Is Bob Marley Dead?
How a racist incident led me deeper into Black British history
“Bob Marley is dead”
What started as a muffled sound grew into a loud voice. These words pierced the protective sound barrier that my noise-canceling headphones usually provide as I make my daily commute around London.
“Bob Marley is dead”
The draw of a British accent I was not used to hearing around London kept bellowing from the bottom of the double-decker bus I was on.
I paused my music but kept my eyes fixed on the pages of the book I was reading.
I thought to myself “Who was this man talking to?”
My curiosity eventually took my attention away from the words of Johny Pitts’s Afropean: Notes from Black Europe and I looked around to see what was going on. I had broken the unspoken rule of the city commuter handbook–mind your business.
Like most major metropolitan cities in the world, London is filled with commuters taking public transportation who rarely engage with the world around them. It’s almost like the second you cross the borders of London, a veil of ignorance is placed on you. Only you can decide if or when to take it off. Most people keep it on. The veil makes it such that it’s incredibly difficult to come into eye contact with a stranger on the tube or the bus. Headphones on or not, sunglasses work or not, everyone is in their own world.
I get it. Everyone has things to do, places to be, problems to fix, and phones to look at. For the record, I don’t consider myself a “talk-to-strangers-on-my-commute” kind of person. I’m more of an “allow-myself-to-be-talked-to-on-the-train-and-engage-in-small-talk-when-prodded-to” kind of person. Although, London provides very limited opportunities for this to happen. Each commuter’s seat seems to have its own invisible soundproof brick wall.
However, the wall became more difficult to rely on when a white British man spewed “Bob Marley is dead” at the bus driver. Trying to diffuse the situation the bus driver, a Black man, told him in his Caribbean accent to stop causing a fuss and just take his seat. The white British man was undeterred.
“stop speaking that Jamaican, boy.”
Hearing boy was the tipping point for a lot of the black people on the bus. Like a bolt of lightning, a group of teenagers who were just playing around minding their business at the back of the upper level of the bus was suddenly quiet. I watched them leap up and congregate around the railing and the stairs that led to the bottom of the bus where all the commotion was happening.
Suddenly, the bus driver erupted yelling “Get off the bus. Get off or I’ll throw you out.” The teenage boys came closer down the steps. They observed for a second, took stock of the situation, and saw it immediately for what it was. They waited on the steps to see if the white British man would obey the bus driver’s command.
Undeterred again the white British man confidently spewed at the Bus driver
“That’s why we sent you Windrush people back because you lot is so damn cheeky.”
The bus came to a halt. The teenage boys started yelling at the man to get out. The bus driver, swung his door open, leaping out of his see-through protective barrier. With the help of the teenagers, they kicked the man off the bus.
As the bus continued on its route, we could all hear the man screaming more racist epithets toward the bus. Everyone else continued on with life as usual. They sat back in their seats and rebuilt the wall that had just crumbled.
I sat there frozen, mulling over the words that were spoken. I had long closed Pitts’s Afropean. Instead, I held it in my hand. I looked out the window into the depths of the night, my heart racing as I processed what I just observed.
An idea that Johny Pitt’s Afropean readily debunks is that racism, especially anti-Black racism, is not as overt in Europe as it is in America.
When you look at African American writers such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright who went to Europe to escape Jim Crow-Era America they often discussed notions of feeling free from race consciousness. Their blackness was not the primary lens in which they felt viewed. However, this sentiment casts a shadow over the non-African-Americans, many from former imperial colonies, who bore the brunt of racism in these European metropoles.
The very fact of holding an American passport was not something James Baldwin overlooked. He once said
…life in Paris was to some extent protected by the fact that I carried a green passport. This passport proclaimed that I was a free citizen of a free country, and was not, therefore, to be treated as one of Europe’s uncivilized, black possessions. - - James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1948 the same year that The Empire Windrush, a ship carrying a little more than a thousand passengers from across the Caribbean, arrived on the shores of the UK. Baldwin had the privilege of holding a passport. These passengers did not.
