Notting Hill Carnival
I was out buying stuff and Tamara told me Notting Hill Carnival was on, so I went. Or rather I walked with thousands of others from Paddington. I didn’t get to see the parade, but I saw a lot of people.
On the way there a notice by a police van said that facial recognition software was being used. On the way back to Paddington station I looked in the police van and a man was scanning images on a screen, and outside a man in handcuffs was shouting out to his friends – ‘I don’t know why’ and ‘It wasn’t my fault’. I wonder how good the software is? The non sequitur of the two sentences next to one another was kind of funny and sad.
There were a lot of police along the road – several hundred at a guess, and I was thinking what a time consuming waste it is for the most part. I guess, I should say maybe. I should say that without the big police presence all hell would break loose. is that really what Notting Hill Carnival is like - barely suppressed violence?
Where to start?
Start with Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915. As an eight-year-old she moved with her parents to New York. She grew up in Harlem and became a Marxist and a significant Communist Party figure out of the racial prejudice she saw.
In 1955, during the anti-communist repression of the early Cold War she was imprisoned for nine months and then deported under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 for her political activities.
Her offence was to 'advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence, to organise a group advocating such overthrow, or knowingly to belong to such a group.'
She was deported from the US to Britain because Trinidad was then a British colony. Without that fact she would have been deported to a Communist Bloc country as others were.
Now living in London, in 1958 she founded the West Indian Gazette, that reported on discrimination in employment and housing, reported on racist attacks and on international anti-colonial politics.
Then, in what became know as the Notting Hill race riots, white gangs attacked mostly people from the Caribbean over several days beginning on Bank Holiday August 1958.
Jones wanted a public response to assert the community's identity and celebrate Caribbean culture. Its dual purpose was to bring people together and to send out a message saying we are here, and the first festival was held in January 1959.
It was held indoors, but it couldn't be contained and the next major organiser was Rhaune Laslett who turned the Carnival into something bigger.
She was local, born in London, and a social worker and activist The National Portrait Gallery describes her as the "principal organiser of the Notting Hill Festival, that evolved into the Notting Hill Carnival."
Claudia Jones meanwhile, who was not mentioned in the NPG quote, died of a heart attack in London on Christmas Eve 1964, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx.
In the 1970s relations between the police and young black Londoners were extremely bad. It was the time of the 'sus law' that allowed the police to stop and search anyone they thought might be guilty of an offence, and it was almost entirely young black people who were stopped and searched. Being on a public street and stopped while all around you passers-by were looking and judging, was a major factor in the relations with the police.
The 'sus law' was was part of section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 that allowed prosecution of a 'suspected person or reputed thief' found loitering in certain places with intent to commit an arrestable offence.
Black people complained that they were unfairly singled out, and were ‘suspected’ merely by being Black.
After the Brixton riots in 1981, for which the 'sus law' was a major contributory factor, the offence was abolished by section 8 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981.
But in 1976 the law was still in effect and at the 1976 Carnival there was a major confrontation with the police. The fact is though that the Carnival grew to the size it is today, and over the years there have been hundreds of arrests, dozens of stabbings and some fatalities.
Now the numbers are coming through for this year's Carnival and I was wrong by a big margin for the numbers of police. In fact, 7.000 police were deployed.