“Black Was the Colour of Our Fight”

The Transnational Roots of British Black Power

Bibliographic Data

ID23202425
AuthorsRosie Wild (corresponding author)
Year2015
Pages25-46
Publication date2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueOther Special Relationship (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781137392701_2
OpenAlexW2481096833
ISBN9781137392701
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited13

"My biggest motivation for joining the Panthers was my experience growinging up as a black youth in England."1 So says Linton Kwesi Johnson—poet, reggae musician, record label boss, and former Black Power activist. The fact that the United Kingdom had its own Black Power movement, which ran concurrently with its more famous American namesake, has been largely overlooked by historians. UK Black Power developed as a reaction of the postwar generation of black immigrants, who came predominantly from the Caribbean and Southern Asia, to their experience of white racism in the United Kingdom.2 It was shaped by their traditions of resisting UK colonial exploitation in their home countries and built on the foundations of anticolonialism and resistance to racial discrimination laid by previous generations in the United Kingdom, most notably African students in the 1930s and 1940s. It was also heavily influenced by, and often mimetic of, American Black Power, which provided a blueprint for rebellion in the urban industrial centers of the West. In the United Kingdom, members of Black Power groups neither carried guns nor engaged in violence, although their fiery rhetoric and the state's heavy-handed response to them suggested otherwise. Beginning its brief life in June 1967, the UK Black Power movement was already moribund by the middle of the 1970s, its coherence fatally undermined by the pressure of external repression and the movement's internal tensions.KeywordsRacial DiscriminationBlack PeopleRace RelationLabour GovernmentLabour PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ancient history · Black British · Black Power · Immigration · Kingdom · Middle Passage · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Racism · Rhetoric · Sociology · White (mutation) · Australian History and Society · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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