Places of Public Resort: The Transatlantic Resonances of Desegregating Public Space in Britain

By the mid-1960s, many liberals and radicals in Britain looked to the American civil rights movement with a sense of awe and apprehension.  On the one hand, progressive anti-racists in the Isles admired the spirit of civil rights workers and attempted to comprehend their applications to British society.  On the other hand, some liberals worried that British racial integration was regressing as the arrival of former Commonwealth subjects stirred severely conservative opposition.  This paper examines British efforts to desegregate public space in increasingly diverse cities, and outlines the mechanisms that British organizations borrowed to do so.  Its main subject is the first Race Relations Act in Britain (1965), usually treated by British political historians as a hollow compromise between the progressive wing of the Labour Party and Conservatives’ racial sentiments against the increasing number of Commonwealth immigrants settling in Britain.  The Act was limited to fighting racial segregation and discrimination in “places of public resort”, which in practice translated to hotels, pubs, clubs, and restaurants.  While later Acts outlawed discrimination in housing, employment, and education, the 1965 Act seems toothless on first glance.  Yet an examination of the records of the Race Relations Board, the bureaucratic agency charged with enforcing the Act, reveals that the Board took its charge seriously, looking to American civil rights workers for helpful frameworks to make public space open to all.  By analyzing several legal and regulation strategies employed by the Board, as well as how UK activists looked to groups like the New York State Commission Against Discrimination and the Chicago-based Congress of Racial Equality for specific mechanisms, the paper makes plain the tangible ways that civil rights groups on both sides of the Atlantic shared strategies for desegregating public space.