Fifty years ago this month, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, east of London. Her 500 passengers had each paid £28.50 for the 4,000-mile voyage from Jamaica. In the main they were young men, many of them returning to England where they had served during the war with the RAF as flyers and ground crew. With no prospect of finding work in Jamaica, England was the obvious answer. The colonial propaganda had more than worked. It was, after all, the Land Of Hope And Glory, the mother country.
What they failed to realise, however, was that playing cricket (or fighting for your country) didn't make you one of the chaps - as in Yorkshire and Lancashire where, once the togs were off, the gamekeeper and the under-gardener went back to their place: the big house was not for them. As the train from Tilbury pulled into Victoria, they had no idea of the hostility that awaited them.
In Windrush: The Irresistible Rise Of Multi-Racial Britain, brothers Mike and Trevor Phillips have brought together the testimonies of those early immigrants. A companion television documentary made in four parts for BBC 2 - the second episode of which is screened tonight - is required viewing for anyone interested in the forces that set one group of people against another. Despite all the high profile British-And-Black success stories chronicled in Windrush - Lenny Henry, Trevor MacDonald, Linford Christie, Jazzy B, not to mention Trevor Phillips himself (currently odds-on-favourite as London's next mayor) - the racism that would scar the lives of those early immigrants has not gone away. Last week the judicial inquiry into the death five years ago of black teenager Stephen Lawrence was told the detective in charge has belatedly realised that arrests could have been made earlier: he had not understood, he said, "basic tenets" of the law. (Asked how he now felt about this, he said: "I think it is regrettable.")
As a result of this lapse, six white youths were acquitted of murder - six white youths who even the right-wing Daily Mail saw fit not only to name but to identify in photographs, in contempt-of-court-provoking action.
Two months ago, following the death on remand of Alton Manning, prisons chief Richard Tilt, in a live interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, said Afro-Caribbeans had a genetic disposition that made it more likely they would die from "positional asphyxia". In spite of a huge public outcry, demands for his resignation have come to naught.
So which is the true picture? Is Britain a country in which institutionalised racism is endemic? Or a thriving multi-racial society?
Both, according to Stuart Hall, a leading intellectual figure in post-war Britain who arrived in England from Jamaica in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. A prominent figure in British cultural studies, he is now professor of sociology at the Open University.
"It's a complicated picture. I do think that multi-cultural Britain is unstoppable. Generally speaking, the opportunities and possibilities are there and I am much more optimistic than I would have been 15 years ago. "On the other hand, I don't think it's a universally positive or upbeat story. There are a number of qualifications. One is that I think the British population is quite divided, mainly in terms of what Englishness or Britishness itself can be in the next century - whether it is willing to take on the implications first of all of having been an imperial power and not being able to forget that implication, and secondly of living in an increasingly globalised and migrant world. You can hear that in the debates about Europe and the debates about refugees."
The other British response, says Hall, is to "go into the bunker and pull the door". And the National Front, he says, is part of that.
Although institutional racism - specifically deaths in custody of black prisoners and the exclusion from school of black boys - are dealt with in Windrush, the murder of Stephen Lawrence is not included (at least not in the book). Mike Phillips believes that to have done so would have been to "skew the nature of the broad sweep of what is happening historically". Stuart Hall, however, would tend to disagree. "I think the Stephen Lawrence case is not a residue of some bygone age, it reflects attitudes among contemporary institutions, it reflects an unthinking quasi-British racist common sense about who is British and who isn't."
Mark Seally, photographer and curator of the Windrush exhibition of photographs from which the picture shown here is taken, is another young, gifted contributor to the documentary. Now 37, Seally was at university in the early 1980s, where he was the only black student in his year. Yet his college, Goldsmith's, is in Camberwell - a mile from Brixton and half a mile from Peckham, now London's most notorious no-go black area. "Yes, you can get Paul Ince to captain the England side, and that's great and something to be celebrated. Yes, there are style gurus like Acho Eshu in Arena. But the overall experiences of black, working-class young people hasn't changed much," he says. Although doors have opened, he believes a climate of fear still prevails. "There is that whole street dynamic. The street is still there to be contested. If you walk through Brixton it's all about claiming territory. There is still that debate between authority and those that are misread and misrepresented, but there is no real dialogue. A lot of this tension is to do with black, male presence on the streets."
