Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

we identified with that and we liked the torch, so we made a logo for SMY inspired by the
Black Power salute. It was all very spontaneous and quick. We did have a committee, and in
the beginning, we didn’t have a leader, but I was eventually asked to be the leader, because
of my brother, I became the front man, and all it meant was that I would have contact with
other people, whilst the others stayed in the background. We had the sense to know that we
had to be careful,
What sort of things did the Southall Youth Movement do?
We came to find out about the National Front. Initially we didn’t know about the National
Front, we know about skinheads, and we didn’t really care if the skinheads were part of a
group or not, but we started talking to the different socialist groups which suddenly came to
Southall. Working with the socialist groups and later the Anti Nazi League, helped us to understand
about the workings of the far right. Some of the white people worked with us, they
went to NF meetings and told us what was happening, where they were going to sell papers,
and have meetings and if they intended to attack people in certain places. So, we found out,
and we would get our squads together and fight them. We had a lot of volunteers, hard core
people who wanted to fight the skinheads, this was an important part of the work.
We wanted the make Southall a no-go areas for skinheads, and so if they came here we
would fight, in that sense if was quite effective. Southall very quickly became a no-go area
for skinheads, and the violent racist attacks ceased. I think a lot of families stopped getting
harassed because of us so it worked. However, at another level nobody really wanted
violence, but you need to understand that we had grown up facing violence, and nobody
wanted to talk about the subject, it was if the violence we face didn’t exist, and before SYM
many people had been beaten, and even when Chagger died, they wanted to present it as
anything but a racist murder, nobody wanted to talk about violence or racism, and we were
afraid that it would remembered as just another death, and so wanted to register its meaning
to others.
We didn’t totally like the white left groups. We had concerns that these white lefties kept
coming to Southall, and telling us how we could achieve liberation. We kept saying to them,
‘nobody tells us what to do’. We knew that they weren’t totally committed, because when
things got difficult they just disappeared. We wanted to see things simply as black and white,
but we also knew we had to learn about the left and right, about fascism, and other things
and we attempted to do this.
We also had an impact nationally, especially up north. We contacted young people from
Bradford, they came to see us, and then we in 1981 we spent a couples of weeks with them
in Bradford. The two communities were totally different, whereas Southall was vibrant, I
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