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

Introduction
This project,‘Coming of Age’, has tried to harness the power of narratives of
anti-racist resistance. It is about the stories people tell about their lives, and the
cultural and political frameworks which form the context of those lives. The preservation
of our past, and presenting the stories of extraordinary men and women is important
for three reasons. Firstly, it allows us to learn how others in the past challenged racism,
secondly we can learn from the issues they confronted, both outside their communities, but also
within their own communities, and thirdly it enables us to imagine a different future by
starting a new kind of historically grounded conversations about both racism, and anti-racism.
When we relate stories of our lives, we implicitly say something to others of our political
worldview. Our parents understtod the importance of this, and made us
listen to the stories adults told each other, probably they had learnt in the same way,
so now if we don’t tell these stories to our children, we can’t then complain that they
don’t understand our past, nor should we be surprised if they in turn relate to the
present only through media or academic texts. Although many do not see the
relevance of history, they would be surprised how much of their own sense of self, of
identity, has been constructed through historical narrative. We are not taught this
history at schools, and often the history we are presented equates historical narrative with
being ‘British’ with an acceptance of British history where the narratives of Black and Asian
people, and specifically of the resistance is absent. Yet, many of the ideas of anti-racism
have been assimilated into national policy, art and culture, without any recognition of where
these ideas were derived, of the resistance which forced the country to change. Just think
about asian and black art, food, music, race equality laws, and human rights laws. How
many people really know how these changes occurred in Britain. If they did perhaps they
would learn that that the very notion of ‘British democratic values’, are not British at all.
We only have to look at the national curriculum to see the absence of black and asian
history. In fact we teach the story of the American civil rights movements, but nothing
about our own civil rights movement. This is not good for Britain. It means we are raising
generations of children who do not fully understand the modern world. There are few landmarks
celebrating the history of black and asian anti-racism, and this is something we need to address.
We started this project with the assistance of a small grant from the Heritage Fund
to share the history of Southall, and the Southall Youth Movement. It is from this past
that both Southall Monitoring Group, now the Monitoring Group, and Southall Black
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