An African American Anthropologist in Wales: St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic Ecologies of Race Relations

Abstract

In summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored with researcher Horace Cayton. What attracted him to Tiger Bay for his next project was a scandal that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic around Britain's growing population of what were referred to as brown babies. These children were the product of sexual encounters that sometimes took place between local white women and some of the 200,000 African American GIs who were at different points stationed across the United Kingdom during the later part of the Second World War. Using the extensive field notes Drake kept during his sojourn in Cardiff, this article reconstructs the nature and feel of a neighborhood where, by the 1940s, half of all residents were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Drake's work serves as a window onto the nature of racism and ideas about race in late-imperial Britain, alongside the parallel presence of metropolitan community life in Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multicultural communities.