Abstract
As television trod ever deeper into the news and current affairs broadcasting of race relations, key issues were at stake. These, as we have seen, not only related to the responsibility of broadcasters but were also tied to broader social concerns about race and immigration, multiculturalism, racial difference and belonging. The coverage of racial extremists brought these questions into ever-sharper focus, as television at once reflected and guided social responses. Programmes addressed how to deal with the far right (and the legitimacy of extreme anti-immigrant mainstream politicians like Enoch Powell) and how to present what was widely perceived as growing black militancy, especially the rise of Black Power. Moreover, in some instances, television also explored international race relations in depth, particularly the apartheid regime in South Africa. But television did not entirely dictate its own policy concerning how these issues were to be covered. After 1965, anxieties about the purview of the Race Relations Act significantly shaped broadcasting responses to racial extremism. In every case, concerns focused on section 6 of the legislation, which made it an offence to ‘stir up hatred against any section of the public in Great Britain distinguished by colour, race, or ethnic or national origins’ carrying a maximum sanction of two years in prison.1
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Notes
The Race Relations Act, the Public General Acts (1965), pp. 1619–20. For analysis, see G. Schaffer, ‘Legislating against Hatred: Meaning and Motive in Section 6 of the Race Relations Act of 1965’ in Twentieth Century British History (Online First, 2013), p. 1–25.
WAC, News and Current Affairs Meeting, 29 March 1968. For details on the Racial Preservation Society, see M. Walker, The National Front (Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1977), p. 59–60.
See also R. Thurlow, Fascism in Modern Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p.142.
R. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), p. 215
and T. Kushner and K. Lunn, The Politics of Marginality: Race, the Radical Right and Minorities in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1990).
See G. Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Postwar Reconstruction of European Fascism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007),
D.S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur, Mosley, Fascism and British Society, 1931–81 (Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 238
and A. Poole, ‘Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement: Success or Failure?’ in M. Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 53–80.
For analysis of the speech, see S. Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 449–59.
See S. Taylor, The National Front and English Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 36. Other scholars have emphasised a longer-term internal schism relating to the party’s relationship with Nazism as leading to Tyndall’s political removal. See Walker, The National Front, pp. 178–95 and Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p.283.
For analysis of the international climate of thinking on race after the Second World War, see G. Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society: 1930–62 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 115–65
and M. Kohn, The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 40–2.
For a historiographical analysis of the apartheid regime, see W. Beinart and S. Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1–24.
H. Smith, ‘Apartheid, Sharpeville and “Impartiality”: The Reporting of South Africa on BBC Television 1948–61’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (1993), 13(3): 251–8, p. 252.
On the impact of the Sharpeville massacre, see R. Davenport and C. Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 413
and N. Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 121.
On the birth of the AAM, see R. Fieldhouse, Anti-Apartheid: A History of the Movement in Britain (London: Merlin, 2005), p. 20–2.
See J. Laurence, Race, Propaganda and South Africa: The Manipulation of Western Opinions and Policies by the Forces of White Supremacy (London: Gollancz, 1979), p. 31–3.
R. Skinner, The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c.1919–64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Fieldhouse, Anti-Apartheid, pp. 53–4.
Fieldhouse, Anti-Apartheid, pp. 95–9. See also P. Hain, Don’t Play with Apartheid: The Background to the Stop the Seventy Tour Campaign (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971).
Some documentaries managed to go some way to convey the realities of black British life, most notably Philip Donnellan’s The Colony, which was broadcast on BBC2 on 16 June 1964. For analysis, see P. Long, ‘Representing Race and Place: Black Midlanders on the Television in the 1960s and 1970s’, Midlands History (2011), 36(2): 262–77.
Black faces were rare, on and off-screen, in news and current affairs in this period. Trevor McDonald began his long career as a BBC producer in 1969, but Britain’s first black presenter was Barbara Blake Hannah, who was a presenter on Thames’ Today programme in 1968. For details, see B. Blake Hannah, Growing Out: Black Hair and Black Pride in the Swinging Sixties (Hertford: Hansib, 2010), p. 95–6.
See Hartmann and Husband, Racism and the Mass Media, p. 210 and T. Freeth, ‘Racism on Television: Bringing the Colonies Back Home’ and P. Cohen, ‘Riots and Reporting’, both in Gardner and Cohen (eds), It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum, pp. 14–33, UNESCO, Race as News, p. 91 and S. Hall, ‘Racism and Reaction’ in Commission for Racial Equality, Five Views of Multi-Racial Britain: Talks on Race Relations Broadcasts by BBC TV (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1978), p. 23–35.
See J. Street, ‘Malcolm X, Smethwick, and the Influence of the African American Freedom Struggle on British Race Relations in the 1960s’, Journal of Black Studies (2008), 38: 932–50.
See R. Wild, ‘Black was the Colour of our Fight: Black Power in Britain 1955–1976’ (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008), p. 259.
In his Black Power career, de Freitas was known as Michael X or Abdul Malik. For the history of the RAAS, see Sivanandan, A Different Hunger, p. 16. D. Humphry and D. Tindall, False Messiah: The Story of Michael X (London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1977),
J. Sharp, The Life and Death of Michael X (Waterford: Uni Books, 1981),
V.S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),
J. Williams, Michael X: A Life in Black and White (London: Century, 2008)
and Michael’s ghost-written autobiography, M.A. Malik, From Michael de Freitas to Michael X (London: Deutsch, 1968).
See A.M. Angelo, ‘The Black Panthers in London, 1967–1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic’, Radical History Review (2009), 103: 17–35,.
See Sivanandan, A Different Hunger, pp. 20–1 and O. Egbuna, Destroy this Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (London: Morrow, 1971), p. 18–19.
For a broad history of Black Power movements in 1970s Britain, see W. Trew, Black for a Cause. Not Just Because: The Case of the ‘Oval 4’ and the Story of Black Power in Seventies Britain (London: TQWM Press, 2010) and Wild, ‘Black was the Colour of our Fight’.
This perception endured to such an extent that John Lyttle (Chief Conciliation Officer of the Race Relations Board) wrote to local conciliation committees to assure them that the bulk of prosecutions were not of black people. He noted: ‘There is a widespread belief, particularly rife in the Race Relations Industry, that Section 6 of the 1965 Act is being used wholly or almost wholly against coloured defendants’ (NA, CK2/179, John Lyttle to conciliation committees, 16 December 1969. Lyttle’s data revealed that of 15 prosecutions, nine defendants had been white and six had been black). Lester and Bindman wrote that there was a ‘widespread and erroneous impression that most of the prosecutions have been brought against black people’: A. Lester and G. Bindman, Race and Law (London: Longman, 1972), p. 373.
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Schaffer, G. (2014). Dealing with Racial Extremes: News and Current Affairs under Pressure. In: The Vision of a Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314888_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314888_4
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