Last modified on Thu 6 May 2021 03.37 EDT
Fifty years ago, as the Guardian marked its 150th birthday, the then editor, Alastair Hetherington, reflected on the changes he had seen since he joined the paper 21 years earlier. Intriguingly, he singled out social forces striving to upset “racial harmony”, and promised resistance.
But in the same 1971 edition, a gallery of images of the senior staff showed how far the paper had to go. All men. All white. In its first 150 years, the number of journalists of colour employed by the paper could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Unsurprisingly for a 200-year-old institution, the Guardian has not always got it right in terms of race coverage. An early article from 1823 regretted the “cruelty and injustice of negro slavery”, but also noted that “amongst all the obvious disadvantages of slave labour, there is none more striking than its tendency to deteriorate the soil”. That set the tone for decades of coverage that often failed to empathise: during the US civil war, the Manchester Guardian was so concerned about the cotton trade that underpinned it that it sided with the slave-owning south.