Migrant Manchester

Frank Worrell

Frank Worrell was one of the Caribbean's leading cricketers and lived near Bury during the 1950s as he played professionally for Radcliffe in the Central Lancashire League. Born in Barbados in 1924, Worrell made his test debut aged 23 scoring 97 runs against England.

Between 1956 and 1959 he studied economics at the University of Manchester whilst playing international and league cricket. In 1960 he became the first black captain of the West Indies transforming the team and the sport. He was knighted in 1964 for service to cricket.

Source: Manchester Guardian, 20/8/1958, p.10; Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (1967)

Manchester Jewish Board of Guardians

The first meeting of the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor of Manchester was held at the Jews'School in June 1867. The organization aimed to provide assistance through:

"food, bed and other clothing, medical aid, industrial occupation, and other help, whereby the recipient might obtain a livelihood; loans, aid to emigrants and the like".

Source: Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester (1998), pp.84-86; Manchester Jewish Federation

Manchester Black Parents' Association

Formed in early 1976, this committee sought to intervene to protect young black men from police violence and legal victimisation. With increasing clashes between black youths and the police, its members were on-call to

"rush to a situation of potential trouble, take down the numbers of the police men and/or security guards and ensure that, in case of subsequent legal action, some witnesses could be produced".

Throughout the late 1970s, many black parents in Moss Side felt that their children were being targeted by police, who would aggressively descend on the area in large numbers, and that their claims of racist violence or wrongful arrest were rarely investigated by authorities. By early 1981, the Association stated that the Moss Side police station

"has long been regarded by the black community as the operational base of a racist army in occupation".

Source: Observer 18/4/1976. p.4; Guardian, 8/6/1981, p.3

1962: Jamaica's Independence

Jamaica's Independence on 6 August 1962 was celebrated with a thanksgiving service of over three hundred people at the Moss Side Baptist Church and then a formal lunch at the Grand Hotel in the city centre. Afternoon celebrations were focused on the Rusholme Public Hall which in the evening hosted a dance and Miss Bronze beauty competition that drew crowds estimated to number nearly a thousand people. The hall was decorated with airline posters of Jamaica, and revellers had a choice of English tea or imported Red Stripe beer.

Source: Guardian, 7/8/1962, p.12.

Afroville

Youth club of the mid-1970s with membership of around sixty.

Source: Observer, 18/4/1976, p.4.

Black Unity and Freedom Party

In 1970 the Black Unity and Freedom Party was formed in Britain, emerging from the Universal Coloured Peoples Association (UCPA). The UCPA had been created by Nigerian Obi Egbuna in 1967 in the wake of the visit of Trinidian-American activist Kwame Touré (Stokely Carmichael) to Britain. The year before Carmichael had transformed the civil rights movement in the US with his call for "Black Power" championing cultural pride, political independence and socio-economic empowerment.

In Manchester, the Black Unity and Freedom Party organised Saturday Schools, campaigned against police brutality and educational inequalities, organised political discussions and distributed the paper The Black Voice.

Source: Sharae Deckard "United States of America, Britain, and the Civil Rights Movement", The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007)

Nello James Centre

Started in 1967 as a community education centre, the cottage supplied day-care and a nursery playground, legal advice, a printing workshop and a social centre. The founders of the centre had partly come together to protest police brutality, although its membership broadened beyond West Indians to include local university students. Amongst its successful events were dance nights and a free university. The centre was visited by the select parliamentary committee on race relations.
Its political radicalism was expressed not only in the cottage being named after leading Trinidadian socialist intellectual C.L.R. James but also in the posters on the trees outside reading "Free Angela Davis" who had been arrested as part of the repression of the Black Panterh Party in California during the early 1970s.

Source: The Guardian, 1/7/1972, p.1

Community House

This Edwardian lodging house at 55 Darcy St was converted into a social club to bring together whites and blacks in the spring of 1954. The project was led by twenty West Indian and Africans, many of whom were in inter-racial relationships. With the parish worker Brother Bernard, they redecorated the building so that it could host Saturday evening dances and carry a "large stock of West African and West Indian newspapers". The club was celebrated as a much needed social space given the difficulties faced by early migrants of lodging in single rented rooms.

