This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its version of a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour. I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drew on widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectability and imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonials and white English people in its fight for equality. This was true despite the fact that a major element of the League's conception of British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominant idea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white. The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideology in the context of two news‐making issues: the campaign to restore British citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiff in 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discrimination by London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantine in 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identities were claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the British Isles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests that under the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneously identify with the imperial power and their (potentially national) home colony.
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Anne Spry Rush (2002) studied this question.