The Color Bar

"What has gone wrong with British fair play?" cried London's big tabloid Daily Mirror. "For years we in this country have criticized the color bar in other countries--especially America and South Africa . . . We have also been righteous about it. For we have always believed that color prejudice had nothing to do with us ... We had better all think again."

Few Britons ever admit to race prejudice. Until 15 years ago, there were very few colored men to be prejudiced against, and they were apt to be either wealthy or titled, or both. There were colored men all through the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and Negro presidents of the Oxford Union; they were accepted in Mayfair's swankest hotels and clubs. During the war, U.S. Negro soldiers were welcomed with unequaled kindness, even to the extent of fathering some 750 babies.

Discovered Emotions. But last week, Britons faced a new situation. Increasing numbers of Negroes have poured into postwar Britain from Jamaica and the other British West Indies, lured by reports of full employment and encouraged by cut-rate fares promoted by travel agents. Clotting in tight, unhappy knots in Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Ipswich and London, they swelled Britain's Negro population to more than 50,000, and with embarrassment and dismay, Britons discovered in themselves emotions and prejudices they had never acknowledged.

The signs of rising tension were clear and troubling. In London's seedy Camden Town, a Negro arguing with a white girl touched off a fight which developed into two days of sporadic rioting. In Birmingham, unionists rebelled when the city proposed to hire 300 Negro bus conductors, caved in only under a nationwide barrage of protests. In Brixton, slogans appeared on walls "Keep Britain White." Some pubs refused Negroes admittance.

In Edinburgh, four out of five landladies on the university's lists refuse to accept colored students. "A friend of mine took in colored, and her neighbors stopped talking to her," explained one. In other cities, West Indians often were told on the telephone that they could have a room but were refused it when they arrived and the landlady saw the color of their skin. A tenant of an expensive Park Lane apartment arranged to sublet it to the young, Cambridge-educated Kabaka of Buganda, then was refused permission by the apartment owner. The Negro players of Anna Lucasta and Porgy and Bess had no trouble obtaining rooms in the best hotels. But when they settled down to a long run and tried to get apartments, they reported refusals and excuses. A frequent one: "Of course, I don't have any prejudice myself, but we have American tenants here, and they wouldn't like it." (Blaming Americans is a familiar exculpation: when the Bermuda legislature recently decided to maintain discrimination in the island's hotels, cinemas and restaurants, and segregation in schools, it pleaded that Bermuda had to "keep our reforms in line with the generally accepted conditions in countries from which we get the majority of our visitors," i.e., the U.S.)

Exported Bar. Landlord hostility has raised prices to Negroes. Explained one: "A room is to let for 30 bob. If a white man applies, he gets it for 30 bob. If a colored man comes, there is a short argument and he gets it for 40 bob. We call it the color tax." On the other hand, some landlords have specialized in renting old and dilapidated housing to Negro tenants who, with no other choice, often end up three or four to a room, creating Harlem-type slums.

The fact is, Britons have long had a color bar, but they have simply exported it. A distinguished Indian can dine at Claridge's in London, but not in the "Europeans Only" restaurants of Nairobi. If there is segregation in Kenya's schools (which there is), if a Negro woman must shop through a hatch in the wall in Rhodesia (which she must), the decent Englishman at home hears about it in no village pub, worries over it in no angry parish meeting. It all happens several thousand miles away, and in another country.

Rising Tide. But the West Indians are on every Briton's doorstep. And they are still coming in, in a tide that reached 10,000 this year and is still increasing. They carry British passports, and they cannot be barred on the ground of job scarcity; in booming Britain, there are more jobs than men to fill them. Admitted the Economist: "Complaints that natives of the West Indies are taking jobs and homes away from natives of Britain are really only polite hypocrisy."

The problem of controlling colored immigration is an awkward one in a commonwealth in which 460 million of its 540 million citizens are colored in one shade or another. Answering a question in Parliament recently, Minister of State for Colonial Affairs Henry Hopkinson declared: "In a world in which restrictions on personal movement and immigration have increased, we still take pride in the fact that a man can say civis Britannicus sum whatever his color may be, and we take pride in the fact that he wants and can come to the mother country . . . That is not something we wish to tamper with lightly." That said, Hopkinson admitted the government is indeed considering some form of limitation.

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