workingclasshistory:

On this day, 23 January 1919, racist rioting broke out in Glasgow, Scotland, as Black and white sailors gathered, hoping to be hired for work, in the mercantile marine office by the Glasgow Docks. A fight broke out between a group of sailors from Sierra Leone and white workers who objected to foreign labour competing with them for limited jobs.
Soon the white mob grew to several hundred strong, and the rioters armed themselves with guns, knives, batons, and bricks. The sailors from Sierra Leone sought shelter in their lodgings, but the white rioters surrounded building and attacked it, smashing its windows. In response, some of the Black sailors fired shots down at the crowd. Eventually, police detained 30 Black sailors in “protective custody”, then charged them with riot and weapons offences. None of the white rioters were arrested.
This was just the first of many race-related harbour riots that took place across Britain in 1919 - which left five people dead, hundreds arrested, and dozens seriously injured. But what’s remarkable about this case is how closely it’s linked to the strike for a 40-hour working week: it took place just days before the famous Battle of George Square, and some of the same people were involved.
Manny Shinwell was imprisoned for his role in the Battle of George Square, but it was also he, as local secretary of the British Seafarers’ Union, who addressed 600 white workers on the morning of the race riot demanding “action” against workers of colour. Shinwell would become the longest-serving Labour Party MP, Secretary of State for War in Clement Attlee’s government, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. But his branch of the BSU banned Black members.
Such racism was, sadly, a feature of party-political trade unionism from its inception. The Trades Union Congress, which established a parliamentary labour party in 1899, had since 1892 been calling for a total ban on immigration, and it supported the antisemitic Aliens Act of 1905. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1905367339648407/?type=3