World: The Dark Million

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Union Pressure. Since the nonwhite Britons equal 2% of the total, the notion of a "mixed society" may strike Americans as faintly ridiculous. But in a nation as homogeneous as Britain, that 2% is infinitely more visible than it would be in the U.S., and it arouses, if anything, greater resentment. Restricted in private industry by their background, and by union pressure, to the jobs that white workers refuse, the nonwhites have flocked to the unskilled occupations; they include the dead-hour mill shifts, the state-owned transit systems and nationalized hospitals, which pay some of the lowest salaries in Britain.

England has not one colored policeman, fireman or member of Parliament, and the BBC has only just hired its first Negro reporter; but 40% of the interns, orderlies and nonprofessional workers in Britain's hospitals are colored, 17% of the nurses' aides, and from 20% to 40% of the bus and underground employees in London and Birmingham. On the plus side, West Indian cricket stars have played in English professional leagues, while the fad for American-style (and Negro-based) rock 'n' roll has helped make sultry Shirley Bassey, daughter of an English mother and a Jamaican father, one of the top two or three British women singers.

Problems for "the blacks" are most noticeable in residential neighborhoods. Though their children attend unsegregated schools, they are often last in line for the cities' already desperately overcrowded public housing, barred from private apartments and boardinghouses by "No Colored" signs, and forced to pay rates of up to 10% on mortgages for private houses. The dark million cluster in overcrowded, rundown Victorian neighborhoods in and around London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Bradford, where they sometimes make up 20% or 30% of the population. In London districts marked by proper English names such as Blenheim Crescent or Henry Dickens Court, the air reeks with curry and saris crowd the pavements, while other alleys are lined with Moslem butcher shops, Urdu movie houses, West Indian fish stands and Sikh temples. Behind the seamy house-fronts, brightened, Caribbean-style, with mauve, yellow and blue paint, crowded weekend beer parties set the nights alive with calypso melodies, steel drums, and some nasty fights.

Into Politics. White neighbors complain that the "nig-nogs, wogs, wallah-wallahs and coolies" use their milk bottles for chamberpots (and then return the empties), spit in the streets, and boost the crime rate. Many local police disagree. In Manchester, says Deputy Chief Constable William J. Richards, coloreds actually commit fewer offenses in proportion to their numbers than whites, though they are more often related to dope and prostitution, and thus more likely to hit headlines. "As a police problem," says Richards, "they are no more noticeable than the Irish were 25 years ago."