“Standard Transatlantic Practice”: Race Relations and Antidiscrimination Law across the Atlantic

Abstract

Abstract By the mid-1960s, many liberals in Britain looked to the American civil rights movement with a sense of awe and apprehension. On the one hand, British race relations professionals admired the progress of civil rights work and attempted to comprehend its applications to British society. On the other hand, some worried that British racial integration was regressing, as the arrival of former Commonwealth subjects at the end of empire stirred severely conservative opposition. This article examines how British race relations authorities spawned transatlantic networks of legal information and comparative analyses of civil liberties struggles in light of American and Canadian experience. It focuses on the construction of antidiscrimination law in Britain between 1965 and 1968, a key period when the Race Relations Board (RRB) first enacted its charge of providing equal opportunity for leisure in “places of public resort” and pushed for an extension of legislation to cover housing, education, and employment. In drawing on the expertise of state antidiscrimination bodies in New York, Toronto, and elsewhere, the RRB built shared networks of mutual support, developed critical commentary on integration projects, and exchanged legal advice to prevent racism and discrimination against Britons of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent. An analysis of these interactions expands efforts to map the topographies of notions of civil rights outside America. It also exposes an episode in postwar British history where British liberals called on transatlantic ties to reflect on their own racial politics and attempted to battle discrimination with adapted American legal strategies.