Page 33 - Great Elizabethans

THE BRISTOL BUS BOYCOTT
Paul became an Air Force cadet in 1953, and stayed in the RAF until 1960, finishing his education while he was in the service. He also spent a lot of time working with children, especially in the Scouts. This was something else he would keep on doing all his life.
In 1962, he went to Bristol in the south-west of England, to work with young people in the community. He was the city’s first Black social worker. Here, he discovered that although Black and Asian people spent money riding on the buses, the Bristol Omnibus Company refused to hire them as bus drivers or conductors. Alongside the Black drivers who had been refused jobs, Paul organised a boycott of the buses, where people refused to use the buses in protest. Support for the boycott spread through Bristol and then to the rest of the country, with famous sportspeople and politicians speaking out on Paul’s side. After a few months, the bus company backed down, and began employing people of colour (but Paul lost his teaching job for being “too controversial”!).
“Every generation has a duty to fight against racism, otherwise it will find its way into our country and into our homes. Addressing this challenge is our duty if we wish to seek a happy and prosperous existence.”
WELL-KNOWN ACTIVIST
In 1964, Paul went into a pub called the Bay Horse in Bristol. At this time, it was still legal in the United Kingdom for pub landlords and shopkeepers to refuse to serve Black people. Paul had just bought himself a drink when the manager asked him to leave. When Paul calmly said no, the manager called the police. Paul was arrested and spent several hours in a prison cell before being put on trial. Although the policemen who arrested him – eight of them! – said that he had been violent and tried to fight them, another man who had seen everything backed him up. The judge ruled that Paul had been wrongly
accused. This event helped to bring in a new law in the United Kingdom called the Race Relations Act (1965), which made it illegal to refuse to serve someone because of their skin colour.
Paul was now well known as an activist. In 1964, he was invited to go to the United States by a group of people who were trying to stop segregation (the separation of people of
different skin colours) there. Paul was surprised to be stared at when he went into the hotel where he was staying. He only discovered afterwards that the hotel
had never had a Black guest before.
In London, Paul worked with the famous boxer
Muhammad Ali to set up a sports association for Black children in Brixton. Paul wanted them to try new activities that they hadn’t
been able to do before, like table tennis and pony trekking. Cheekily, Paul even managed to get Muhammad Ali to drop in on a school assembly – for free!
Paul continued to work tirelessly for racial equality and to end discrimination, and as he grew older, he was given wider recognition for his achievements. In 2009, he was given an OBE, and in 2017, he received a Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award. He even has a train named after him!