After WWII, Britain passed the British Nationality Act of 1948 which allowed people from across Britain’s colonies to migrate to the the UK to live and work. WWII created significant labor shortages across the UK and dire economic situations in its colonies. The British Nationality Act was instituted to fill in this gap. However, not everyone on The Empire Windrush were immigrants only looking for better economic opportunities, some of the passengers were artists, singers, and carpenters. Some even fought for Britain during WWII. Although the majority of those on the ship were men–women and children were also among those who arrived in the UK.
Between 1948 and 1971, thousands of Caribbean people migrated to the UK filling a crucial gap in a post-WWII economy by becoming nurses, manual workers, cleaners, and drivers. A new generation of Black Britons was born.
In 1971, a new immigration act was passed to give commonwealth citizens the permanent right to stay in the UK. 1970s Britain must have felt like a wind of progress was flowing underneath the sails of a small isle that had to exchange its colonies for commonwealth countries in the era of decolonization.
By the mid-1970s, a half-white British, half-Black Jamaican Reggae star began to dominate British airwaves. Bob Marley’s fair skin yet, intricate dark locs became a symbol of a post-1960s desire for cultural hybridity. He pioneered a genre of music that utilized rock, punk, and spiritualism as a backdrop to lyrics that spoke of liberation and freedom from oppression. Reggae music opened doors for multiracial concerts and gatherings across the world.
However, everything was not all roses. The music industry was still riddled with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. In 1976, the British blues guitarist Eric Clapton took the stage at a concert in Birmingham and put a halt to the wind of progress many believed they were experiencing.
In a drunken stupor, he said, in part,
Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country….The black w*gs and c**ns and Arabs and f**king Jamaicans don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black wgs and c**ns living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man.”
It felt like in many ways the racist man on the bus was reading the words of Eric Clapton as he shouted at the Caribbean bus driver. The racist vitriol from 1976 was preserved for fresh use in 2023.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the arrival of The Empire Windrush. While the arrival was celebrated, it stood in the shadows of the Windrush Scandal. In 2018, news broke out that the British Home Office had not created records nor kept evidence of those granted permission to stay in the UK. Even the landing cards that recorded many of the Caribbean migrants’ arrivals were destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. Unable to prove their legal residence in the UK, many migrants were deported, detained, and struggled to gain access to basic services like housing and healthcare in the UK.
“We don’t want them here” and “send them back” are more than just xenophobic and racist words, they are a sentiment that governed the lives and destinies of thousands of Caribbean migrants who came to the UK to dig the British economy out of the trenches of a post-WWII economic downturn.
So when the racist man on the bus invoked Windrush, he knew he was twisting the knife of historical trauma that many Black Britons are subjected to today. Some reading this may think the white British man getting kicked off the bus was a heroic end for a xenophobic racist who thinks Black Britons need to be deported or sent back to the colonies. The reality is there’s not a feel-good ending here.
What remains to be dealt with is the echoes of these four words – Bob Marley is Dead. Is what Bob Marley represented– his cross-cultural appeal, desires for liberation, spiritual enlightenment– truly dead? What we all heard on the bus is what was said. What concerns me is what was left unsaid in the minds of those who looked onwards at all the commotion. Or even worse– the opinions of those who kept their eyes averted refusing to remove the veil.
Until next time,
Hi! My name is Shae and I am a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University. I write weekly newsletters about history, culture, and art. If there’s a topic you’re curious about and would like to know more– send me a DM on Instagram over at @shaethehistorian
Further Reading
Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation by Colin Grant
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
This Lovely City by Louise Hare
Sources
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43782241
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jan/30/reggae-revolutionary-bob-marley-britain
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/manufacturing-bob-marley
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-fairest-soul-brother-in-england-marzoni
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-empire-windrush-passenger-list/