The Politics of the Race Relations Act 1976

Abstract

My involvement with the vexed problems of racial injustice, bigotry and intolerance began long before 1976. My involvement was shaped by my origins and experience: by the nightmares of a fortunate British Jew who escaped the Nazi Holocaust only by the accident of birth in Britain; by English anti-Semitism; by revulsion at the Sharpeville massacre and indignation at apartheid in South Africa; by two profoundly influential years in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s, witnessing the heroism of the civil rights movement in using non-violent action to overcome racist oppression in the Deep South; by observing the intractable patterns of racial discrimination and disadvantage in the cities of the Northern States; and by exploring the benefits and the limitations of constitutional guarantees of leral equality.