When racist pogroms flared up across Britain in the Summer, many people highlighted the similarity to the riots which broke out in 1919 in British port cities. But they were alike in other ways too, not least the role that sections of the labour movement’s leadership played in promoting the racist tropes which motivated the rioters.

As I point out in the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921, the failure of the official left to challenge racist ideology disarmed the labour movement in the crucial years after World War I.

At the heart of the British war effort was the defence of the British Empire and its racial hierarchy. In late 1916, open racism appeared on the British home front when, faced with labour shortages in the munitions industry, the government floated the idea of importing black workers from South Africa.

Shockingly, the idea was immediately denounced by the future Labour Party leader George Lansbury’s Herald, as the Daily Herald was called during the war. It facetiously referred to black workers as ‘our coloured brethren’ and disgustingly recommended the manufacture of whips to keep them under control.

Its position was inspired by the journalist a future Labour MP E.D. Morel’s pamphlet ‘Africa and the Peace of Europe’, which the Herald advertised with the lurid headline ‘25 Million Armed Negroes for Europe.’ Although Morel was a prominent campaigner against Belgian atrocities in the Congo, he believed ‘races’ should not mix and opposed non-white immigration into Europe.

Shockingly, the anti-war British Socialist Party (BSP) repeated the Herald’s racist rhetoric. Writing in its newspaper The Call, BSP leader Tom Quelch claimed  ‘a grotesque shadow has been flung across the economic milieu of the workers — a shadow, dark and menacing — the shadow of the Negro labourer’, and warned soldiers that their wives and daughters were to be ‘delivered into the arms of the vigorous Othellos of Africa.’

This open racism was opposed by a prominent Marxist member of London’s Russian exile community, Georges Chicherin. A Menshevik up to 1914 but now a Bolshevik — and future People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs — he criticised Quelch’s stance:

Racial distinctions and restrictions are the greatest hindrance to the universal development of labour solidarity. How can the masses of the backward countries be drawn into the international labour movement if the labour organisations of the more developed countries consider them as inferior beings and exclude them?

Chicherin’s position was shared by the Socialist Labour Party, a leftist, Scottish-based split from the BSP’s forerunner. In September 1917, its newspaper The Socialist insisted that:

The workers of the so-called subject races are part and parcel of the international working-class movement. … How must the coloured labour problem be met? By organisation! By class organisation!! … The moment white labour fights black labour, that moment Capital beats both. The moment white and black labour unite, that moment the defeat of Capital has commenced.

In October 1917, the Workers’ Union in Birmingham also began a campaign to recruit Chinese workers in local metal industries. Union official John Beard told the press that ‘these men are workmen, circumstanced like every other workman, and I record it to the credit of several of our branch officials who took the initiative of enrolling them in our union … so far as I am concerned I will be no party to hounding a man simply because his colour, creed or civilisation is different to mine.’

The government’s plan to import African workers was quietly dropped, but racial violence flared up shortly after World War I ended. The demand for merchant shipping collapsed, throwing many seamen from the West Indies, Africa and China out of work, while demobilised Royal Navy sailors flooded the market. Long-established Chinese, African and West Indian communities in British ports quickly became the focus of racist hostility.

On 22 January 1919, Glasgow seamen’s leader, and future Labour cabinet minister, Manny Shinwell, told a seamen’s meeting that their problems were caused by the government’s failure to ban Chinese sailors. ‘Action should be taken at once’, he said. The next day, racist mobs invaded black people’s homes and attacked them. The pogrom only ceased when police arrested 30 black seamen. Needless to say, none of the white racists were detained.

The following month, Arab seamen in South Shields faced racist attacks led by an official of the National Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks, Butchers and Bakers. In early June, racists ran amok through Liverpool’s long-established black community, leaving dozens injured and murdering ship’s fireman Charles Wootton.

That same month, racist riots broke out in Cardiff, as Australian soldiers using live ammunition led lynch mobs into the black, Arab and Chinese dockland community. Scores were injured, and Mahommed Abdullah was killed by a blow to the head. Tellingly, the inquest into his killing could not decide whether his death was caused by the mob or the police.

The BSP criminally said nothing about these pogroms, but organisations to its left declared their opposition to racism. In The Socialist, William Paul argued that ‘no worker should be debarred from working at any job. It does not matter what the colour, sex or skill of the worker may be. … There is no yellow peril, there is no Asiatic problem. These things only exist because capitalism exists.’

The Worker, the newspaper of the Clyde Workers Committee, also addressed racist paranoia about white women’s relationships with black men. ‘The colour of the skin is not a factor in deciding whether a man can make a woman happy,’ it argued, going on to make an appeal to ‘fellow workers, drop all this racial warfare, recognise the black man as being a victim of capitalism just as you are; join up your forces with him, and fight to destroy that which makes slaves of you just as it makes a slave of him.’

Sadly this was not a widely-held position in the British labour movement. In April 1920, the Daily Herald published a front-page article by E.D. Morel headlined ‘Black Scourge in Europe. Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine.’ Morel, by now a prominent member of the Independent Labour Party, described the Senegalese troops in the French Army on the Rhine as ‘black barbarians’ who were ‘raping women and girls — for well-known physiological reasons.’

The Herald‘s editorial claimed to oppose racial prejudice but asked, ‘Are the Christians of Europe, who raise millions of pounds annually to teach the heathen the blessings of monogamy, going to remain silent before the sexual outrages that are being committed?’ Morel and future Labour MP Margaret Bondfield also addressed a mass meeting in Westminster’s Central Hall called to protest ‘Against the Use of Black Troops in Europe.’

In response, revolutionary Jamaican poet Claude McKay, who was now writing for Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought, immediately sent a reply for publication in the Daily Herald. When George Lansbury refused to print it, the Dreadnought ran it.

McKay asked why Lansbury published ‘this obscene, maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?’ He went on to expose how Morel and the Herald were inflaming racism: ‘I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race.’

More than a century later, McKay’s words still stand as a warning to the left about what happens when racist narratives are not combated. It’s high time the lessons of 1919 were learned.