Towards the end of the century, a Trinidadian law student, Sylvester Williams, helped to found the African-Association, which lobbied for human rights in the colonies and was instrumental in holding the first Pan-African Conference in London (1900). In 1906 he joined the Fabian Society and was elected to Marylebone Borough Council, before eventually returning to Trinidad.

William Cuffay Moving Here catalogue reference (LMA) GLC/DG/PUB/01/195/1679

In the same period another Jamaican born radical, Robert Wedderburn, was jailed following his speeches urging revolution. Later in the 1830s and 1840s William Cuffay, a tailor, whose father was from St Kitts, became one of the leaders of the Chartist movement and was eventually put on trial for his fiery speeches against the Queen and transported to Tasmania.

Individuals such as these created a political tradition, and several Caribbean immigrants gravitated to radical politics and made a contribution which stemmed from their own unique experience. However, it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century and a growth in numbers and confidence within their communities, that it became possible for Caribbean migrants to create political trends which stemmed from their own history in Britain and their interaction with white British people.

From the end of the First World War, the politics of Caribbean migrants in Britain was made up of two major elements. The first was concerned with the country's reaction to their presence. The second was to do with the political activities produced by their attempts to influence or control the conditions under which they lived.

These two strands were inextricably linked and eventually the politics of the Caribbean migrants became a vital feature within the spectrum of British parliamentary politics. Read about the Self Help Movement.

The politics associated with Caribbeans in Britain can be broken down into three distinct eras:

Up until the 1950s, the political activities of Caribbean migrants were largely concerned with conditions in the Caribbean or Africa and the argument for colonial independence. Organizations like the League of Coloured Peoples and the International African Service Bureau also frequently lobbied the government about the issue of racial discrimination in Britain.

The LCP, for instance, mounted a political campaign around the cases of Caribbean seamen who had been thrown out of work by legislation - the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order - which had been applied. During the 1930s, the LCP also lobbied against the widespread discrimination in the recruitment of nurses and hospital staff.

In addition to its campaigns against discrimination in Britain, the LCP joined with the IASB to lobby the government about improving conditions and furthering political progress in the colonies.

This process produced political figures whose activities reflected the importance of these issues to the Caribbean community of their time. These included Ras Makonnen, a migrant from Guyana, and George Padmore, a Trinidadian who closely identified with African political leaders notably Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta; but their political interests were largely focused on what was happening in the colonies, especially in Africa. The IASB drew together and funded protests and lobbies against colonialism.

Before the 1950s, the politics of Caribbeans in Britain had been driven largely by events abroad, or had been a by-product of welfare activism. The migrant community was too isolated and too scattered to support a direct intervention in British politics or a political platform based on migrant experience. However once decolonisation was more or less over, and the bulk of Caribbean immigration in the late 1950s and 1960s had taken place, the picture changed radically.

The issue that created and shaped migrant politics was the clash between their needs and expectations, and the routine discrimination practised in the areas of accommodation and employment.

The Notting Hill riots in 1958 dramatized this problem, and the event was a political watershed for a number of reasons. Housing in London was in desperately short supply after wartime destruction. Notting Hill was already a slum, which housed transients and people too old or too low down the economic ladder to get out. The incursion of migrants and their exploitation by corrupt landlords squeezed out existing English families and raised rents to ridiculous levels.

Right wing and racist politicians, like Sir Oswald Mosley, played on the resentment in the area and, in 1958, after a week of violence in a similar district of Nottingham, disturbances were sparked off when young delinquents from all over London began attacking Black people in Notting Hill.

From the point of view of the Caribbean migrants, it was evidence that their problems weren't simply a matter for each individual. Instead, they were collective issues which could, and needed to be, faced collectively

On the other hand, British politicians and commentators realized that the presence of the migrants had become a serious political issue. The political solution voiced in the media and in parliament was to limit the numbers of migrants allowed to enter Britain and, after the Notting Hill riots, the argument for immigration control dominated political discussion for the next decade. Read these transcripts of parliamentary questions regarding Caribbean immigration in 1960.

The issue of race and skin colour also had a major importance in shaping the politics of migration in Britain. The timing of the bulk of Caribbean migration, between 1960 and 1965, turned out to be crucial. Almost the entire process of decolonisation took place during that decade, giving rise to widespread arguments about race and racial equality in the former colonies and in Britain itself.

Within the same short time, Britain fought a war against African insurgents in Kenya, the white settlers in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) were struggling to stay in control of the country, and the apartheid regime in South Africa was repeatedly grabbing the headlines. In addition, the Civil Rights struggle in the USA was in full swing. All over the world, race was a burning political issue and, in Britain, the coincidence of the migrants' skin colour set off a confrontation which has come to be symbolised by the Notting Hill riots.

