Becoming Black in the Era of Civil Rights and Black Power
Many people of color in Britain “became black” in the 1960s. This transformation occurred in reaction to the apparent consolidation of British politics around a revived whiteness and through the resonance within Britain of U.S. Black Power and Caribbean and African secondary decolonization. Presenting Black Power as a global formation unfolding within Britain in the face of the failure of state-led “race relations” management, this chapter charts the impact of African American visitors to Britain in the mid-1960s and follows the development of British Black Power among Caribbean, African, and South Asian activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows the resonance and new meanings of blackness that developed in this global conjuncture, as older anticolonial and antiracist politics were reworked.