U.S. Negroes, Your Fight is Our Fight: Black Britons and the 1963 March on Washington

Abstract

This essay examines the diasporic character the 1963 March on Washington movement for Jobs and Freedom in Britain. In the months leading up to the march Black British activists and intellectuals closely followed events in Alabama, Mississippi and in towns and cities throughout the South as Black Americans organized sit-ins, boycotts, marches and other forms of mass protest demanding the rights of full citizenship guaranteed to them by the U.S. constitution. In addition to bearing witness to the struggles of Black Americans, Black Britons collectively organized in solidarity with the Black freedom movement in America and invoked the iconography and rhetoric of American racial (in)justice to articulate the dynamics shaping the local politics of race Britain. In doing so, I argue that by organizing events like the London solidarity march, Black Britons transformed the 1963 March on Washington into a type of discursive capital that wielded a powerful story about race, citizenship and the dilemmas of blackness that transcended the boundaries of the American nation and engendered the relations which constitute the (re)making of diaspora.