The Economic Development of the World: Part 6

Jamaican Flag

The British African Caribbean Connection

British African Caribbean (or Afro-Caribbean) people are residents of the United Kingdom who are of West Indian background and whose ancestors were primarily indigenous to Africa. As immigration to the United Kingdom from Africa increased in the 1990s, the term has sometimes been used to include UK residents solely of African origin, or as a term to define all Black British residents, though the phrase "African andCaribbean" has more often been used to cover such a broader grouping. The most common and traditional use of the term African-Caribbean community is in reference to groups of residents' continuing aspects ofCaribbean culture, customs and traditions in the United Kingdom.

A majority of the African-Caribbean population in the UK is of Jamaican origin; other notable representation is from Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia,Dominica, Montserrat, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana (which although located on theSouth American mainland is culturally similar to the Caribbean and was historically considered to be part of the British West Indies), and Belize.

African-Caribbean people are present throughout the United Kingdom with by far the largest concentrations inLondon and Birmingham. Significant communities also exist in other population centers, notably Manchester,Bradford, Nottingham, Coventry, Luton, High Wycombe, Leicester, Bristol, Gloucester, Leeds, Huddersfield,Sheffield, Liverpool and Cardiff. In these cities, the community is traditionally associated with a particular area, such as Brixton, Harlesden, Stonebridge, Dalston, Sutton, Lewisham, Tottenham, Peckham in London, West Bowling and Heaton in Bradford, Chapeltown in Leeds, St. Paul’s in Bristol, or Handsworth and Aston in Birmingham or Moss Side in Manchester. According to the 2011 census, the largest number of African-Caribbeans are found in Croydon, south London.

British African-Caribbeans have an extremely high rate of mixed-race relationships, and could in effect become the first UK ethnic group to "disappear". Half of all British African-Caribbean men in a relationship have partners of a different ethnic background, as do one-third of all British African-Caribbean women. As of the 2011 census, over 1 million people are of African-Caribbean origin in total.

From the 16th century to the 19th century, enslaved Africans were shipped by European slave traders toBritish colonies in the Caribbean and British North America, as well as French, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, andPortuguese colonies. New World slavery was originally focused on the extraction of gold and other precious raw materials. Africans were then later set to work on the vast cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations in the Americas for the economic benefit of these colonial powers and their plantocracy. One impact of theAmerican Revolution was the differing historical development of African-American and African-Caribbean people. There are records of small communities in the ports of Cardiff, Liverpool, London and South Shieldsdating back to the mid-18th century. These communities were formed by freed slaves following the abolition of slavery. Typical occupations of the early migrants were footmen or coachmen.

The growing Caribbean presence in the British military led to approximately 15,000 migrants arriving in the North-West of England around the time of the First World War to work in munitions factories.

The Jamaican poet and communist activist, Claude McKay came to England following the First World War and became the first Black British journalist, writing for the Workers' Dreadnought.

Building the  Panama Canal

The decade-long American effort to construct the Panama Canal, tens of thousands of laborers were Blacks from the United States, Central and South America as well as the islands of the Caribbean.

Panama Canal Museum

Canal laborers head to work

worked, sacrificed, and died while building the largest canal the world had seen to date. Combating harsh terrain, disease, and deplorable living conditions, workers from around the world held a variety of different jobs in the canal zone, their pay and quality of life often directly related to their ethnicity.

Long before the U.S. attempt at building the Panama Canal began in 1904, workers from around the world had been coming to the isthmus. In the early 1850s, the Panama Railroad Company imported thousands of African and Chinese workers to lay the tracks for the railway lines that would make the construction of the Panama Canal possible. Most would die from malaria or suicide.

