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

Art, Activism, Race and Social Justice - 1900/1976
1967
Universal Coloured Peoples Association
The UCPA was established in 1967 by Nigerian, Obi Bene
Egbuna and Indian, Ajay Ghose. The UCPA took a militant stand
against racism. Several members of UCPA were fined for
incitement to racism, most noticeable was Roy Sawah. The use of
Race Relations to fine leaders of the black power movement was
fairly common in the late 1960’s.
1967
The Congress on the Dialectics of
Liberation
The congress on the
Dialectics of
Liberation was an
international
congress organised in
London between 15 and 30 July 1967. Set
against the backdrop of the war in
Vietnam, uprisings in the US, the US Black
Power movement and the the antipsychiatry
movement, the aim of the
Congress was ‘to form a long-term
network of people who were interested in
an in-depth, nitty-gritty examination of
what seemed to be the most important
critical areas in the state of the human
species’. The wide spectrum of speakers
included Herbert Marcuse, William
Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, R.D Laing,
and Stokely Carmichael. Whilst in
London he addressed a meeting of
activists in Hackney invited by John La
Rose and CLR James, Micheal X, Stefan
Darcus Howe (below) is a British
broadcaster, writer, and civil liberties
campaigner. Like his uncle, CLR James,
Howe came from Trinidad. He arrived in
England and throughout his life he spoke
frequently with CLR James. He joined the
British Black Panthers in 1970, and
came to public attention as one of the
Mangrove Nine, when he marched to
the police station in Notting Hill, London,
to protest against police raids of the
Mangrove restaurant, and again in
1981 when he worked with John La
Rose, Gus John and others to organise
a 20,000-strong "Black People's
March" in protest at the handling of the
investigation into the New Cross Fire,
in which 13 black teenagers die. He is a
former editor of Race Today, and
former chair of the Notting Hill
Carnival. He is best known in the UK
for his Black on Black series on
Channel 4; his current affairs programme,
Devil's Advocate.
Kalipha and Horace Ove. His scorn for
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