The West Indies Cricket Tour to England in 1976 came at a time of mounting attacks and provocations on black communities both by fascist groups such as the National Front and by the institutionally racist police forces. The situation was inflamed by the comments of England Captain and native South African Tony Greig, who before the tour claimed "I intend to make them grovel", a comment which came amid the controversy about apartheid and sporting boycotts. Includes a showing of the BBC […]
Namibia: Genocide And The Second Reich "The ghosts of the Namibian genocide have been reawakened. They return to haunt liberal post-war Germany, and in doing so they force Germany to wake-up to a very uncomfortable fact that the dark racial theories that helped inspire the Nazis run much deeper into German and European history than most people want to acknowledge." The powerful documentary by David Olusoga (BBC) is the story of Germany's forgotten genocide. It takes a sensitive and […]
Rasicm: A History: Part 1 The first part of Racism: A History was screened in March this year on BBC4. Partly filmed at Bristol Radical History week last year, the first of this excellent three part documentary deals with the rise of transatlantic slavery. Bristol Radical History Group think this is one of the best documentary series we have ever seen on the BBC. What did other viewers think on the BBC website? Here is a selection: "This should be shown in every secondary school in the country. […]
Cunard Yanks Bristol premiere of a Cunard Yanks already shown in Liverpool and New York to popular aclaim. In the early 1950s young, white, Liverpool seamen who worked the Cunard Line, were sailing to New York. Although they did not know it at the time, they were to collide with the explosion of a new cultural scene in the U.S.A. This was the great migration of Afro-Americans to the northern states and the cities of Chicago, Detroit and New York which had brought new music, dance and fashion to […]
Berlin, 1939. A young, brilliant trumpet player, Hieronymus, is arrested in a Paris café. The star musician was never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sidney Griffiths, the only witness that day, still refuses to speak of what he saw. When Chip Jones, his friend and fellow band member, comes to visit, recounting the discovery of a strange letter, Sid begins a slow journey towards redemption. From the smokey bars of pre-war […]
This classic text is the most comprehensive and extensively researched history of black people in Britain. The sections on the black radicals of the 18th and 19th century are a must as is Fryer's demolition of British establishment attempts to rewrite themselves as the moral and legal vanguard in the abolition of slavery. Fryer's social history not only enlightens us about individual black political figures in this process but also covers such disparate groups as boxers, musicians and soldiers […]
