Organising for Equality in the 1930s: The League of Coloured Peoples

A rejection becomes a public question

The first issue of The Keys, published in 1933, described a young woman who had applied to twenty-five hospitals and been refused because of her colour. The journal belonged to the League of Coloured Peoples. Its account turned an applicant's repeated disappointment into evidence of an institutional problem. A further investigation, reported in July 1934, exposed the distance between a hospital saying it had no colour bar and its willingness to admit a Black nurse. Officials sometimes blamed the possible objections of patients rather than acknowledging their own decisions. The records reproduced by Black Cultural Archives show campaigners collecting precisely the evasions that made discrimination difficult to challenge. Education, professional qualifications and willingness to work could not by themselves overcome a door that remained closed. ¹

The League had been founded in London in 1931, with the Jamaican doctor Harold Moody as its central organiser. His home at 164 Queens Road, Peckham, became a base for its work. From there, campaigners sought responses from politicians, civil servants and trade unions. An organisation could approach an institution in a different way from an isolated applicant: it could ask for an explanation, compare one refusal with another and publicise the result. Moody's position as an established doctor gave him contacts and standing, but the issues he raised extended well beyond his profession. The organisation's name uses the racial terminology of its period. It should be read historically, not as the language in which people today must describe themselves. ²

A network of people doing the work

Cecil Belfield Clarke was among those who helped establish the League. Born in Barbados, he came to Britain on a Cambridge scholarship in 1914 and opened a medical practice in Elephant and Castle in 1920. His surgery served its neighbourhood for decades, remaining available even after wartime bomb damage. Clarke brings another working practice into the organisation's history, alongside Moody's better-known Peckham address. These doctors were not campaigning from somewhere outside British life. They treated patients, employed their training and sustained professional relationships while challenging the exclusion of other Black people. The meeting of medical work and civic action also helps explain the League's attention to healthcare, housing and the conditions in which children were growing up. ³

Una Marson added a different combination of skills. The Jamaican writer arrived in London in 1932 and stayed with the Moody family. By the autumn of 1933 she was the League's unpaid assistant secretary, helping to organise events and maintain contacts. She also edited The Keys, whose circulation reached about 2,000 worldwide in 1934. Editing and administration were not decorative additions to the campaign. They shaped what people heard about, whose experiences could be connected and whether an organisation remained visible between meetings. Marson's contribution places a Black woman's labour near the centre of a history often told mainly through male leadership. Her developing literary and public life intersected with the less glamorous work of correspondence, preparation and keeping an association functioning. ⁴

A journal for argument and company

The Keys cost sixpence and appeared quarterly between 1933 and 1939. Its pages connected discussion of African American affairs and colonial politics with poetry, letters, photography and accounts of social occasions. Young people's trips to Epsom and Eastbourne could appear alongside reports on West Indian cricket and the League's garden parties. The range matters: an organisation concerned with discrimination also helped people meet and spend enjoyable time together. Its readers included Africans, West Indians, Black people born in Britain and white supporters. The journal was therefore both an account of unequal conditions and a means of sustaining a community of readers. After 1939, a monthly News Letter continued the organisation's presence in print. ⁵

Help had a local address

The League formed connections with other people providing practical assistance. Kamal Chunchie, a Sri Lankan-born pastor of Malay heritage, had established the Coloured Men's Institute in Canning Town in 1926. After a break with the Methodist missionary organisation, he continued independently, with Moody among the institute's vice-presidents. The work included accommodation for stranded seamen, clothing, fuel vouchers, Christmas meals and outings for families. Chunchie's background should not be collapsed into a single Black British identity; his importance here lies in collaboration across communities affected by racial exclusion. Food and somewhere to sleep could be urgent needs long before any institutional complaint was resolved. His fundraising difficulties also reveal how much this provision depended on personal effort and uncertain income rather than a secure public budget. ⁷

That kind of work could not simply be transferred from London to another city. In 1935 the League sent a team to Cardiff to investigate support for unemployed minority seamen and establish a branch. The project proved short-lived, with the outsiders' position among its difficulties. Local Quakers and members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation subsequently formed the South Wales Association for the Welfare of Coloured People. Other local bodies, including the communist-led Colonial Defence Association, supported efforts to secure employment. The sequence shows several political and religious traditions addressing the same immediate problem. It also warns against treating the London organisation as the automatic representative of every port community. Local knowledge, established relationships and trust mattered alongside national contacts and the willingness to help. ⁸

Who could speak together?

