I told you so. In the still of the morning, on Tuesday 25 October, a member of the Today programme team left a message on my answerphone. She was seeking my reaction to the death of Rosa Parks. Jesse Jackson was due on air via a line from the US.
Some readers may be aware that Rosa Parks, in a quiet moment of obduracy, triggered one of the largest social movements modern America has ever known. She refused to sit at the back of the bus, the place assigned for blacks, while whites occupied the privileged positions at the front. Thereafter came the Montgomery bus boycott by the entire black citizenry, followed by a tide of revolt that succeeded in winning the vote for hundreds of thousands of black people in the Deep South, who had borne the yoke of semi-feudal conditions and racial oppression.
Rosa lived to the ripe old age of 93 and, unlike Joan Rivers and those whites in this country who hung on to the hem of her ill-fitting garment, she could not possibly have been bored with the issue of race.
In her last moments, Rosa perhaps scanned the horizon. Perhaps she was moved to tears of frustration by New Orleans and the realisation that not much had changed, that the acquisition of the vote did not lead to liberation from poverty and a life of degradation.
I regretted that I was unable to reflect on her life on Today. But I confess that on hearing of her death, "I shed an eye unus'd to flow/for a precious friend hid in death's dateless night." The very life she lived and her courageous stand against racial injustice have ensured that I and others too have never been, and never will be, bored with race. I cannot afford the luxury.
But I do know from the experience of four decades of activism that one is targeted, at times viciously so, by those made uncomfortable by unrelenting campaigning on issues of racism. Even from one's own. Two columnists of dark skin seized the moment. I know now that I am some kind of egomaniac, a charge laid by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. And an unashamed self-publicist, says Akin Ojumu, the whippersnapper who muses in the Observer on the difficulties he has with mentioning the issue of race.
Meanwhile, Vanessa Feltz, on her radio programme, could not wait to assure me that now we have a Race Relations Act and a Commission for Racial Equality, there was no need to fight racism. But it was another reporter who raised an eyebrow. He wanted his readers to know that I court controversy only to attract attention to myself. To support his point, he referred to a documentary which I was responsible for and which was broadcast on Channel 4 in August 2004. It was titled Who You Callin' a Nigger?
A large part of the documentary was filmed in Birmingham - Walsall, Handsworth and Lozells. We aimed to show that tensions between West Indian and Pakistani youths were assuming violent proportions. "Jets of violence" was the term I used. The detractors gathered; they wailed and moaned that I exaggerated what were isolated incidents, that I was mischievous. They spat fury in order to convince one and all that I was up to my old tricks again.
This suggested to me that nothing was going to be done and that a whirlwind was inevitable. I kept my contacts alive in Birmingham and have known for some months now that an explosion was imminent and that guns would be involved.
I interviewed Pakistanis who waved images of Bin Laden in my face, making claim to territory in Walsall which, they said, would be little Pakistan in a few years' time. They used the term "lock down" to describe how they were prepared to seal off their community and assault anyone who dared to trespass.
The West Indian youths were no less belligerent. They displayed stab wounds and warned of retaliation. When they mentioned guns, it was clear to me that this was not just bravado.
A Punjabi businessman spat the most racist bilge about Caribbean blacks, the kind of language I previously heard from the British National Party. Young Asian women, mainly from the lower middle classes, spoke of a hierarchy - with them at the top and blacks at the bottom.
My approach, as the programme's presenter, was not hard for viewers to discern: at best an irritation on hearing from Asians and West Indians the same racist abuse that had been heaped on us by whites.
Community workers, journalists and commentators, most of them operating from a comfort zone, denied all of this despite the overwhelming evidence. Even now there are those who would have us believe that the riots that exploded on the streets of Handsworth and Lozells are simply the reckless behaviour of criminals.
Community relations, they say, are in fine shape.
I am minded to put to the reporter a question that I invariably asked my guests on the Devil's Advocate, a studio show I presented some time ago: "Sir, in the light of present events in Birmingham, what say you now?" I can see him shuffling his feet, sweat gathering across his brow as he is made to eat his careless words.
I sign off in a single sentence: "Remember I told you so." And a final farewell to Rosa Parks: "But if the while I think on Rosa, dear friend/All losses are restored and sorrows end."
