Plaques honour carnival founder

The founder of the Notting Hill Carnival has been honoured in central London at a ceremony in which two commemorative plaques were unveiled.

Fifty years ago the late activist Claudia Jones organised Britain's first event celebrating Caribbean culture.

It grew into a street party which in 1964 became the west London carnival.

John S Jeremy, High Commissioner for Trinidad, was among those at the unveiling of blue and bronze plaques at Portobello Road and Powis Square.

Known as the "mother of the Notting Hill Carnival", Ms Jones was born in Trinidad in 1915 but spent most of her adult life in the US.

Celebratory walk

In 1955 she was deported from the US for "un-American" activities and given asylum in Britain, where she founded and edited the West Indian Gazette, Britain's first black weekly newspaper.

Following the 1958 riots in Notting Hill, she organised a walk from Powis Square to Tavistock Square to celebrate positive aspects of Caribbean culture.

Claudia Jones also founded Britain's first black weekly newspaper

A few months later Ms Jones organised Britain's first Caribbean carnival, held indoors at a hall in St Pancras. This continued annually until Claudia and friends established the first carnival on the streets of Notting Hill.

This year's Notting Hill Carnival is expected to attract 1.5 million people to west London from Saturday.

Jak Beula, founder of the Black history organisation Nubian Jak Community Trust, said: "It is wonderful that someone who gave so much to her community, and who stood up for justice and equality, should finally be recognised for giving Britain its greatest symbol of cultural diversity - The Notting Hill Carnival."

Allyson Williams, interim chair of London Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, hoped the plaques would "remind us all of the sacrifices that others have made, so that today we can enjoy the freedoms of a truly multicultural Britain".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7577113.stm

NOTTINGHILL RIOTS 1976

Remembering the Notting Hill riot
By Emma Griffiths BBC News website, London



This year marks 30 years since the Notting Hill Carnival riot in 1976 - an important year for race relations and one which saw carnival hit the headlines - albeit for the wrong reasons.
1976 was bang in the middle of a period of racial upheaval that would lead to the Brixton and Toxteth riots of the early 1980s.
Tempers were boiling among young black men over police use of the "sus" law, under which anybody could be stopped, searched and held, even if only suspected of planning a crime.
Anticipating some trouble, 3,000 police officers turned up - ten times the amount of previous, relatively peaceful, events.
This raised the tension, but what sparked the riot is still open to question.
White fascist gangs were said to be at large. Police said it began after attempts to arrest a pickpocket.



Whatever set it off, police officers were soon dodging a hail of bottles and a surging crowd.
Windows were smashed, fires were lit and ill-equipped police officers picked up dustbin lids and milk crates to charge the rioters. More than 100 officers and 60 other people were taken to hospital.
One officer interviewed in hospital afterwards told the BBC: "There were missiles coming at us from all directions, some over a lengthy period, bottles, bricks and the like."
BBC London radio presenter Dotun Adebayo was 16 at the time and remembers dancing to calypso music on Portobello Road when the trouble started.



Shower of missiles

He said: "Within seconds the whole place erupted and I realized I was in the middle of a serious disturbance.
"I had never seen policemen running away from a situation before.
"I don't know where all the rocks came from but they were raining down on the fleeing cops.
"One or two police vehicles...tried to make it up the road but were turned back with a shower of missiles."
It went on for hours, as police tried to contain the violence.
Seventeen youths were eventually charged but only two were convicted after a case costing £250,000, a record at the time.

Questions were later raised about whether carnival should continue.
Professor Chris Mullard, chairman of organisers London Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, said: "It became very difficult.
"Carnival was always seen by the state and the establishment as something that they wanted to stop, because they saw it for what it was - a form of cultural resistance."
He said it became a "running battle" between organisers and the "establishment".
But there was a determination to see it continue, and carnivalists started to form alliances with sympathetic groups - like trade unions.
He sees the riot as important in the history of race relations, giving rise as it did to the implementation of the Race Relations Act 1976 which prohibited racial discrimination.