Throughout both the building of the Panama Railroad in the 1850s and the French excavation 30 years later, workers from Jamaica were recruited heavily. In 1881, French recruiter Charles Gadpaille ran advertisements throughout Jamaica, offering wages much higher than average on the Caribbean island. The campaign showed the "Colón Man," a Jamaican who had gone to work in Panama, returning to his home country a rich and prosperous man. This ideal caught on quickly in the largely working-class country, and drove a huge migration of Jamaicans to Panama in the latter half of the 19th century. But the promise of riches was an empty one: in reality, West Indians earned $0.10 an hour and the work was treacherous. During the eight-year French excavation period, of the more than 20,000 workers who died, most were West Indians. Strikes proved fruitless, as there were always more men eager to take the jobs. Despite the heavy recruitment of laborers from the West Indies, Colombia, and Cuba, only one in five workers stayed on the job longer than a year.

The U.S. Gathers a Workforce
When the United States announced its plan to build in Panama, promises of grandeur breathed fresh life into workers recruited to the area. "You here who are doing your work well in bringing to completion this great enterprise are standing exactly as a soldier of the few great wars of the world's history," Teddy Roosevelt announced to workers during his trip to Panama in 1906. "This is one of the great works of the world."

In December of that year, two years into the project, there were already more than 24,000 men working on the Panama Canal. Within five years, the number had swelled to 45,000. These workers were not all from the United States, but from Panama, the West Indies, Europe, and Asia.

The base of the workforce, however, once again came from the West Indies. After experiencing the empty promises of the French in the 1880s, most Jamaican workers were unwilling to try their luck on the American canal project, and so in 1905 recruiters turned their attention to the island of Barbados. West Indian labor was cheaper than American or European labor, and a West Indian worker was eager to believe a rags-to-riches tale spun by a recruiter. The "Colón Man" was reborn as representatives from Panama boasted of a rewarding work contract, including free passage to Panama and a repatriation option after 500 working days. By the end of the year, 20 percent of the 17,000 canal workers were Barbadian.

Panama Canal Museum

Laborers from Barbados arrive on the isthmus

West Indians recruited with promises of wealth and success confronted a very different reality upon arrival at the Isthmus. The dense and untamed jungle that covered the 50 miles between coasts was filled with deadly snakes. The venom of the coral snake attacked the nervous system, and a bite from the ten-foot mapana snake caused internal bleeding and organ degeneration. The rainy season, which lasted from May to November, kept workers perpetually wet and coated in mud.

Initially, accommodations for canal employees provided little protection against the wet weather or jungle life. The Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) housed most workers in dilapidated barracks built two decades earlier by the French. Some employees opted instead to pay for rent in one of the two coastal cities, although options there were not much better. Others who could not find housing near their work site pitched tents or lived in old boxcars or barns.

Library of Congress

Spanish workers shovel by hand

The living conditions exacerbated the poor hygiene in the area, and newcomers quickly learned about the serious threat of disease on what was dubbed "Fever Coast." Smallpox, pneumonia, typhoid, dysentry, hookworm, cutaneous infections, and even the bubonic plague infected workers throughout the American excavation period, but yellow fever was the most treacherous ailment, both physically and mentally. Just the mention of an outbreak caused such panic that defection rates were higher than mortality from the disease itself. 

Experts predicted that yellow fever would kill hundreds of workers each year. Malaria, while less lethal, was more common. A strain of the disease called "Chagres Fever" led to jaundice, coma, and severe internal hemorrhaging. Even more damaging was its ability to recur after a patient had recovered. Statistics on illness among workers were staggering: in 1906 alone 80% of the total workforce was hospitalized for malaria.

As work on the canal entered its second year, the death toll for laborers was four percent and 22,000 were hospitalized. Every evening, a train traveled to Mount Hope Cemetery by the city of Colón, its cars brimming with coffins, forcing the men to confront the great odds against their survival.

U.S. citizens were used sparingly in Panama because they were both disease-prone and demanded higher wages. In North America, however, the transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869 and produced many U.S. workers adept at rail jobs: switchmen, signalmen, locomotive drivers, mechanics, electrical engineers, and foremen. Skilled U.S. laborers came to the canal with the promise of a generous pay package that included free benefits and services, 42 paid vacation days and 30 days paid sick leave -- much more than the majority of West Indian canal workers could expect.

