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

West Indian Gazette.
17. It was later that the concept of Black began to break down. on the one hand, Pan-Africanists
began to exclude East African Asians from their deliberations, Asians to carp against the
descriptor Black as a denial of their identity. on the other hand, local and national governments
began after the 1981 ‘riots’ and Lord Scarman’s recommendations, to funnel monies to
community groups on the basis of ethnic, cultural and religious identification. In the event, by the
mid-1980s Black became a highly contested term and inevitably most people began to use the
initials BME and later BAMER (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee) as descriptors.
18. It was considerably later that books appeared marking the importance of Malcolm X’s visits to
and influence on the black movement in the UK: Jan Carew’s Ghosts in Our Blood: with Malcolm
X in England, Africa and the Caribbean (1994), Marika Sherwood’s Malcolm X: visits abroad April
1964–February 1965 (2011) and Saladin Ambar’s Malcolm X at Oxford Union (2014).
19. Derek Humphry’s exposé False Messiah: the story of Michael X was published in 1977 after
Michael X had been hanged for murder in Trinidad.
20. Speeches from the acknowledged Black Power orator Roy Sawh at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park
in the 1960s, are available on the web. A book of his speeches and reflections was published in
1987: From Where I Stand: black people want to hear and white people fear (Hansib, 1987).
21. See, for example, Susan Craig, ‘Black Power groups in London 1967–1969’, BSc thesis, university
of Edinburgh, 1970; G. Llewellyn-Watson, ‘The sociology of black nationalism: identity, protest
and the concept of “Black Power” among West Indian immigrants in Britain’, PhD thesis,
university of york, 1972; Kalbir Shukra, ‘The changing patterns of Black Politics in Britain’,
university of Canterbury, 1995. More recently Rosalind Wild, basing her PhD thesis for the
university of Sheffield on retrospective interviews with activists of the time, wrote ‘Black was
the colour of our fight: Black Power in Britain 1955–1976’ (2008); Robert Waters, ‘Imagining
Britain through radical blackness: race, America and the end of Empire’ (PhD thesis Queen Mary
university of London, 2014).
22. A. Sivanandan had already written ‘Black Power: the politics of existence’, in Politics and Society
1, no. 2 (1971) republished in A Different Hunger (Pluto Press, 1982) and ‘Culture and Identity’ in
Liberator 10, no. 6 (June 1970).
23. Two other films are worth noting here: Blacks Britannica (1978) dir. David Koff and Mangrove
Nine (1973) dir. Franco Rosso.
24. The book came out of a series of talks and conversations in 1997 organised by the George
Padmore Institute on ‘Life Experience with Britain’.
25. A photographic book which says much about such agency, and significantly includes Asians,
unfortunately now out of print is The Arrivants: a pictorial essay on Blacks in Britain (1987).
26. Winston James, ‘Migration, racism and identity: the Caribbean experience in Britain’, New Left
Review (May–June 1992).
27. There was, as he spent more time on his television career from 1985, a rift between him and the
erstwhile Black ‘comrades’ with whom he had worked on community initiatives such as the Black
and Third World Book Fair.
28. It should be noted, though, that in the UK in August 1967 C. L. R. James gave an important
speech ‘Black Power, its past, today, and the way ahead’ which can be accessed at: http://
www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20 Power!/
SugahData/Books/James.S.pdf.
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