe’s landed surface was still under British rule.