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

Art, Activism, Race and Social Justice - 1900/1976
1905
The Workers Welfare League of
India
In 1916 a body of British and Indian
activists formed the Workers
Welfare League to ensure Indian
and British workers had the same
rights, thereby ensuring that the
labour conditions in India was not
used to keep British labour
conditions at a low level.
1919
Race Riots across UK
In the wake of the First World War
and demobilization, the surplus of
labour led to dissatisfaction among
Britain’s workers and across the
seaport towns, white crowds
attacked Black workers, their
families and communities,. This
was most intense in the places with
the largest black communities,
London, Glasgow, Liverpool,
Cardiff, Salford, Hull,
South Shields , Newport, and Barry.
1925
Shapurji Saklatvala was born in India.
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia of
November 1917 was an inspiration to
Saklatvala joined the Communist Party
with Emile Burns, R. Palme Dutt, J.
Walton Newbold, Helen Crawfurd,
and others as part of an organised faction
called the Left Wing Group, later they
joined the Community Part GB. He
attended the 2nd Pan-African
Congress held in Paris in 1921 as a
delegate of the CPGB. He was a MP in
Battereas North for the Communist Party
(GB).
Amy Ashwood was born in Jamaica, on 10 January 1897.
She met Marcus Garvey, with whom she founded the
Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA) in 1914. She married Marcus 1919, but the marriage
quickly broke down, ending in divorce in 1922. She moved to
Great Britain, where she struck up a friendship with Ladipo
Solanke. Together, they founded the Nigerian Progress
Union, and she later supported Solanke's West African
Students' Union. After a short spell in New York, she
returned to London opened the Florence Mills Social
Club a jazz club on Carnaby Street which became a gathering
spot for supporters of Pan-Africanism. She helped to establish
the International African Friends of Abyssinia with
C.L.R. James, the International African Service
Bureau with figures like George Padmore, Chris
Braithwaite and Jomo Kenyatta, and the London
Afro-Women's Centre. She chaired the first session of
the 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester in
1945.She helped to set up the "Afro Peoples Centre" in
Ladbroke Grove in 1953. She was a friend of Claudia Jones,
and was on the editorial board of the Brixton-based West
Indian Gazette, founded by Jones in 1958. In the wake of
the Notting Hill riots in 1958, she co-founded the
Association for the Advancement of Coloured
People. In 1959, she chaired an enquiry into race relations
following the murder of Kelso Cochrane in London.
West African Students Union
WASU was founded in 1925 to campaign for the improved welfare of African students. it was led by
Ladipo Solanke and Herbert Bankole-Bright, with the Amy Ashwood Garvey. Over time its
campaigns broadened to anti colonialism abroad and against colour bars in Britain.
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