R0JEMN Police try to hold back Beatles Fans. Photograph: Album/Alamy
In February 1965, the civil rights activist Malcolm X visited Smethwick, in the Midlands, where the Conservative-run council was planning to buy up houses to stop the area becoming a “coloured ghetto”. He wanted to see how bad the racism was and he experienced it first-hand when refused service in a pub. White residents thought his visit a “disgusting” intrusion. Nine days later, back in the US, he was shot dead.
Britain in the mid-60s is associated with Carnaby Street, the Beatles and miniskirts, not racism. But what Black people endured, from a colour bar on property to the abuse of Leeds United winger Albert Johanneson as a “golliwog”, is no less a period marker than Harold Wilson’s pipe, Twiggy’s haircut, Mary Whitehouse’s clean-up TV campaign and Bob Dylan’s use of an electric guitar. David Kynaston doesn’t underplay the excitements of the period. But he rightly emphasises that the rotten old 50s – patriarchal, homophobic, class-divided and bigoted – wouldn’t just fade away.
