Creation for Liberation 1 (1979) Produced by the Cultural Media Collective (CMC) Amsterdam, Netherlands Dedicated in loving memory to Joe Simmons- founding member of Cultural Media Collective Director, Camera, Editing: Ray Kril Part One Part 1 of Creation for Liberation (CFL) is a celebration of the 10th anniversary (1969 - 1979) of Bogle-LOuverture Bookshop and Publishing House, in London, featuring dance, music -- including blues singer Jimmy James -- and two poems by reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, inter-cut with a discussion about the role of the black community in Britain . The first book Bogle-LOuverture published, in 1972, was The Groundings with my Brothers by the Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney, former professor in African History at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, who returned to Guyana from Tanzania in 1974, and was murdered in Georgetown on 13 June 1980 . Creation for Liberation Part Two. (1981) Reflections in Red is the second part of CFL, and deals with the April 1981 riots in Brixton, a borough in south London, with 30 percent sub-standard housing-- mainly inhabited by black council tenants -- few social amenities and a high unemployment rate. Added to this social deprivation was the attitude of the Metropolitan Police, and the heavy-handed use of the SUS laws to stop and search young blacks. An area known as the Frontline became the battleground. n 1978 the Special Patrol Group (SPG) sealed off the Frontline and searched everybody entering or leaving the area, one of several operations by the police intended to intimidate the Frontline community. Tension between the local community and the police increased in the week leading up to the riots. At 23h00 on Friday, 3 April the Frontline area around Lesson and Dexter Roads was sealed off by the police and 20 arrests were made. Throughout the following week Operation Swamp 81 continued with 1,000 people, mainly black youths, stopped and searched. On Friday 10 April, around 17h00, a young black with a knife wound was arrested by the police. However, a group of local people managed to free the youth and he was taken to a nearby hospital. The following day the police occupied the Frontline, sitting in vans every 50 meters waiting for something to happen, and Reflection in Red with music by Jamaican reggae singer Oku Onuora, illustrates what happened next, with footage of police, crounched behind perspex shields being forced to retreat under a hail of stones and petrol bombs. This wasnt a race riot, as one black youth interviewed on Dexter Road explains, it was a riot against the police and the system. And his remarks and the complaints from other residents about the attitude of the police are remarkably similar to those expressed by visitors to the Bogle -LOuverture bookshop two years earlier. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, David McNee blamed the riots on outside agitators who brought petrol bombs into the area -- a rather patronising remark, suggesting that the local black people couldnt even organise a riot. Reflection in Red also contains footage of a demonstration outside County Hall in London where the inquest into the deaths of 13 black teenagers in a house fire during a party in New Cross was being held. The demonstation was to highlight the racist element in the New Cross fire, something the Metropolitan Police either played down, or deliberately ignored when investigating attacks on the black community. In November 1981 a retired judge, Lord Scarman, produced a report into the Brixton riots which reached an obvious conclusion, namely that racial disadvantage is a fact of current British life and he warned that urgent action is needed if it is not to become an endemic, ineradicable disease, threatening the very survival of our society. Twelve years later another retired judge, Lord Macpearson, produced a report into the 1993 murder of black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death at bus-stop in London by a group of white racist thugs, and concluded that institutional racism had influenced the initial investigation by the Metropolitan Police into the still-unsolved crime.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 17:44:20 +0000
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