Right wing parties and politicians, notably the senior Conservative Enoch Powell, led a campaign for a ban on immigration (Powellism), exploiting the stresses and conflicts which accompanied the arrival of growing numbers of migrants during the first years of the 1960s.

Opposing them was a coalition which had taken shape after the Notting Hill riots, and which was already engaged in the campaigns for nuclear disarmament or against apartheid in South Africa. This consisted of a confederation of West Indian organizations, based on various national groups, (e.g. the West Indian Standing Conference), church based and voluntary groups like Christian Aid, and left wing organizations and parties, like the Communist Party.

The majority of Caribbean migrants tended not to be involved in any of these political groupings. In fact, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), which set out during the early 1960s to recruit a mass movement under the leadership of the activists, failed to do so and collapsed within a few years.

In Parliament the politics of migration sparked off a raft of legislation, which was to have significant effects on British law and constitution. The first legislation limiting immigration appeared in 1962. This established quotas and a voucher system for migrants. In 1965 another Immigration Bill imposed further limits, and was followed by a Race Relations Bill which outlawed racial discrimination in public places.

In 1967, the last in this significant group of acts introduced the concept of 'patriality', which limited the right of entry to people whose grandparents had been born in Britain, and cleared the way for new rules about registering and recording British citizenship.

This network of legislation, for the first time in the history of the British constitution, obliged Parliament to define citizenship of the United Kingdom, and to outline the rights of its citizens. This led in the next decade to a new era in the politics of the Caribbean migrants.

For Caribbeans at the beginning of the 1970s, there was a glaring gap between their newly established status as citizens and the treatment they received from domestic institutions and their fellow citizens.

Since the mid-1960s and the political storm of Powellism, the government established a series of quangoes aimed at promoting racial equality, forerunners of the CRE. These were intended, among other things, to monitor and protect the rights of the ethnic minorities within the political culture and everywhere else. But it had become apparent to most migrants that any real improvement in their prospects depended on influencing parliamentary politics.

This awareness led to two distinct forms of political action. The first was a series of campaigns and protests aimed at such issues as police harassment and educational under-achievement. The political content of these protests was often unfocused but, taken together, they began to outline a political programme which had specific effects on the political culture as a whole. The other strand of political action was the gradual penetration of Black activists into the structures of local government, the trade unions and the major political parties.

The politicization of the Caribbean community was partly the result of the 'self help' movement which consisted of a network of projects, largely funded by local government, staffed by local activists, and grouped round the specific needs of the migrants - education, legal advice, and housing. Black bookshops, parents' groups, legal aid centres and hostels proliferated in various parts of the country, and Black activists based their activities on the space and resources provided by these centres.

Most of these took Blackness and Black deprivation as their rationale and, whilst performing their ostensible functions, also disseminated information about, and support for, the struggles and issues of Caribbeans throughout the country and within the Black diaspora as a whole.

At the same time, the Rastafarian movement, reinforced by its connections with popular culture, and its Back to Africa overtones, fed its language and pre-occupations into the cultural climate.

The most notable political achievement of this phase of migrant politics was the repeal of the Vagrancy Act of 1824. This Act had allowed the police to stop, search and arrest anyone under any suspicion, and had been extensively used against young Black people, mostly the children of Caribbean migrants. Read this file containing examples of accusations against the Metropolitan police.

After Black youths rioted in many of Britain's major cities in the spring of 1981, Parliament hastened to repeal the Act. However it had been the political programme outlined during the 1970s which gave the riots their meaning, as the subsequent government enquiry, led by Lord Scarman, pointed out. Read the GLC publication, Race and the Police and the press release about the 1982 GLC Police Committee report on police statistics, including comment from Paul Boateng who was chairman of the committee at the time.

The Labour Party, however, which had substantial support and participation from Black people, consistently refused to permit the emergence of sections devoted to migrant interests and politics. Towards the end of the 1980s, two MPs from a Caribbean background entered parliament, but they were elected, like their white colleagues, as politicians who subscribed to the political programme of the Labour party, rather than as people who were specifically accountable to voters from the Caribbean migrant community.

Black politics remains a matter of single campaigns and protests. An example of this is the campaign focusing on police mismanagement of the Stephen Lawrence case, which concerned a young Black man attacked and murdered by a group of young white men in South London in 1993.

The upshot of the campaign was a judicial review which charged British institutions with widespread institutional racism. On the other hand it is still not clear what the political consequences of the Macpherson report might be.

The Stephen Lawrence case summed up both the successes and failures of Black politics over the years. Its interventions have been high profile and culturally significant. The political benefits of these struggles to British society as a whole are obvious, but the specific benefits to the day to day social and political circumstances of Caribbean migrants and their children have been less marked. While Caribbean migrants are notably active in the practice of British parliamentary politics, they have not created parallels to the institutions which support the political establishment and the political programmes of the African American population.