ABSTRACT
The period of the 1940s was a crucial one in the history of Black immigration to Britain and the resulting political response from the indigenous society. While Braithwaite’s argument contains some element of truth, the real issue lay in the fact that British society had been left politically ill-equipped through its experience of empire to handle a race relations situation within its own boundaries. The loss of control by the administrative apparatus over the mobility of Black labour as wartime controls became relaxed, and the political constraints over direct control of immigration through fear of political reaction in the colonial context, constricted government policy by the early 1950s. In comparison with the Black seamen who had settled in the years after the First World War, the West Indian recruits imported in the early 1940s exhibited a fairly high degree of political awareness.
