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The Bristol Bus Boycott should be remembered as a pivotal campaign that challenged racial discrimination in Britain, as we witness the Windrush generation face renewed challenges.

In the spring of 1963, Guy Bailey applied for a job at the Bristol Omnibus Company. There were plenty of vacancies advertised only the day before, however, when he arrived he was told they were not hiring. It was not a big leap to assume that he would have been offered a job if it wasn’t for the colour of his skin.

Most black people at the time were fully aware of the existence of a colour bar, which excluded black people from employment, housing, social venues and other places where white people congregated. Even when they got together in groups to discuss their mistreatment, socialise and express their culture peacefully, the law treated them with suspicion and they were regularly harassed by law enforcement (see the Mangrove Nine case).

Guy too knew that the colour bar existed within the Bristol Omnibus Company itself. He, along with Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans, Prince Brown and Paul Stephenson, formed a group called the West Indian Development Council (WIDC), an action group that fought against discrimination in the work place. They endeavoured to find hard evidence that the colour bar, a clear act of discrimination, existed in the Bristol Omnibus Company – and that’s when he applied for a job.

With the rejection of Guy’s application, they had their proof. In April 1963, Paul Stephenson got the WIDC to call for a boycott of Bristol buses. The boycott, which lasted three months was supported by both black and white people, who saw the overt injustice of the colour bar.

But how did Britain get to this point? At the end of the Second World War, Britain was financially depleted due to six years of warfare and it was in need of rebuilding. The working population in Britain had reduced drastically; the total workforce was said to have dropped by 1.38 million between 1945 and 1946. This was due to a number of factors, including the retirement of an ageing workforce and the migration of workers to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, countries that were also actively trying to rebuild their economies following the war. Britain needed workers.

In 1948, The Empire Windrush, a boat on its way from Australia to the UK, docked in Kingston, Jamaica. While the boat was docked, an advert placed in a Jamaican newspaper offered migrants cheap fares for anyone who wanted to work in Britain. As such, the first wave of migrants arrived in Tilbury Essex in June 1948 and included not only Caribbean’s, but also members of the RAF, Polish nationals displaced by World War Two, and people from Mexico, Gibraltar and Burma. Caribbean immigrants thought that they were coming to a country that wanted them, that needed them, and that could provide them with the opportunities that they lacked in their own country.

By 1960, in Bristol alone, there were about 1,000 African-Caribbean migrants and this tripled to 3,000 in 1962. Almost half of the immigrants were highly skilled workers and had excellent qualifications. Yet they were forced to take jobs that the local population considered undesirable and demeaning, or jobs that demanded they worked anti-social hours. Even though they were abused and treated poorly, they were still willing to take these jobs.

In the 1986 book Black and White on the Buses, Jessie Hood wrote: “Fear of increasing unemployment has made many English people more conscious of the presence of coloured people. Many white people who had a ‘live and let live’ attitude to coloured people (earlier) are now asking why coloured people should be allowed to come into this country and are showing hostility when speaking about coloured people although not necessarily when speaking to coloured people.”

Racial discrimination grew. Stories of the number of attacks and abuse based on the colour of someone’s skin became rife within the black and Asian communities. The correlation between racism and the economic downturn had never been so obvious. As a result of public opinion, and fearing the mass influx of non-white immigrants to Britain, the government attempted to revoke the commitments made in the Act of 1948 and passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which tried to stop the future rights of entry to Commonwealth citizens. Many considered that a direct bar – an attack in fact – on people of colour. The Windrush generation were, therefore, rejected by the country that promised to welcome them as Commonwealth citizens.

Ian Patey, the general manager of the Bristol Omnibus Company, attempted to justify his company’s enforcement of a colour bar by stating, “We don’t employ a mixed labour force as bus crews, because we found from observing other bus companies that the labour supply gets worse if the labour force is mixed.”

He continued: “A company may gain 15 coloured persons and lose through prejudice 30 white people who decide they would sooner not work with coloured people.”

Of course there were no such observations in other bus companies and his arguments were unfounded, but this fear of the black worker replacing white workers was prevalent amongst white English people at the time and was used to justify the colour bar.

The boycott by Guy Bailey and the WIDC ended on 28 August 1963 when, after lengthy negotiations, Bristol Omnibus Company agreed to employ black workers. Three weeks later, Raghbir Singh became the first non-white bus conductor employed by the Bristol Omnibus Company.

A few years later, the United Kingdom passed the Race Relations Act of 1965 which finally made it illegal to discriminate against black people in the workplace. The role of the Bristol Bus Boycott in helping achieve this should not be forgotten.

Although the colour bar was removed, obstacles for black people working in the UK still remain. The Racism at Work Survey, published in March 2018, states that of the 500 people surveyed, 70% of ethnic minority workers have experienced some racial discrimination at work, while 60% have experienced unfair treatment at work related to their race.

The Windrush generation are also still feeling the rejection of a nation that feigned acceptance and inclusion to get them here in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. In 2010, arrivals from Caribbean countries were threatened with deportation due to the Home Office destroying thousands of landing cards, which recorded their arrival to Britain. Although the British government have said that the Windrush generation has a right to remain, this is another brutal blow to the black people who helped rebuild a nation in one of its darkest hours. Rather than threaten them with deportation, the government should be doing everything they can to make amends for the abuse, prejudice, violence and degradation that they have suffered since arriving on these shores. And we, as individuals, must never forget the impact that the Bristol Boycott and the power of collective action can make when we feel the injustices of our situation.