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Britain is a multiracial country. Yet although  Britain is reputed to be a country where ethnic minorities integrate easily, Britain's Blacks - also known as Afro-Caribbeans - certainly suffer from a degree of passive discrimination.  And when times are hard, things often get  worse.
     Freeway magazine looks at the story of the Black community in today's Britain.

 In the nineteen fifties, Britain was a nation in need of men. A decade after the second world war, it was a country with lots of children, but not enough men to work in the mines, the factories and the public services.
     Hundreds of thousands of young men had been killed during the war; who could take their place? There was an easy answer; men from the colonies! Britain was still the capital of an Empire that stretched to the four corners of the earth. In the developing countries of the Commonwealth, there were millions of young men, just looking for work. When the British authorities offered them the chance to come to Britain and work, thousands wanted to come.
     Most came without their families; but soon, as they settled into their new country and their new jobs, they paid for their families to come over too. While a few came from Africa, the largest contingent of Black immigrants came from Jamaica and the other islands that make up the West Indies.
      By 1960, "Afro-Caribbeans" and their families had settled in large numbers in several of Britain's cities — usually in the poorest and most unattractive parts. At the time however, the conditions they lived in in Britain were not too bad, and often better than those they had enjoyed in the West Indies. There were jobs, so there was money; there were schools for the children.