Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD)

In December 1964 the American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr stopped in London to meet with anti-racist activists and organizers, ahead of his trip to Stockholm where he would accept the Nobel Peace Prize. The meeting, which was organized by the Trinidadian author and pacifist Marion Glean, inspired the creation of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), whose founding members included the Grenadian doctor and politician David Pitt – who would chair CARD – and prominent South Asian academics Dipak Nandy and Hamza Alavi. It became ‘an organization of organizations’ and represented several anti-discrimination groups, including the Indian Workers’ Association and the National Federation of Pakistani Associations. Its founding meeting was held on 10 January 1965.

CARD lobbied the government to implement anti-racist and anti-discrimination legislation to protect the rights of racialized minority groups in Britain. This became particularly necessary given the racist and xenophobic sentiments expressed by politicians who were attempting to appeal to white working-class voters, as exemplified by the Smethwick election of 1964. CARD played an important role in shaping the Race Relations Act of 1965, the first legislation to ‘prohibit discrimination on racial grounds in places of public resort’ and ‘to penalise incitement to racial hatred’. Anthony Lester, a barrister and founding member of CARD – who would later become a founding member of the Institute of Race Relations and Runnymede Trust – drafted a ‘green document’ which included several amendments to the original Race Relations Bill authored by Labour Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice. The original bill contained punitive measures to tackle discrimination, such as fines and jail sentences. CARD, instead, fought for the introduction of a Race Relation Board and regional committees where victims of discrimination could take their complaints. These peace-making measures were inspired by the actions of the American civil rights organization the NAACP.

However, the Race Relations Act of 1965 had significant limits, particularly regarding discrimination in housing and employment. CARD therefore worked with the anti-racist immigration lawyer Ian McDonald to lobby for the expansion of the Race Relations Act.

In 1965 David Pitt and Hamza Alavi, who favoured working with the government to create anti-discrimination policies, left CARD to join the newly founded government-funded National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI). CARD was dissolved in 1968, primarily because the inclusion of middle-class white liberals in the organization alienated racialized minority and working-class members who often turned to the Black Power Movement instead, which was gaining traction by the late 1960s. Moreover, their alignment with the Labour Party created distrust amongst Black and South Asian members. The founding members of CARD continued their anti-discrimination activism. Dipak Nandy, for example, became the first director of the anti-racist think-tank, the Runnymede Trust.