……...
Joan: I was very fortunate that I was brought up in a home where my parents believed in the Lord. I was baptised before I came into this country - what I mean is the personal baptism, in water, 1962. I came into this country, left on the 10th of October, arrived on the 11th of October and tried to settle down but settling down was very very difficult in those days because only in the big conurbations did you find quite a few black people. And one of the things that the black people had to do between the 50s and the 60s was to buy their own houses. One chap in whose house I lived, he told me that he drove his truck from Birmingham to London each week, slept in his truck, until he had the money to buy the house. When you bought a house you bought it cash - at least black people bought their houses cash.
Ryan: Why was that?
Joan: Because there were… I don't know if there were mortgages in that time, but certainly mortgages would not have been given to the black people. So you went into the place, they looked at you, they looked you up and down and they might not want to sell you the house - whatever - but if you had the money. And he paid 5K for his house and this house was in Tottenham and then he rented it out to different people - something like the HMOs that you have now. One of the things that came out of this living was the black landlords will not allow white people into their houses and the white people who lived near to them very soon as soon as they knew that a black family moved in the white people put up their houses to sell to move out because they didn't want to live next to black people.So those were the kinds of images that you had.
Ryan: We would call it “white flight”, I think is what in the US it was called. Was it that same concept?
Joan: It is that same concept that they…there was no official segregation in the country. The government did not segregate the people.The government brought the people from the West Indies over so that they could work in the industries that had lost quite a lot of people during the war.
Ryan: WW2 - because of people who had died?
Joan: The government itself went out to the West Indies and recruited people, and the first set of people who came were the ones who had been here between ’40 and ’45 for the wars - the men - and so they came back. Those were the first ones but they came back to difference - when they were here first and they were fighting in the war they were doing something and the people didn't make an exception to them because it was the war.
Ryan: War has a unifying element doesn't it?
Joan: Yeah, and after that the people just didn't want them around. Very few people wanted them around. And so these young men who came - returnees to a certain extent - found it very difficult to get places to live. Work was there. In London it was London Transport. In the country it was nurses and people in the hospitals. It would be the lowest of the jobs that they could get, but it was work. But when you wanted to find a place to live, that was the difference. People would spit on you. People would write things on their houses like “No niggers. No Irish. No dogs.” and they would actually look out of the door if somebody knocked on the door and if they saw it was a black person they would turn the sign around to say “No vacancies.” So that was life.
The money that you were receiving was very small, extremely small. When I started in London Underground for instance, I don't think I was getting as much as £6.00 a week. And out of that £6.00 a week you paid tax and what we call national insurance now, and you still have to pay your rent blah blah blah. But before I started in London Transport I worked at a place that was called Micah and Micah Knight and it was in Barnsbury Square. If you can find Barnsbury Square on the map, this is north London, then you can see I was living in Highbury and walking to Barnsbury Square. It was a nice walk. It was a cold walk because this was October. Nevertheless, it wasn’t…when you're 19 you don't see those things.
But the very first Sunday that I was in this country I went to church.
Ryan: So what day did you arrive in this country?
Joan : I arrived on the Friday.
Ryan: OK.
Joan: My friend took me out on the Saturday to buy a coat.
Ryan: Ah - you’d need one of those.
Joan: To buy a plate. Bought a plate, a cup, a saucer, a knife, a spoon, and a fork. So my own stuff.
Ryan: So all the necessities.
Joan: Yes. And a coat. Because on the 12th of October, it was cold to me.
Ryan: What were you used to?
Joan: If you were coming from a place where it's 28 degrees most times…So the weather was against me, however.
Ryan: So it was probably, what, 15 or 10 or something?
Joan: To me it was minus!
Ryan: Right, right.
Joan: How it felt on me.
Ryan: Brilliant!
Joan: Anyhow, on the first Sunday I wanted to go to church, which I expected to do. So I left the house where I was staying, walked up to the main road, turned left and there was a church at the corner. I went into the church and sat at the back because I didn't know anybody. And I was… I can't say I enjoyed the service because I didn't understand much of it because it wasn't the type of church that I was accustomed to. However, at the end of the service the pastor came down the aisle and stood in the front and he shook the hands of the people who'd been in the church.
And when he came to me, or I came to him, he held out his hand, shook it, and said “It was very kind of you to come, but it's no necessity because we can pray for you.”
Ryan: So…
Joan: No need to come again. Well…
Ryan: That’s just breathtaking isn’t it?
That's why I understood that the people in the house where I was living - and these were Guyanese people - that's when I understood why they didn't go to church because they were not…they probably tried themselves and it was not made very friendly for them to go to church.
And one of the things that I saw in London in the first years that I lived there, that they had very few people in church and the people who were in the church were white people and the people who were in the church were old people. And it might be just that generation that, because the pastors had to be careful with their congregationalists, whatever you…whatever word they use...I cannot tell you whether it was an English church or Irish church or whatever but it just was a place… that might be the reason why the older people didn't want to sit in pews with people who were a different colour or whatever. I don't know. That's all I can say. I don't know. But it took me about three months to get to a church because I had, I sent a letter to my own pastor at home and my pastor sent back a letter to tell me and gave me an invitation where I could go to church. I went to church at Cholmeley Hall and that is up in Archway. OK?
OK. OK!
……...
But is it OK? The decidedly unchristian - indeed, Anti-Christ - behaviour Joan experienced was directed at many of her predecessors and peers. In further conversation with her, she believes this sort of xenophobia is responsible for the death of many churches in the UK, as the people God brought to our country in his providence - people who could have been consistent and strengthening presences of light in their communities and life in the churches - were rejected. Rejected by the very gatherings of people to whom the Spirit-empowered author of Hebrews writes: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2)! Joan also thinks this shabby treatment set into motion a chain of reactions that has damaged the black community in London, and elsewhere. Racism in the churches disheartened the older generation. It disillusioned their children, some of whom stopped going to church altogether. It displaced their grandchildren, who are culturally homeless - despite being third and fourth generation in the country, they are still regarded as ‘not really from here’ - and spiritually orphaned, so seek connections in other ways: some by chasing the Prosperity gospel, others joining cults like Nation of Islam or Black Hebrew Israelites, others joining gangs that can lead to them being stabbed up and bleeding out in the streets. To contemplate on sinful act of rejection’s potential reverberations on countless human souls is horrifying. How might our history be different, if we had been different?
And this is still happening, though perhaps not always as brazenly. It is foolish to think, as some, that such racist behaviours are no longer present in the UK or even in our churches. Some would smugly dismiss any notion of there being much of a racism problem at all in the UK with the favourite line, “Racism is more of an American problem. Classism is the British problem.”. This is demonstrably false.
Since the land of my birth was mentioned though, and since I am an equal opportunity offender, I fear for those white-majority churches in the USA who have unacknowledged and undealt-with residual prejudices, implicit biases, and racist behaviours, or who let members persist therein undisciplined. Just yesterday, I read of a church that could not hire a black pastor because a racist campaign among a minority of church members kept the congregation from reaching the constitutionally recognised super majority threshold. If the churches of America, regardless of how “sound” their theology and how “consistent” and “principled” their ecclesiology and missiology, do not welcome the stranger, love and help the migrant and the refugee regardless of legal documentation, care for the socially disadvantaged or deprived, and worship, serve, and follow people of other colours and cultures, then their country chapels will be abandoned and dilapidated, their urban buildings will become museums, business centers, or apartment complexes, and their vast campuses will become the shopping complexes and amusement centres of tomorrow. The light will not go out - Jesus will snuff it out - and the life will have left long ago with the people who were turned away, talked down to, or tokenised till they walked away.
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