Dark strangers: sociological study of the absorption of a recent west Indian migrant group in Brixton, South London

This book has been such a long time in the writing that it virtually spans the whole period of unrestricted, large-scale immigration from the West Indies to Britain that ended with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962.

Such was far from being my original intention. The book's genesis was in a two-year research project carried out under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Little between late 1955 and early 1958, when I was a member of the staff of the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh.

The project's main purpose was to round out the set of studies of race relations in Britain already carried out by Dr. Little and by his colleagues or students with a field-research study of what was then a new situation that created by the presence of a large group of coloured working-class migrants in a central, urban industrial area in this country. Brixton was chosen as the area for field study as being more 'typical' of such situations up and down the country than such areas of social anomie and chaos as parts of Paddington and North Kensington. Although the latter area was to achieve world wide notoriety in the late summer of 1958 as the scene of the Notting Hill 'race riots', it was and still is in areas like Brixton that the important long-term processes and problems of immigrant-host adaptation and acceptance are, with certain local variations, being worked out.

For although this inquiry was originally envisaged in terms of white-coloured relationships, the preliminary findings soon caused it to develop into a study of immigrant-host relations, with colour as one only of a number of major factors involved in the various pro cesses of absorption. The basic field material was collected in the appointed period, but the processes of absorption continued inexor ably, and coloured Commonwealth immigration grew into one of the major political issues of recent times. This made it difficult to cut the inquiry off tidily, particularly as I remained in contact with the local situation through many Brixtonians and West Indian settlers, and with the general issues through my work at the Institute of Race Relations. Additional material has therefore been added and the final major revision of the text was made in late 1961, with the exception of the Postscript dealing with social action, which was rewritten after the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in April 1962.