The local Panamanian citizens were initially tapped as a logical and cheap source of unskilled labor. Though more resistant to yellow fever than the foreign workers, locals proved to be equally susceptible to malaria and pneumonia. Worse, local laborers suspicious of Americans' power-grabbing ambitions did not prove to be the most enthusiastic workers, earning them a reputation as lazy and irresponsible. Open hostility between workers ultimately added to Panamanians' dissatisfaction, and they did not make up a large percentage of the work force.

Unequal Treatment

The apartheid system governed every aspect of a worker's life. The distinction began as a division between "skilled" and "unskilled" laborers, but as time passed it evolved into a purely racial divide. Skilled employees went on the Gold Roll and were paid in gold coins. These workers earned paid sick and vacation time and were housed in better accommodations than their unskilled counterparts. Those on the Silver Roll, the unskilled workers, were paid in balboas, or local Panamanian silver. West Indian workers, plentiful in numbers and eager to work, could be paid 10 cents an hour -- half of the salary of a European or white U.S. worker. 

Over time, the Gold Roll became comprised of white U.S. citizens exclusively, while the workers on the Silver Roll, by far the majority of the workforce by the end of the construction period, were largely non-white.

Discrimination extended to living quarters!

National Archives

Living quarters for West Indians in Cristobal

made available to each group of workers. Barracks were distinctly worse for West Indians than for whites; as many as 72 West Indian men lived in a 50- by 30-foot hut. Mess halls for black workers had no tables or chairs and fed up to 8,000 men a day with unappealing, simple food. Inadequate housing and malnutrition made West Indian workers more vulnerable to injury and disease. Hospitals on the isthmus routinely located their black wards in the worst parts of the buildings. While the average death rate in 1906 was around 4% of the whole labor force, the rate for West Indian workers was closer to 5%.

In stark contrast, white workers had a luxurious life in the canal zone. The dismal quality of life in the first years of construction on the Panama Canal had sent American workers away in droves. When the turnover rate of skilled U.S. laborers reached 75% in the summer of 1905, the ICC realized they needed to create incentives for Americans to stay on the isthmus. One of the first projects was building a new cold-storage unit to keep fresh, perishable foods. Then, the ICC set to work improving the living conditions. In 1906, 2,500 structures were either renovated or built new, including two-story family homes that featured screened-in verandas, modern plumbing, and electricity.

Panama Canal Commission

The ICC Band

A year later, American workers celebrated Independence Day on July 4, 1906 with games, athletic competitions, and dancing. This was the beginning of recreation in the canal zone. Baseball leagues, social clubs, and fraternal organizations sprang up to fill lazy Sundays. By that winter, the canal zone had paved roads, warehouses, dormitories, and dining halls.

Attractive enticements to keep white workers on the isthmus became the norm. New cottage homes, public schools, churches and bakeries opened in towns and camps along the route of the canal. Bachelor "hotels," built to house single workers, turned into social gathering places filled with noise and smoke.

Library of Congress

The ICC Hotel Tivoli at Ancon

YMCA clubhouses charged Gold Roll employees $10 a year for access to bowling lanes, billiards tables, chess boards, and a host of organized social events. In 1911, workers published a yearbook titled The Makers of the Panama Canal that contained biographies of selected employees and pictures of clubs and brotherhoods on the isthmus. By 1913, there were dances and band concerts every Sunday, and nine women's clubs.

White workers were encouraged to bring their wives and families to the isthmus with increasingly extravagant incentives. Housing for married workers was provided rent-free, and homes increased in luxury according to a worker's place on the pay scale. In 1908, over 1,000 families were living on the isthmus and the ICC was spending $2.5 million a year for entertainment and games for white workers.

The ICC provided nothing, on the other hand, for the accommodation, provisions, or entertainment of Silver Roll employees.

Working in Great Britain

In February 1941 345 West Indian workers were brought to work in and around Liverpool. They were generally better skilled than the local Black British. There was also some tension between them and West Africans who had settled in the area.

