The fight for fairness
In April 1968 Enoch Powell delivers his infamous speech at a Birmingham hotel — and the city's communities answer with organisation, not retreat. Churches, unions, tenants' groups, and community associations build alliances, and the Race Relations Acts of 1965–1976 slowly outlaw open discrimination. Voices raised here changed Britain.
The people
Ordinary Brummies in extraordinary times · John Ball collection
The 1960s put Birmingham and its surrounding towns at the centre of Britain's reckoning with race. The 1964 general election in neighbouring Smethwick became notorious for an openly racist campaign; four years later, in April 1968, Enoch Powell chose a Birmingham hotel to deliver the speech that would become a byword for hostility to migration. The eyes of the country were on the West Midlands.
The answer came from below. The Indian Workers' Association, Caribbean community associations, Black-led churches, sympathetic trade unionists, tenants' groups, and faith leaders organised, campaigned, and built alliances across communities. Workplace disputes challenged discrimination on the buses and in the foundries; community centres and Saturday schools were founded; and ordinary acts of solidarity between neighbours did quiet work no legislation could.
Parliament slowly followed where communities led: the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968, and 1976 progressively outlawed open discrimination in public places, housing, and employment. The colour bars did not vanish overnight — but the direction was set, and it was set in no small part by voices raised in Birmingham. The people who raised them are now elders; their testimony is the treasure this project seeks.