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

founded by George Padmore in 1937 and the Pan-African Federation (PAF), founded in 1944.
There were also many important buildings such as the West Indian Students Union, and
India House, in Highgate. India House was opened in 1905 by Henry Hyndman and the
MP Dadabhai Naoroji, the Irish Suffragist, Charlotte Despard and Bhikaji Cama. This
building became an important meeting place for people from Asian, the feminist’s movements
as well as Irish nationalist. Some of the prominent Indian revolutionaries and
nationalists were associated with India House, including Shyamji Krishna Verma, Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar, Bhikaji Cama, V.N. Chatterjee, Lala Har Dayal, and here the ideas around
universal suffrage, self determination and equality in Britain were discussed and debated.
Our third article charts this journey. From Rebellion to Riots was written by Sivanandan is an
important article and we are pleased to be able to reproduce it for this publication. As we
will see the issues around Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism and the importance
of solidarity with the white working class, were all themes which would characterise the
British Black Power movement, and later the Asian Youth Movements, yet they were issues
that were being discussed by black and asian organisations in Britain as far back as the 1920’s.
The role of women within the anti-racist movement is deeply under
researched, and rarely written about. We have tried to identify individuals
who were active in the anti racist movement in our timelines, though we
acknowledge that there are many more women present than we have mentioned.
One person who we cannot ignore is Claudia Jones. Claudia Jones was a Trinidadian communist
who came to London, via Harlem, courtesy of the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. Jones
moved to New York with her parents when she was seven. It was there, during the campaign to
defend the Scottsboro boys, a group of young African-Americans framed for rape in the south,
that she joined the American Communist party in which she was later to play a leading role.
Twice interned for her political beliefs on Ellis Island - ironically, the spiritual home for immigrants
fleeing poverty and persecution - she was eventually ordered to leave in 1955 and sent to England,
and it was here that she established one the first Black newspapers, ‘The West Indian Gazette’.
The events of 1958, in Notting Hill and Nottingham, and the murder Kelso Cochrane in 1959, had
a profound impact on black and asian communities across Britain, and Claudia was determined
to do something. “We need something to get the taste of Notting Hill out of our mouths,” she
said. “Someone suggested we should hold a carnival,” says Donald Hinds, who was in the room
at the time. “We all started laughing because it was so cold and carnival is this out-on-the-street
thing. It seemed like a ridiculous suggestion.” But Jones had other ideas and set about making
arrangements. A few months later, on January 30, 1959, London’s first Caribbean carnival was
held in St Pancras town hall. Televised by the BBC for Six-Five Special - a forerunner to Top Of
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