The mass media said it was a ‘riot’ that had erupted around me 50 years ago in Chapeltown, Leeds on 5/11/1975. In Chapeltown News, the community paper I helped produce, we treated it as a righteous protest against police harassment of local black youth.
For five weeks in the following summer I sat in the dock of Leeds Crown Court with eleven black youngsters. I’d objected at being struck by a cop as he ran, truncheon in the air, at the remaining youths after they’d overturned a police car, so they arrested me and charged me with threatening behaviour. When they realised I was with Chapeltown News, a thorn the flesh of Leeds police and the rest of the system, they concocted charges of incitement to riot and affray.
Much had happened between November 1975 and the trial in June 1976, and I’ve written about it a few times before, but it’s gone pretty much un-noticed, so I was pleased to be asked to contribute to a panel during the excellent Black Power at the Grassroots symposium at Manchester University on Friday just gone. As I tried to explain to a crowd of young scholars, black power activism made a crucial contribution to the acquittal of most of the youth.
I too was acquitted, to the surprise of Judge Beaumont, but I still carry the pain of being a pariah for some of the black power advocates in Leeds who supported the defence of the black youths. I mention this at the end of the script I used for the talk, which you can read here. (It’s about a ten minute read, and it includes the photos I used. I took this one of two of the acquitted defendants and one of the people who wasn’t very keen on this form of protest but who I somehow persuaded to be in the photo. Because they were early supporters of Rastafari in Leeds, I posed them in front of the lion.)
The talk’s main purpose, however, is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first uprising of black British youth; trying, as ever, to get rebellion properly inserted into this island’s story. Click here if you’d like to read it.