Since World War II many African-Caribbean people migrated to North America and Europe, especially to theUnited States, Canada, the UK, France, and the Netherlands. As a result of the losses during the war, theBritish government began to encourage mass immigration from the countries of the British Empire andCommonwealth to fill shortages in the labor market. The 1948 British Nationality Act gave British citizenshipto all people living in Commonwealth countries, and full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. Many West Indians were attracted by better prospects in what was often referred to as the mother country.

There was plenty of work in post-war Britain and industries such as British Rail, the National Health Serviceand public transport recruited almost exclusively from Jamaica and Barbados. 

Though Afro-Caribbeans were encouraged to journey to Britain via immigration campaigns created by successive British governments, many new arrivals were to endure prejudice, intolerance and extreme racism from sectors of indigenous British society. This experience was to mark African-Caribbeans' relations with the wider community over a long period. Early African-Caribbean immigrants found private employment and housing denied to them on the basis of race. Trade unions would often not help African-Caribbean workers and some pubs, clubs, dance halls and churches would bar black people from entering. Housing was in short supply following the wartime bombing, and the shortage led to some of the first clashes with the established white community. Clashes continued and worsened into the 1950s, and riots erupted in cities including London, Birmingham andNottingham. In 1958, attacks in the London area of Notting Hill by white youths marred relations with West Indian residents, leading to the creation of the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which was initiated in 1959 as a positive response by the Caribbean community. Some of the racism and intolerance was stoked by explicitly fascist or anti-immigration movements including Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, the League of Empire Loyalists, the White Defense League, the National Labor Party and others. 

Influenced by this kind of propaganda, gangs of Teddy Boys would often attack blacks in London.

In 1962, Britain passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act restricting the entry of immigrants, and by 1972 only holders of work permits, or people with parents or grandparents born in the UK, could gain entry - effectively stemming most Caribbean immigration. Despite the restrictive measures, an entire generation of Britons with African-Caribbean heritage now existed, contributing to British society in virtually every field. The number of British persons born in the West Indies had increased from 15,000 in 1951 to 172,000 in 1961 to 304,000 in 1981. The total population of persons of West Indian heritage by 1981 was between 500,000 and 550,000, depending upon the official source used.

The 1970s and 1980s were decades of comparative turbulence in wider British society; industrial disputes preceded a period of deep recession and widespread unemployment which seriously affected the economically less prosperous African-Caribbean community. Societal racism, discrimination, poverty, powerlessness and oppressive policing sparked a series of riots in areas with substantial African-Caribbean populations. These "uprisings" (as they were described by some in the community) took place in St Paul’s in 1980, Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side in 1981, St Paul’s again in 1982, Notting Hill Gate in 1982, Toxteth in 1982, and Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham in 1985.

The riots had a profoundly unsettling effect on local residents, and led the then Home Secretary William Whitelaw to commission the Scarman report to address the root causes of the disturbances. The report identified both "racial discrimination" and a "racial disadvantage" in Britain, concluding that urgent action was needed to prevent these issues becoming an "endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society". The era saw an increase in attacks on Black people by white people. The Joint Campaign Against Racism committee reported that there had been more than 20,000 attacks on non-indigenous Britons including Britons of Asian origin during 1985.

The police response to the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence led to outcry and calls to investigate police conduct. The ensuing government inquiry, the Macpherson Report, concluded that there was institutional racism in the London Metropolitan Police Service.

Afro-Caribbeans have exhibited an increasing association with gun-crime, heightened by high profile murders, such as that of two young black women shot by black assailants outside a Birmingham hair salon in 2003. Several media outlets blamed a “gangster rap culture”, though Assistant Chief Constable Nick Tofiluk of theWest Midlands Police believed that the use of firearms is not an Afro-Caribbean issue alone, and has been on the rise throughout British society. Tensions between African-Caribbean residents and British Asians in a number of regions have led to confrontations, notably violent disturbances in Birmingham in 2005 where groups fought and rioted over two nights. There is also evidence of tensions between African-Caribbeans and African immigrants.

In 2009, 1.2% of British children under 16 were Black Caribbean and 1.1% were mixed white and black Caribbean. Among those children who were living with at least one Caribbean parent, only one in five were living with two Caribbean parents.