Sex and race and gender, he says, are very much "a hot molecule in a Cool Britannia room", a space still echoing with the same stereotypes - "that whole debate about `exotic other': the Naomi Campbell thing, the black male body thing, the stupid sexual taboos." And he still finds himself pigeon-holed professionally by the colour of his skin.
The turning point in the history of Caribbean immigration, believes Mike Phillips, was marked by the Notting Hill riots of 1958. With its large, Victorian houses and racially vibrant atmosphere, Notting Hill is now one of the more sought-after addresses in London but in the 1950s it was an area of cheap, run-down housing. Unlike the American experience, where geographical areas have traditionally been defined by the ethnicity of their inhabitants, Notting Hill was always racially mixed. As black working men were excluded from local pubs and bars, they opened their own clubs - thus avoiding licensing laws. Notting Hill became a byword for illegality - drink, drugs, prostitution. And the locals didn't like it. "The irony is that Britain was actually used to migration, for decades, centuries," says Mike Phillips. "Everyone knew the patches of west London that were Irish, everybody knew that part of Ealing was Polish. But they could live with that. But the riots of Nottingham and Notting Hill showed that it wasn't something that was going to settle into a corner and could be easily contained. It set off a huge wave of hostility, but it also made race a central issue for the next 30 years."
The 1960s and 1970s can be encapsulated in one word, Powellism - when Enoch Powell, MP for Wolverhampton, turned generalised ignorance into specific hostility with his "Rivers of Blood" speech, which tied race and immigration firmly together in the public mind, and his calls for a Ministry of Repatriation. Something had to blow. And in 1981 it did, with the Brixton riots. As a result of the Scarman report into the riots, money was poured into deprived areas. Equal opportunities became the civic byword. Representation on local councils increased (Britain now has 12 black and Asian MPs).
Even Thatcherism played its part by opening everything up to money: the implication being if you're smart, you can hustle your way up. And via the opening-up of higher education generally, young blacks did just that.
It's a very different phenomenon from the American experience, Stuart Hall believes. "In America, every black person looks at every white person and thinks `your grandfather probably had my grandmother as a house nigger'. The problem in Britain is almost the other way. The British have almost forgotten they were slave-owners and imperial masters - `Why would they want to come here? What a surprising thing that they would think of this as the mother country'. . ." they say to themselves. "America is a society of ethnic migrations; it's an enclave society, and is formalised legally. It has never hardened in that way in Britain. The sociological integration has gone much further. One in every three black men has a white partner. In Britain there is just much more mixing, the crossovers of street style, the crossovers of music and the numbers of white kids who speak patois."
Currently at the cutting edge of this cultural crossover, says Hall, are young Asians. "For some time, because of their more stable family situations, Asians have appeared to do better at school which has given them access to intermediary jobs - opticians, pharmacies, as well as helping in their father's corner shop. But culturally they felt very much outside, until this generation. This generation is swinging along culturally, in a way in which the black one did in the 1970s and 1980s - think of the reggae revolution and of how black kids' popular culture took hold. Now, Asians and crossover music is going like wildfire. And all of it is hybrid, not multi-cultural like the US. All fusions: fusion in style, fusion in language and so on.
"I don't want to be celebratory about it but there are a lot of things going on, very inchoate, and nobody quite knows where the maps are."
The downside are the unemployed and disaffected young men at the bottom, "the piles who are left out".
"The difficulty is partly because people want simple stories, they want a celebratory story or a disaster. But the idea that you can have both is a difficult idea even for New Labour to hold in its head. I am deeply irritated by the way in which all the social imagery of New Labour, whether that is Middle England or Cool Britannia, somehow misses out what it is that makes contemporary British society such a vibrant maelstrom. I don't mean its black minority, but its multi-cultural character which is saying as much about its white population as its black one."
For Mike Phillips the Windrush project has been justified many times over. "One of the interesting things to me abut the response to this whole thing is that people are finding it incredibly liberating. White and black. Black people don't talk about it in mixed company. Because if they say anything they'll be told they have a chip on their shoulder." Until now, he says, white society has simply ignored what it doesn't feel affects it directly. "There have been no models for white people to engage positively with the process of change in Britain. As long as they're are not involved in doing anything bad, then OK. But this country belongs to all of us. Taking on this society and believing in its possibilities is a very strict, practical thing. It's not being optimistic or hopeful, it's getting a job."
But the British, Stuart Hall believes, are changing. "They are beginning to learn how to live with difference, which is an incredible lesson for an old, imperial society on the decline to learn in the evening of its days."