Paul Stephenson, a British civil rights activist who led a boycott of city buses in Bristol, England, in 1963 that helped usher in the nation’s first Race Relations Act, outlawing discrimination in public places, died on Nov. 2. He was 87.
His family said in a statement that the cause was Parkinson’s disease and dementia. The statement did not say where he died.
Britain’s civil rights movement of the 1960s is less well known, and had less impact, than the epochal struggles in the American South that produced sweeping laws banning segregation and protecting voting rights. But the themes and even some dates in Britain are a historical rhyme to events that occurred in the U.S.
The boycott of the Bristol Omnibus Company spearheaded by Mr. Stephenson ended in victory on Aug. 28, 1963 — the very day that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.
Mr. Stephenson drew inspiration from Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, which touched off a far-reaching boycott of city buses by Black riders. In 1964, he staged a one-man sit-in at a Bristol pub that refused to serve him because of his race. His arrest by eight officers and the subsequent trial made national news in England; a headline on the front page of The Daily Express read, “The Man Who Refused to Say Please for His Beer.”
The bus boycott and the pub sit-in drew the attention of Harold Wilson, the Labour Party leader, who pushed through the Race Relations Act in 1965 when he was prime minister.
“The Bristol bus boycott and Mr. Stephenson’s own case,” The Independent wrote in 2005, “helped to thrust race into the national limelight and change public opinion about the treatment of Blacks and Asians living in Britain.”
The significant presence of racial minorities was a relatively new phenomenon in Britain in the 1960s, the result of immigration from Commonwealth nations in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Casual racial prejudice was commonplace. In 1964, it was legal to discriminate in hiring, housing and public accommodations on the basis of skin color.
Mr. Stephenson, the son of a Black father from West Africa and a racially mixed English mother, grew up and went to school in nearly all-white environments. He was bolder and more savvy about public relations than leaders of the West Indian immigrant community in Bristol, where he was employed as a social worker.
The city’s bus company had no nonwhite drivers or conductors. In April 1963, replying to an ad for new conductors in The Bristol Evening Post, Mr. Stephenson scheduled an interview for a Jamaican immigrant friend. He spoke on the phone in his flawless English accent, which gave no hint of race.
When the applicant showed up, he was sent away with a curt “We don’t employ Black people.”
Mr. Stephenson called a news conference to denounce what he called the bus company’s “color bar.” He urged a boycott to end discriminatory hiring, a practice supported by the transport workers union. He sued a union official for libeling him in a newspaper as “irresponsible and dishonest.”
At the time, Bristol was a city of 425,000 with a Black population of only about 3,000. But residents of all races observed the boycott, walking or cycling to work and marching in protests. High-profile politicians voiced support.
In the news media, Mr. Stephenson explicitly invoked the example of American racism in the Deep South and the U.S. civil rights movement then drawing worldwide attention, often over the violent backlash of white authorities. When London reporters trekked to Bristol and echoed that framing in their coverage, local officials were embarrassed.
At a protest near a statue of Edmund Burke, Mr. Stephenson ripped into the bus company. “They have projected the image of the Black man as a bogeyman, and the threat of a colored invasion,” he said, as reported by The Times of London.
After four months, the bus company capitulated. It declared a policy of “complete integration” in hiring. The transit workers union also voted for integration.
“However obscure the dispute remains today,” BBC News Magazine wrote in 2013, “Britain’s post-colonial legacy was shaped by its contortions.”
Mr. Stephenson was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for his role in overturning racial barriers. In 2020, the Great Western Railway named an express train after him.
Paul Stephenson was born on May 6, 1937, in Rochford, Essex County, in the east of England. When he was 3, he was placed in a group home with seven white children, where he lived for seven years.
In 1947, still in foster care, he moved to London and attended a secondary school where he was the only Black student. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1953 and served until 1960. He then attended Westhill College in Birmingham, where he studied sociology and community development. In 1962, he found a job teaching migrant youth in Bristol.
After the bus boycott, Mr. Stephenson was invited to the U.S. by the N.A.A.C.P. He met Louis Farrakhan, the fiery Black nationalist, in New York and then traveled to the South.
Back home, he met Joyce Annakie, a Jamaican-born psychiatric nurse, and married her in 1965. The couple had two children, Paul Jr. and Fumi, who survive him.
His wife died in 2019. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Stephenson campaigned for racial equality and against apartheid in South Africa before moving to London to work for the Commission for Racial Equality. In 1992, he returned to Bristol, where he called on the city to face up to its history as a major debarkation port of ships transporting African slaves to the New World in the 18th century.
A week before his death, a plaque honoring Mr. Stephenson was installed at the Bay Horse pub, which had refused to serve him in 1964. The plaque recognizes his “one-man sit-in,” which it says “helped pave the way for the Race Relations Act.”
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