‘A People’s Art is the Genesis of Their Freedom’
▻https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/11/a-peoples-art-is-the-genesis-of-their-freedom
In 1958, in a rather wet and cloudy August, Notting Hill exploded into racist violence. One evening, a fight between a white Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, and her husband Raymond, who was Jamaican, had drawn the attention of onlookers outside Ladbroke Grove tube station. A fight broke out between some of Raymond’s friends and some passing white men; the next night, Majbritt was assaulted in the street as she walked home by a group of young white men who threw bottles at her, hit her with an iron bar, and shouted racist epithets. This wasn’t an isolated incident: there had been racist violence in London all summer, as well as in other cities like Nottingham. Britain in the 1950s had an increasingly large black and Asian population, as people moved from across the empire and former empire to settle in the ‘motherland’; the 1948 British Nationality Act had given all imperial subjects the right to live and work in the United Kingdom. Some white British citizens welcomed this and their new neighbours; many reacted with suspicion, intolerance, and anger.
The riots in Notting Hill raged for about a fortnight, as young white men from the area attacked predominately West Indian houses and businesses. On the first night of riots, three to four hundred teddy boys who wanted to ‘Keep Britain White’ raged around West London armed with butchers’ knives and iron bars, leaving five young black men unconscious in the street. The police arrested and charged over a hundred people, overwhelmingly white; nine white men were sentenced to four years each in prison, intended as an exemplar to others who might be tempted to take up the racist cause.