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

The Pops - it was timed to coincide with the Caribbean’s largest and most famous carnival in Trinidad.
The brief introductory statement to the souvenir brochure came with the title “A Peoples’
Art is the Genesis of their Freedom”. Here we reproduce Claudia’s words from the brochure.
This relationship between art, culture and politics has always been an integral part of the anti
racist struggle. One person who understood this was another Trinidadian, John la Rose. After
he passed the Guardian wrote, “John La Rose was the elder statesman of Britain’s black
communities. Like Marcus Garvey, CLR James, George Padmore, Fidel Castro and Frantz
Fanon, John belongs to a Caribbean tradition of radical and revolutionary activism whose
input has reverberated across continents. The depth and breadth of his contribution to the
struggle for cultural and social change, for racial equality and social justice, for the humanisation
of society, is unparalleled in the history of the black experience in Britain.” One of
John’s favourite sayings was “We didn’t come alive in Britain,” an allusion to the struggles
that had been waged by Caribbean peoples in the Caribbean against colonialism and for
workers’ and people’s power, something which had began with the first Carribean labour
movements in 1919. In the 1940s in Trinidad, he helped to found the Workers Freedom Movement
and edited its journal, Freedom. John’s influence on British anti-racism from the 1960’s
through to the 1990’s has not been given the acknowledgement it deserves and we are
grateful to Dr Gus John for his article charting John’s journey through art, culture and politics.
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