Football’s Black Pioneers is about the first black player at each of the 92 Football League clubs, but what about black fans?
I’m certainly not suggesting anyone should try and identify the first black fan at any club, I have no idea how you would go about doing that, but there were pioneering black fans too and this article is about three of them (although not really ‘about’ them as we have no idea who they were).
This is a photo of what a fairly typical football crowd looked like in 1978, a sea of white faces. But look closely and you may be able to pick out three black ones in the bottom right hand corner.
There are other photos of the crowd that day and in some of them there are, similarly, one or two black faces. Out of a total crowd of 22,082 there were perhaps a dozen black fans.
Millwall’s ground had a cosy sounding name, ‘The Den’, but it had a far from cosy reputation. The Den was an inhospitable place for visiting fans, black or white, and it was especially unwelcoming to visiting black players. There are several references to this in ‘Pioneers’ (see the Scunthorpe and Leyton Orient chapters in particular). The ground stood on Cold Blow Lane which probably sums up the atmosphere of the place rather well.
On 23rd November 1968 I went to see Crystal Palace take on Millwall. I don’t know how it happened but I got separated from my mates in the crowd before the game and blundered into the ‘wrong’ end by mistake. Had Palace played out a 0-0 draw I might have got away with it but in the 20th minute Mark Lazarus put us one up. My reaction was as instinctive as it was unwise. I may have cheered the first Palace goal that day but I didn’t cheer the second (Bobby Woodruff just before half time). Looking back on it I reckon the Millwall fans let me off lightly, they expressed their displeasure at my presence verbally rather than resorting to physical violence. I had no business being in ‘their’ end and, had the roles been reversed, I would have been pretty disgruntled too.
Just seven days after my escape from the Lion’s Den, Frank Peterson became the first black player to represent Millwall in the Football League. That game was away at Portsmouth and it would be over four months before he made his home debut.
Fast forward 10 years to the date of these photos.
Frank Peterson didn’t last long at Millwall but by now (1978) there were a couple of black players in the Millwall team on a regular basis. Trevor Lee, playing in the No.10 shirt against Ipswich, made over 100 appearances for the club and Phil Walker (wearing No.4 that day) made over 150 appearances in all competitions.
As far as the game itself was concerned, a 6th round FA Cup tie, it went badly for Millwall as they lost 6-1. But events on the pitch were only half the story. The BBC reported that the day started badly when coaches ferrying visiting fans to the ground were attacked by Millwall fans throwing stones. The violent scenes were repeated once the match was underway. After Ipswich had taken the lead there was a pitch invasion and the players were ordered to return to the dressing rooms until order was restored. Play was suspended for just under 20 minutes – with the referee promising that the match would be finished on that day.
The BBC report on the game comments that fears of crowd violence had been expressed before the game so it was bizarre that the pre-match entertainment consisted of a mock wild west shoot out.
There were no black players in the Ipswich team that day so the only black people in the ground were Colin Lee, Phil Walker and the handful of black fans. Did the presence of black players on the pitch embolden black fans to go and watch games? Without speaking to them we can’t really be sure but it must have helped.
Clearly, though, it sometimes wasn’t enough. Tom Collins, a Leyton Orient fan at the time Laurie Cunningham and Bobby Fisher were playing for the ‘Os in the mid-seventies, is quoted as saying ‘a lot of my black mates changed their allegiance from Spurs and Arsenal to Orient and carried around pictures of Laurie, but didn’t feel confident enough to come with us.’ Collins, who worked on the project ‘Football Unites Racism Divides’, regrets that his black friends missed out on the ‘privilege’ of seeing Cunningham play.
But racism on the terraces was an odd thing. Vile racist abuse would routinely be directed at visiting black players while black players on the racists’ own teams were often lionised (Walker and Lee, for instance, became firm favourites). Illogical? Certainly, but there is nothing very logical about racism.
Some of the paradoxes of being a black Millwall fan were explored in this film (Walker and Lee both talk about their experience playing for the Lions):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5slaabI_wnw
No one ever quite asks any of the black fans being interviewed ‘how did you, as a black fan, feel when fans around you were hurling racist abuse at black players?’ The closest is at 34 minutes into the film when one says: ‘You’d get people shout out “you black this and that” and they’d turn round and say, “I’m not talking to you mate, I’m talking to that black.” How do you work that one out?’ How indeed?
The overall impression from the film is that ‘being Millwall’ trumped ‘being black’, certainly the three black fans in the photo look comfortable in their surroundings. But being a black football fan in the 1970s must have been a daunting experience at many grounds – we salute the pioneering black fans.
Love football – Hate racism