Vox Pops on Black Police Officers

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Vox Pops on Black Police Officers (ATV Today)

Media Archive for Central England
1966-02-08
Sound
3m

Black police officers? What a ridiculous idea! Attitudes from England's colonial past linger on in the Midlands of the 1960s.

Reg Harcourt gauges views from a Midlands street about a then controversial issue: ethnicity within the police force. It may be a surprising fact for modern viewers, but the total number of paid black and Asian police officers in Britain when this was filmed in February 1966 was zero! No matter how outdated and jarring the views may be to modern sensibilities this seemingly disposable news items provides us with a reminder of how far we have travelled.

Mohamet Yusuf Daar joined the Coventry police force on 15 March 1966 becoming, in the language of the day, the first 'coloured police officer'. Daar was born in Kenya of Asian heritage and had previously been an inspector with the police force in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Norwell Roberts, originally from the Leeward Islands, joined the Metropolitan Police in 1967. Another early trailblazer was Astley Lloyd Blair who was an unpaid special constable in Gloucestershire from January 1964.

Black Lives

Portraits of public and private lives against the shifting social climate of 20th century Britain.

Black communities, like many Global majority groups, have long been ill-served by a mainstream British media accustomed to reflecting predominantly white, middle-class lives - a problem entrenched in the second half of the 20th century with the rise of television. Yet a rich tapestry of work from across the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, film and TV, made for (though not always by) black people, does exist. This selection contains many surprises – some joyous, some sobering, some heartbreaking – and highlights the often painfully slow progress in addressing negative representations and stereotypes on screen. Impassioned and sometimes violent dispatches from the front line in the fight for racial equality can be found here, but so too can records of progress: in the pioneers breaking new ground in culture, politics and sport, and in the more mundane glimpses of everyday life. And this story is not just London’s story: the selection takes a journey around Britain, to a Nigerian wedding in 1960s Cornwall, an ‘African village’ in Essex and a Caribbean restaurant opening in West Bromwich; Newcastle