April 20, 1968: Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" Speech

April 20, 1968: America had George Wallace, a politician who came to symbolize support for "law and order" and opposition to the equality of the races, and therefore bigotry. Britain had Enoch Powell, who not only became that for them, but also an opponent of immigration to his country.

Born in 1912, in Birmingham, England's 2nd-largest city, he graduated from Cambridge University as a classical scholar and an expert in linguistics, learning several languages. He served in the British Army's Intelligence Corps in World War II, and began to fear that America was leading India out of the British Empire and toward independence and democracy. Writing home on February 16, 1943, he said, "I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were... our terrible enemy, America."

He was first elected to Parliament in 1950, as a member of the Conservative Party, representing a district in Wolverhampton, near his hometown. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appointed him Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1957, in which he served 1 year; and Minister of Health in 1960, serving a little over 3 years. In 1965, Party Leader Edward Heath appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Defence.

On April 20, 1968, at the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, a city already rocked by a racial divide between white and black, Powell gave a speech addressing the 1968 Race Relations Bill, which the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to succeed the Race Relations Act 1965. The Conservatives, a.k.a. the Tories, had tabled an amendment, significantly weakening its provisions.

In the speech, Powell recounted a conversation with one of his constituents, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier. Powell said that the man told him: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country... I have 3 children. All of them been through grammar school, and 2 of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas... "In this country, in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." In other words, Powell's constituent -- presuming he actually existed -- was predicting that, between 1983 and 1988, white English people would be the slaves of black people.

Powell went on:

Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who, in broad daylight, in my own town, says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking. Not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

It could have gone done in history as "The Funeral Pyre Speech." But Powell wasn't done: He quoted the Cumaean Sibyl, an oracle in Virgil's Aeneid, and citing the river that flows through Rome:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood." That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come.

In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

The Times, the London-based largest newspaper in Britain, declared it "an evil speech," stating, "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history."

The leading Conservatives in the Shadow Cabinet were outraged by the speech, with 4 of them threatening to resign from the front bench unless Powell was fired as Shadow Defence Minister. The next day, April 21, Heath accepted reality, and sacked Powell.

The Shadow Cabinet's Fuel and Power Spokeswoman, 42-year-old Margaret Thatcher, thought that some of Powell's speech was "strong meat," and when Heath phoned her to tell her about the sacking, she told him, "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis."

Racist incidents did indeed follow the speech. On April 30, in Powell's Wolverhampton, came a slashing incident with 14 white youths chanting "Powell!" and "Why don't you go back to your own country?" at patrons of a West Indian christening party.

And yet, the Conservatives won the 1970 general election, making Heath the Prime Minister. Still, he did not dare appoint Powell to his Cabinet. In the national election of February 8, 1974, despite the Tories getting a new mandate, Powell was voted out. But the mandate fell apart, and there was another election on October 10, and Labour won, restoring Wilson to the Premiership. Despite this, Powell was returned to the House of Commons -- not from Wolverhampton, but from a place where he had a country home: County Down in Northern Ireland, a place where the dominant conflict was over not race, but religion. Powell held that seat until retiring in 1987, and died in 1998, at 85.

The Tories won in 1979, making Thatcher the Prime Minister. She made no secret of her distaste for the poor, regardless of race. During her tenure, there would be several race riots in Britain, most notably in Brixton, South London, in 1981 and 1985. During this time, the right-wing National Front picked up where Powell left off, and organized anti-black and anti-immigrant violence.

Immigration to Britain continued, mainly from former British possessions in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It's as if their countries couldn't wait to get out from under British rule, but found independence rough going, and some of their people went back to "the mother country" for a better opportunity. To this day, racist Englishmen use the slogan, "Powell was right."

UPDATE: On October 25, 2022, Britain received its 1st nonwhite Prime Minister. But it wasn't a black person, nor an immigrant: It was a Southampton-born Indian, Rishi Sunak.

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April 20, 1968 was a Saturday. In England, North London soccer team Arsenal F.C. went to the North-East, and lost to Sunderland, 2-0 at Roker Park.

These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins, 4-2 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Mel Stottlemyre outpitched Jim Perry. Harmon Killebrew hit a home run for the Twins, which was no surprise. Gene Michael hit one for the Yankees, which was a huge surprise. Mickey Mantle went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The New York Mets beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 3-2 at Shea Stadium.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Cleveland Indians, 3-2 at Fenway Park in Boston. Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-4.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Houston Astros, 7-1 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 1-0 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Willie Mays went 1-for-4, leading off the top of the 2nd inning with a triple off Bob Veale. With Jim Ray Hart up, Veale was called for a balk by home plate umpire Harry Wendelstedt, forcing Mays home with what turned out to be the game's only run. Ray Sadecki pitched a 4-hit shutout.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Atlanta Braves, 2-1 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Pete Rose went 1-for-4. Johnny Bench went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Hank Aaron went 0-for-4.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Chicago White Sox, 4-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The game was scoreless after 8 innings. Each team scored a run in the 9th. White Sox reliever Wilbur Wood fell apart in the top of the 10th. Al Kaline went 2-for-4.

* The Chicago Cubs beat their arch-rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, 5-1 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis. Billy Williams hit a home run off Bob Gibson. Ernie Banks went 2-for-4. Gibson was outpitched by Ferguson Jenkins.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the California Angels, 10-1 at Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim). Brooks Robinson went 2-for-5, and Frank Robinson went 3-for-4 with an RBI.

* And the Washington Senators beat the Oakland Athletics, 4-1 at the Oakland Coliseum. The A's had made their Oakland debut 3 days earlier. Reggie Jackson, in his 1st full season, went 0-for-3 with a walk.

American football was out of season. The NBA Finals began the next night, and the Boston Celtics would beat the Los Angeles Lakers in 6 games. Game 2 of the American Basketball Association's 1st Finals was held at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh. The New Orleans Buccaneers beat the Pittsburgh Pipers, 109-100, to tie up the series.

And in the Stanley Cup Semifinals, the Montreal Canadiens beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 4-1 at the Montreal Forum, taking a 2-0 lead in the series. The Canadiens would win the series in 5 games, going on to sweep the St. Louis Blues for the Stanley Cup.