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

had gone to hear the clash of the reggae sound systems. Carnival was the only place that
you would have the chance to hear Jah Shaka, Coxsone, Sufferer and Tottenham’s finest
Fatman Sound System all in the same place for FREE!
On my way to the carnival I felt my excitement increasing with each stop that the tube
made. For it seemed that this tube had been specifically reserved for young black carnival
goers. At each stop more and more black youths got on. You could see groups from north,
east, west and south London boarding the tube all with one destination in mind.
There were lots of different groupings, many of them identifiable as such because they
wore similar clothing to others in their group. Many had clearly put much time, thought and
effort into their carnival outfits. Some had bought their ghetto blasters with them, as if,
warming themselves, and everyone else in earshot, up for the carnival that was to come.
The atmosphere on the train journey was electric, for this was 70’s England where there
were few opportunities for the black community to gather together in remembrance and
celebration of our culture. Back in those day the most that we had were parties in our living
rooms, and underground blues dances which were always likely to be shut down or raided
by the local police. But this was our day, for it was legal and outside in the basking sunshine
of the famous 1976 heatwave, which was the hottest summer on record at the time.
So its fair to say that I went to the carnival full of heightened expectations, knowing that
I was going to have one of the best days of my young life so far.
But instead it turned into something totally different.
There was another backdrop to this years gathering that I had been unaware of at the
time. It seems that 1976 was also the year that the Metropolian Police Service (MPS) decided
that current legislation, as it was then, was simply not repressive enough when it came to
policing the Black community.
So they trawled old common law acts, that had been used and, most often, abandoned
during Victorian times, and came up with an offence that no white person had been arrested
for in this country in the past 100 years or more.
The Suspicious Persons Act or the SUS law as it commonly known.
The SUS law basically meant that police officers could, and did so in their thousands,
arrest a person who they considered to be acting suspiciously and charge the said person
with having committed the crime. The issue was that the officers did not need to have a
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