1. Why do you think there was such a conflict between the black and white residents of London in the 1950s?
Writing in The Guardian (24th August 2002), Alan Travis reports that new
evidence has come to light about the Notting Hill racial riots. Over five nights
in August 1958, a great deal of violent crime was committed by both black and
white people on the streets of Notting Hill and Notting Dale in London. Official
reports from the Metropolitan Police at the time suggested that the attacks
were simply the work of ‘ruffians and hooligans’ and were not directly related
to racism. However, apparently secret papers and private statistics have now
been uncovered which tell a different story. The papers include eye witness
accounts from the police who were patrolling the streets, and these indicate
that most of the violence was committed by white working class men who
were out ‘nigger-hunting’. 300-400 such men are alleged to have been
spotted, armed with iron bars, butchers’ knives and weighted leather belts,
and out on a mission to ‘Keep Britain White’. Of the 108 people who were
arrested and charged, 72 were white and 36 ‘coloured’, many of whom had
acted in retaliation against the white men’s attacks. Thus it would seem that
the riots did have a racial motive and were largely the work of white
xenophobics, but the police and the government’s attempts to deny this have
led to grave mistrust of the Met by London’s black residents.
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/nottinghillcarnival2002/story/0,12331,780023,0
0.html
Questions:
1. Why do you think there was such a conflict between the black and white
residents of London in the 1950s?
2. Why would the police have been keen to deny that the riots were racially
motivated?
3. What do such ‘hate crimes’ reveal about race relations in a supposedly
multicultural society like Britain?
4. The Notting Hill Carnival began in 1959 as a response to these riots. What
kind of ‘counter-discourse’ does this suggest?
5. How reliable do you think these ‘secret’ police reports are as evidence of
what really happened on the streets of Notting Hill?
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