[cont]

Description:'I Protest Against the Colour Bar'

A further article, written by the aforementioned Jamaican arrrivant, Horace Halliburton cites a different reason for the disturbances, namely: ‘accommodation and employment.’ Halliburton writes about the management policy of segregation in the Hostel which, in his view, led to the disturbances. He argues that: ‘In my opinion a man has to live with his neighbour before he really gets to know him properly, whereas splitting the races leads to suspicion and estrangement.’ He makes the important point that most of the hostel’s coloured men served in the forces during the war but nonetheless, ‘the Jamaican is coloured, and he is not allowed to forget it.’ This point is underlined by Halliburton’s saddening tales of his experiences of discrimination in his search for work in Birmingham.

Halliburton alludes to the earlier disturbance in Nottingham when he says ‘The problem of Causeway Green is by no means unique in this country.’ With his comment ‘Great Britain is destroying its reputation overseas’, Halliburton arguably makes a link between the condition of Black people in Britain, and the development of anti-colonial movements overseas. The fact that Halliburton has published such a well-written and insightful piece of writing, would, in itself have presented a challenge to the racist attitudes of many, who as Halliburton writes, might still, label; ‘a coloured man a savage or headhunter with a boiling pot up his sleeve.’