Race Relations Act 1965

The Race Relations Act 1965 was drafted by the Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice. Its purpose was to ban discrimination ‘on racial grounds in places of public resort’. The Act was in response to the racism faced by Commonwealth immigrants, who had migrated to Britain in increasing numbers after the Second World War, despite the introduction of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. Notable events which catalysed the implementation of the Act included the Notting Hill riots (1958) and Bristol bus boycotts (1963).

Following the passage of the Race Relations Act, a Race Relations Board was set up in 1966. The Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), which had suggested several amendments to the original Act, lobbied for the Board’s introduction to create a place where victims could take their cases of discrimination. The Board organized seven regional committees across the UK, which would handle local cases. These committees were conciliatory and worked on assurances by the perpetrator that they would not discriminate again. If regional committees could not resolve a case, it would be escalated to the Race Relations Board. The first chair of the Race Relations Board was Mark Bonham Carter, who travelled to the US to learn more about the efficacy of conciliation in promoting anti-discrimination and positive community relations.

The Race Relations Act 1965 was significantly limited in its scope, which activists criticized. A. Sivanandan argued that the Act, in forbidding discrimination solely in places of public resort, made discrimination more prevalent in housing and employment. Moreover, he argued that in penalizing racial hatred, the Act was more useful for imprisoning racialized minority people and right-wing extremists rather than powerful political figures such as Enoch Powell and Ronald Bell QC, a Conservative politician who was an active member of the Conservative Monday Club, which opposed non-white immigration. The Guyanese civil rights activist Roy Sawh, for example, was arrested for inciting racial hatred during his speeches at Speakers’ Corner under the Race Relations Act and was sentenced to an eight-month jail sentence in 1967.

Subsequent Acts in 1968 and 1976 strengthened the Race Relations Act by outlawing racism in employment, housing, education and services.