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

tered with historical statues, art works, and street names recounting events around Britain’s
Empire. We don’t propose destroying these items, but we do think that over the coming years
we need to begin to address the legacies of this distorted historical narrative. If nothing else,
the debate around ‘British’ identity in a post Brexit country will force us to address this, as
we sometimes appear to be spiralling into the same racist environment which existed before.
Everyone who grew up in the 1970’s will remember the long hot summer of 1976.
However for many young people the summer was a ‘coming of age’, a moment when
British youth, both black and white, challenged the engrained racism of the 1970’s and
began to forge a new vision for Britain. This book tells the story of the young people
from London, who in 1976 took direct action to tackle racism, altered the debate on
racism, and in time developed the multicultural Britain we all know today. The stories
focus on the series of events which occurred during 1976, including Malawi refugee crisis in
January, the birth of Southall Youth Movement in June, the Notting Hill riots in August, the
start of the Grunwick Strike in August, and the birth of Rock against Racism in November.
There have been various projects which have told aspects of the different events, but no
project has linked the series of events into a cohesive narrative. This is not surprising. Marable
Manning (2011) reminds us that our political culture was hammered together over the years
with the imperfect tools of survival, and capacity building from below, “evolving and oscillating
constantly and often unpredictably between outright accommodation and overt resistance’.
As Jenny Bourne reminds us in her review of Black historical literature, every piece of
historical narrative is a contested space, and we have tried to consider these issues in our narrative.
The book allowed us to document the stories of activists, and think about how they
can be placed into this broader narrative. This book is therefore an attempt to present
our history. We have done this through oral history, photography, academic
writing, and activist personal memoirs, an approach called ‘living history’ by Marable
Manning (Manning (2011) Living Black History : How Reimaging African-American Past Can
Remake America’s Racial Future), and hopefully we have given the past another lease of life.
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