Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

From April 10 to 12, 1981, about 1,000 Londoners, mainly black youth, fought the police in the Brixton Uprising. The Brixton Riots brought violence to Britain's capital on a level unseen for a century, and saw the first use of petrol bombs against the British state on the streets of Britain. They were the most explosive events in an arc of black-led but multiracial riots in anger at unemployment, poor housing, and institutional police and state racism that had begun in Bristol in 1980, and would soon spread to engulf Liverpool and other towns and cities of Britain. Brixton, South London, April 13, 1981: A man holds up his fist in the Black Power salute as he stands on top of a burned-out car, hit by a petrol bomb during rioting over the previous Wo days. The result of ongoing economic pressures and police harassment in the poor and predominantly black neighborhood of Brixton, the rioters' aggression was primarily focused on the police and police property. (Getty Images) Brixton in south London was the undisputed “capital of black Britain,” home to generations of migrant workers. However, general social deprivation and a rise in unemployment after the arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 had hit the young black population particularly hard. Insult and injustice were added to injury on an almost daily basis by an institutionally racist police force. In 1978 Thatcher had played ... log in or subscribe to read full text