Even the meaning of the League's constituency was debated. Research assembled by the South Asian Britain project records disagreement over whether its name primarily described people of African descent or should encompass Indians more fully. Indian solicitor R. S. Nehra served on its executive, while speakers and contributors brought experience from East Africa, India and Sri Lanka. These were more than disputes about a label. They concerned whose grievances an organisation would take up, how colonial politics entered its work and what kind of coalition it intended to build. Multiracial cooperation was something members had to negotiate, not a condition that followed automatically from using inclusive language. The argument belongs within the League's history rather than being smoothed away to make it appear united on every question. ⁶

There were also disagreements about methods. As historian S. I. Martin observes, Ras Makonnen criticised the League's emphasis on respectability and its combination of charitable assistance and social occasions. Such criticism came from within Black political life, not only from opponents of equality. A favourable meeting with an influential person and a campaign against the structures of empire were not necessarily the same objective. ⁵

Yet disagreement did not always mean separation. In the published notes to his study of the League, Roderick J. Macdonald records Ronald Moody's recollection that George Padmore was a friend of his brother Harold and visited the house. Padmore represented the Pan-African Federation at Moody's funeral. These connections complicate any division of interwar organisers into two sealed camps, respectable moderates and militant radicals. People could criticise an approach while continuing to talk, visit and acknowledge another campaigner's contribution. The surviving evidence is better served by that complicated relationship than by a story in which one organisation supposedly possessed the only authentic route to freedom. ⁹

Wartime service did not remove the colour bar

Learie Constantine had joined the League in the early 1930s. During the Second World War he worked for the Ministry of Labour supporting West Indian workers, but his public reputation and government service did not protect him from discrimination. In 1943 the Imperial Hotel in London refused his family the accommodation they had booked; his successful legal challenge followed. The case belongs to Constantine's own campaigning career, not to an invented claim that the League alone won it. Within the organisation's wider history, however, it demonstrates the problem its members repeatedly confronted. Recognition in one setting could coexist with rejection in another. A celebrated cricketer could carry out useful wartime work and still find that a hotel manager treated his family as unacceptable guests. ¹¹

Moody was also looking beyond individual British disputes. A letter preserved at SOAS, written in July 1943 in his capacity as League president, invited discussion between representative African leaders and Europeans and Americans about Africa's future. It survives among missionary records, reminding us that organisational correspondence can be scattered across archives rather than neatly assembled in one collection. The letter makes visible an attempt to organise a conversation while the war was still being fought. It did not itself deliver self-government or mean that invited Africans shared one programme. It does show that the League's thinking was not confined to the manners of British employers and landlords: questions about political authority in Africa were part of its work as well. ¹⁰

A charter for a different settlement

In 1944 the League convened a three-day London conference to formulate a Charter for Coloured Peoples. Its demands included self-government for colonial peoples at the earliest opportunity, and equal economic, educational, legal and political rights irrespective of colour or sex. Discrimination in employment, public entertainment, refreshment places and other public settings was to be prohibited and punished. The programme joined experiences in Britain with the distribution of power across the empire. It also went beyond asking an individual official to behave more generously. The call was for rules and institutions that would make equal treatment enforceable. The following year's Pan-African Congress in Manchester belongs in the same wider chronology of debate, but had its own organisers, participants and resolutions. These gatherings should be connected without pretending they were identical events. ¹²

An organisation, not just a famous founder

Moody died in April 1947 after becoming ill during a fundraising journey intended to support a cultural centre in London. His death removed the League's longstanding president, but did not immediately end the organisation. ¹⁰

The League continued until 1951, outliving its founder by four years. ⁵

The record also contains signs of continuing practical priorities. Macdonald's research notes trace the addition, in 1937, of an explicit objective to provide financial help to people in distress within the League's capacity. The qualification about capacity was important: need and available resources were not the same thing. He also identifies Sam Morris as a secretary in the mid-1940s, part of the work carried forward by others. ⁹

A portrait can help us remember a person while making an organisation harder to see. The National Portrait Gallery holds Ronald Moody's bronze head of Harold, cast in 1997 from a work made in 1946. It gives a physical form to the doctor's public memory. Beside that face, the League's history asks us to remember Marson's editing, Clarke's practice, the names on letters and committees, and the people who brought problems to their attention. The woman rejected by hospital after hospital was not merely a reason for a famous man's activism. People seeking work, training and fair treatment were themselves the substance of the campaign. Reading the journal and the portrait together restores something of that relationship between a recognisable individual and collective action. ¹³

Sources and further reading

1. Black Cultural Archives, Medicine, Race and Activism: extracts from The Keys.

2. English Heritage, Dr Harold Moody.

3. London South Bank University, Cecil Belfield Clarke and his medical practice.

4. English Heritage, Una Marson.

5. S. I. Martin, The Keys: publication history, British Newspaper Archive.

6. South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, League of Coloured Peoples.

7. English Heritage, Kamal Chunchie.

8. South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, South Wales Association for the Welfare of Coloured People.

9. Roderick J. Macdonald, Dr Harold Arundel Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-1947: published reference notes, Race & Class, 1973.

10. SOAS Special Collections, Harold Moody: missionary archives and correspondence.

11. English Heritage, Learie Constantine.

12. King's College London, Dr Harold Moody: the 1944 Charter.

13. National Portrait Gallery, Harold Arundel Moody: portrait by Ronald Moody.