My Black skin got me sacked from British TV. That’s why I spend my life fighting racism
Fifty years ago, when racists called and wrote daily letters to ITV’s Today programme in 1968 telling the corporation “Get that nigger off our screens”, they were speaking about me, the first visibly Black TV journalist in Britain.
It resulted in me losing my job, having been in post just nine months. The official excuse at the time was, “She didn’t fit in with the programme.” But this was not what I was told when the producer showed me the complaint letters, and then the door.
It hurt. Not least because, only a few weeks prior to that, the British government had passed the Race Relations Act, making it illegal to discriminate against people in housing, education or jobs based on their race or religion. I had even attended parliament to hear the debate. My employers, Thames Television, could have told the racists they they would have been breaking the law by terminating my job. They didn’t: they sided with the racists instead. It hurt even more 50 years later, in 2021, when I learned from research published in the Guardian that that same year, the Queen’s courtiers had banned “coloured immigrants or foreigners from serving in clerical roles in the royal household”. No wonder Thames Television felt able to stop me contaminating their black-andwhite TV screens. If the Queen did it, why not them?
Yes, TV was black and white then, which is probably why Eric Anthony Abrahams, a Jamaican journalist at the BBC a few years before I got my job, escaped the same fate as me. His paler skin had not appeared dark enough on TV screens to receive the same racism that mine inspired. Skin tone