ABSTRACT
The US experience in the civil rights movement and in the whole area of black and ‘third world’ politics is worth remembering in any short treatment of the importance of alliances and coalitions in the achievement of goals by black groups in the United Kingdom. Alliances and coalitions work best if like is working with like. Efforts to build alliances in race relations has so often been made by whites who have felt concerned about immigration policies, police misconduct – civil libertarians in the main. The local community relations councils were from their inception officially sponsored alliances. They were in that regard premature, it is easy now to see from hindsight. The ‘sus’ campaign could have succeeded because it is a much more discreet target than ‘police brutality’. White liberal opinion has slowly learned that it has lost the right to be the vanguard of the march towards racial justice.
