Current Events > TIL Britain had a Black Power party as well

(+) Yeah! (+)

Panther*

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/britain-black-power-movement-risk-forgotten-historians

The Cambridge academic Robin Bunce said: "There is a fundamental danger of erasing the very notion of a struggle at all. I've been researching this for four and a half years and there have been so many occasions when people have said to me: 'There was no black struggle in Britain. You're thinking of South Africa or America.'

"The narrative that feeds it is the one that Britain is the utopia of fair play. We have such a commitment to individual rights, we have such a commitment to common sense and decency that there is no systematic racism in Britain."

Bunce and Paul Field have published a political biography of Darcus Howe one of the most significant black activists in Britain using him as a framework for a history of the black power movement in Britain.

They argue that key flashpoints, such as the trial of the Mangrove Nine in 1970 and the Black People's March of 1981 are becoming a kind of forgotten history.

In the book's introduction they argue "there has been a resurgence of outright denial, linked to the romantic, dumbed-down 'whiggish' view of history that suggests racism was always someone else's problem".

...

The book says Britain's black power movement was galvanised into existence by what was happening in the US and by speeches made at the Roundhouse in north London in 1967 by Stokely Carmichael. "From that point onwards you get this explosion of black power happening in Britain," said Bunce.
Within a week of the conference, an organisation called the United Coloured People's Association had expelled all its white members and a new black-power-orientated manifesto was being written. Within a year, there was a British Black Panther movement.

By the early 1970s, there was a significant black power movement in Britain that came to wider prominence with the Mangrove Nine trial.

The Mangrove was a Notting Hill restaurant that served as a wider black culture community centre. The police saw it as somewhere where terrorism was being cooked up, and "fundamentally believed black radicalism was criminal", said Bunce.

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are you under the impression that america is the only place that treated and continues to treat black people poorly?

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SevenTenths posted...

are you under the impression that america is the only place that treated and continues to treat black people poorly?

Absolutely not, and I'm not ignorant to Britain's atrocities committed over the course of centuries. I just didn't know that Britain had a Black Panther movement. By the title of the article I linked, it seems to be becoming a footnote in British history - historical revisionism claiming things were always good for black people in Britain, or at least glossing over any sort of civil rights activism of the late 60's.

I fucked up the title of the thread, I know.

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