Originally published as part of our 2018 Black History Month Hidden Stories campaign
In Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, she draws a comparison between Rosa Parks’ Montgomery Bus Boycott and the lesser-known Bristol Bus Boycott, which took much place closer to home.
In 1963, youth worker Paul Stephenson and a small group called the West Indian Development Council launched a protest against the Bristol Omnibus Company for refusing to hire people of colour as bus crew. Inspired by Rosa Parks’ demonstration and clearly revealing the need for a British Civil Rights movement, the boycott lasted four months and successfully ended the unofficial race discrimination in the bus company.
The protest saw all of Bristol’s 3000-strong West Indian population boycott the bus service, many of whom would have fought in the Second World War for Great Britain. General manager of the Bristol Omnibus Company lamented that ‘the advent of coloured crews would mean a gradual falling off of white staff’, meanwhile Paul Stephenson was heavily criticized by trade unionists for aggravating the problem. As we have seen so many times in recent years, opposition tried to place the blame on the activists drawing attention to the injustice, instead of on the company enforcing a colour bar.
The boycott attracted support from students of Bristol University, who held a protest march to the bus station. Politicians such as Labour MP Tony Benn, future Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Trinidad’s High Commissioner Learie Constantine also condemned the bus service and the Transport and General Workers’ Union. On 27 August 1963, a meeting of 500 bus workers agreed to end the unofficial racial discrimination.
As Reni Eddo-Lodge points out, the Bristol Bus Boycott took place in the same year as Martin Luther King’s immortal ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. Black people were demanding equal rights on British soil in the same era as the American Civil Rights Movement. Yet the magnitude of the African American plight has come to eclipse that of Black Britons, obscuring the realities of deep-rooted racism during the 1950s and 1960s.
It is thought that the Bristol Bus Boycott influenced the first Race Relations Act in 1965, which was followed by the 1968 Act that extended the ban on discrimination to housing and employment. The efforts of Paul Stephenson OBE and other activists like him in our own campaign for civil rights are exemplar in Britain’s story of race relations.