Source: Manchester Guardian, 8/4/1954, p.4.

The Economist

Bookshop established by Ras Makonnen in the mid-1940s to support his Pan-African Publishing Co. The directors of the latter were Makonnen, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta and Peter Millard. Amongst the anti-colonial works published by the press were Sylvia Pankhurst, Italy's War Crimes in Ethiopia (1946), Kenyatta's, Kenya: Land of Conflict (1945) and The Negro in the Caribbean by Trinidadian historian and later Prime Minister Eric Williams. The bookshop relied on the support of students at the University of Manchester, for as Makonnen recognized:

it wasn't a race bookshop, either in the sense that it catered only to blacks - there weren't enough around for this to be possible - or in the sense that we only sold books about blacks. However, when there was some particular book on blacks that I felt needed promoting, we went to town.

One of those books that was made a "big splash" about was Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944) which explored how Caribbean slavery help to fuel the emergence of Britain's industrial economy.

Source: Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from within (1973), pp.145-146.

Roots Festival

First held on 2-3 December 1977 in Ducie High School, the festival celebrated the arts and history of the African and Asian Diasporas. It included craft exhibits, book displays, food stalls and demonstrations of Nigerian drumming. Part of the initial vision of the festival was that it was a multicultural event celebrating cultures that were marginalised in British education and society. During the 1980s the festival moved between local schools. Emerging from the festival was an extensive oral history project with Caribbean, African and South Asian migrants which is now available at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre.

Source: Roots 5 years on (1981)

Forum Club

Nightclub established by Ras Makonnen near Owens College in the mid-1940s. Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Kitchener was a regular performer.

Source: Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from within, p.138.

1946 "Piccadilly Disturbance"

On a snowy evening on 27 September 1946, two white women and two Jamaican RAF servicemen were walking through the city after a meal at the Cosmopolitan. Between the Grand Hotel and Woolworths, they were abused by a group of whites, resulting in a brawl that led the death of one of the latter, John Smith aged 22 from Fallowfield. Jamaican Gerald Beard, aged 23, who was stationed with the RAF in Cambridgeshire was charged with murder. In response, Ras Makonnen and some of the Jamaican service personnel in Manchester organised for Norman Manley, King's Council, to travel from Jamaica to Manchester to lead the defence. As Makonnen remembered:

"we could easily get some of our European friends to help us, but I think that we should really get a black lawyer to defend this man here. We want to project the image that the Black man is capable of carrying on his own defence".

Manley successfully argued that that there was no direct evidence linking Beard to the killing, and that the wounds appeared to have been caused by a right-handed assailant while the accused was left-handed. The case was dismissed.

Sources: Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from within (1975), pp.141-143; The Times, 28/11/1946, p. 2.; Manchester Guardian, 28/9/1946, p.6; Manchester Guardian, 23/10, p.8; Manchester Guardian, 28/11/1946, p. 3.

1945 Pan-African Congress

Norman Manley

Norman Manley was Jamaica's Chief Minister and then Premier between 1955 and 1962. He led the negotiations for the island's independence in 1961, although his efforts to keep Jamaica within the West Indian Federation failed. As a Rhodes Scholar he studied law at Oxford, before returning to Jamaica as a barrister. He took a prominent role in defending black workers during the 1838 labour crisis and was the island's leading lawyer at the time he travelled to Manchester in 1946. His son, Michael Manley, followed him into politics and became Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1972.

Source: T. E. Sealy, "Manley, Norman Washington (1893–1969)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Abasindi

Alvinos Patty Shop

Cosmopolitan

Four-storey restaurant established by entrepreneurial Pan-Africanist Ras Makonnen in the mid-1940s which was popular with black American troops and West Indian service personnel. Provided a mix of Chinese, Indian and West Indian cuisine while the dining rooms had been painted with murals by an Jewish refugee from Austria. Managed for a time by Jomo Kenyatta who would become the first Prime Minister and then President of Kenya (1963-78), the profits of the business were used to support the 1945 Pan-African Congress.

Source: Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from within (1975), pp.137-139

Migrant Manchester