As carnival changed, so did the social make-up of Notting Hill as the 1970s and 80s saw the area "gentrified", with wealthy residents moving in - many of whom are still no fans of carnival.
But relations with the police have greatly improved, although is still heavily patrolled by officers who prepare all year round for it.
Prof Mullard said commissioner Sir Ian Blair and his predecessors have all been positive about the event.
Ch Insp Rod Charles, who was a beat bobby in Notting Hill in the 1980s and is still involved in the operation, said things had changed a lot since 1976.

Carnival has grown exponentially," he said. "We have got a number of people travelling from different parts of the world and the UK.
"Things are certainly, in our opinion, going very well in terms of police and community relations."
For Mr Adebayo, the event is now one of the most peaceful of its size in the world.
"I saw a lot of terrified faces in 1976 and 1977. Faces of young kids and parents who didn't know where to turn to safety. I hope I never see that again," he said.
"But we shouldn't forget 1976 and its impact on this country before Lord Scarman picked up the pieces of the Brixton riots years later."



Alway remember the past, always remember your roots.



Mas Assassin.

Notting Hill riots - 50 years on

By Alice Bhandhukravi


BBC News, London









As Notting Hill prepares for this weekend's carnival, the memory of what happened on those streets exactly 50 years ago remains etched on the memory of the community.
August 1958 saw some of the worst rioting in British history in what is now one of London's most trendy and sought-after neighbourhoods.
But 50 years ago the working-class area in west London, known as 'Notting Dale', was little more than a slum.
Newly arrived migrants from the Caribbean had settled in the Colville area alongside the white working-class, and it was an uncomfortable existence.
'Colour bars' saw black people turned away from pubs and consequently 'shebeens' or illegal bars sprung up providing social places for black people.



Landlords refused to rent to black families, advertising for rooms to rent specifying 'no coloureds' while other crammed several people into one room and charged over the odds.
Velma Davis remembers arriving in the area as a young woman from Trinidad in 1957.
"Accommodation was the big problem. In those days they had big signs.
"Signs were up at the windows - no blacks, no Irish, no dogs, no children. So that was difficult."
She said Teddy boys hung out on street corners, and at night they took to 'hunting' black men who they perceived to be 'taking their women'.



'Innocuous dispute'
Ms Davis said racist insults were regularly thrown at her in the street.
"I didn't know they were talking to me because where I came from I didn't know about black and white."
There were isolated beatings in the months preceding the August Bank Holiday but it was riots in Nottingham that prompted an eruption of violence in the already tense Notting Hill.


Local historian Tom Vague said it began with an "innocuous domestic dispute" between a Jamaican guy, Ray Morrison, and his Swedish wife Majbritt outside Latimer Road Tube station.
"It was a really poor area at that time. A group of white men were heckling Ray and then she shouted back at them.
"Some West Indian men turned up. It was just a scuffle between the black and white men but that was the incident which set off the riot weekend."
It was the catalyst for widespread attacks on black homes by white mobs, wielding sticks, bottles and iron bars.
The black community responded with the height of the fighting raging outside Totobags Café in Blenheim Crescent - a black hang-out now famous for the travel bookshop which featured in the film Notting Hill.
Mr Vague said: "At the climax of the riots the mob surged out of Notting Dale to the east across Ladbroke Grove to attack the Colville area".

Race relations Act
Hundreds of people were arrested, the majority of which were white.
While racism was overt, slum housing and poor living conditions have previously been blamed for the tensions between socially excluded groups.
The riots led to a strong desire to heal the social wounds inflicted by the fighting which eventually gave rise to the Notting Hill Carnival.
But the fighting in 1958 also paved the way for the first Race Relations Act of 1965 which outlawed racial discrimination.
Mary Gardiner who has worked in the voluntary sector in the area since the 1970s said the riots were a "watershed for community development".
"They showed us we had to work in partnership to make things better for all people.
"We shouldn't be ashamed. It's much better to look at what we learned and see how we grew from it than forget about it and pretend it didn't happen."



Know your history people, Carnival is not all jump and wine, its roots always lead to the soil of resistance and struggle, against oppression and subjugation.
Mas Assassin.