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

From Resistance
to Rebellion
Reproduced courtesy of the Institute of Race Relations, publisher of Race & Class,
Vol XXIII, nos 2/3 1981
On 25 June 1940 Udham Singh was hanged. At a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society and the East India
Association at Caxton Hall, London, he had shot dead Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who (as the Lieutenant
Governor of the Punjab) had presided over the massacre of unarmed peasants and workers at
Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919. Udham was a skilled electrician, an active trade unionist and a delegate to the
local trades council, and, in 1938, had initiated the setting up of the first Indian Workers’ Association, in Coventry.
In October 1945 at Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester the fifth Pan-African Congress, breaking with its earlier
reformism, pledged itself to fight for the ‘absolute and complete independence’ of the colonies and an end to
imperialism, if need be through Gandhian methods of passive resistance. Among the delegates then resident
in Britain were Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore, Wallace-Johnson, C.L.R. James and Ras
Makonnen. W.E.B. DuBois, who had founded the Pan-African Congress in America in 1917, presided. In September
1975 three young West Indians held up a Knightsbridge restaurant for the money that would help set up
proper schools for the black community, finance black political groups and assist the liberation struggles in Africa.
Of such strands have black struggles in Britain been woven. But their pattern was set on the loom of British racism.
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