The forgotten racial history of Notting Hill Carnival

Coming off the tube at Holland Park, you can always hear it before you see it. The rhythmic soca beat beats in the distance, the faint echo of chanting and cheering punctuating the usually rare stillness. A colorful trail of feathers and frocks provides an impromptu road map, wandering through the pristine streets of Ladbroke Grove until you suddenly burst into a cacophony of sounds and smells, engulfed in a kaleidoscopic parade of rolling hips and infectious laughter.

Notting Hill Carnival is now a staple in the London calendar. Taking place every year over the August bank holiday, it is Europe’s biggest street party, attracting revelers of all ages and ethnicities looking for an opportunity to let their hair down in a collective alcohol-fuelled dance party.

But carnivals haven’t always looked like this. The euphoric celebrations that now characterize the weekend mask a traumatic and painful racial history that is often overlooked and sometimes willfully misrepresented.

Taking a walk around the area now, it is hard to imagine that in the 1950s, Notting Hill was extremely deprived and home to a large West Indian community following the arrival in London of the SS Windrush Empire in 1948. However, it was also a stronghold for Oswald Mosley’s far-right Union party, which included a large group of white extremist youth and Teddy Boy gangs, who would routinely target the West Indian community in the area.

On August 29, 1958, Majbritt Morrison, a white Swedish woman, was arguing with her Jamaican husband Raymond outside Latimer Road tube station. A group of white people tried to intervene and a small fight broke out between them and some friends of Raymond Morrison. The next day, Majbrit was verbally and physically assaulted by a gang of white Teddy Boys, who remembered seeing him the night before, throwing milk bottles and hurling racial slurs such as “Black man’s trollop”.

The argument was a catalyst for what became some of the worst nights of racially motivated violence the UK has ever seen. Hundreds of white youths took to the streets, throwing homemade firebombs at the homes of black residents. As one resident described the experience to the BBC, “They’re marking the outside of houses to [Teddy] Guys know where to bomb and where not to bomb.”

The first night left five black men lying unconscious in the streets of Notting Hill. The violence continued to rage for five days over the bank holiday weekend as the black community responded with counter-attacks. Thomas Williams was stopped by police as he left Bluey’s Club in Talbot Road. He was found to have a piece of iron in his trouser leg, a petrol bomb in his pocket and a razor blade in his inside breast pocket: “I have to protect myself,” he told the arresting officer.

At the time, the true extent of the violence and its racial motivations were not fully exposed. Senior Metropolitan police officers tried to write off the violence as the work of “naked, black and white” failed hooliganism. But confidential police files released in 2002 confirm what many in the black community already knew to be true: that the riots were largely instigated by the “Keep Britain White” crowd of 300 to 400 people, many of their Teddy Boys armed with iron bars. butcher knives and weighted leather belts, which became the rage among the West Indian residents of Notting Hill. The files, which were sealed under the 75-year rule but released early, show senior officers tried to convince the then home secretary, “Rab” Butler, that there was no real racial element to the riots.

Among the testimonies of police officers was that of PC Richard Bedford, who said he saw a crowd of 300 to 400 white people shouting: “We’re going to kill all the black bastards. Why don’t you send them home?” PC Ian McQueen on the same night said he was told: “Mind your own business, copper. Keep out of it. We will kill the bastards.”

In an attempt to ease lingering tensions, Trinidadian-born activist Claudia Jones organized a Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959. In many ways, the event foreshadowed today’s Carnival: a steel band played masquerade and calypso performers and icon The Carnival Queen competition took place.

A few months later, in May 1959, when 32-year-old Antiguan-born carpenter and barrister Kelso Cochrane was murdered in Notting Hill in a racially motivated attack, it was clear that something more needed to be done to uplift the black community of area. .

It is from these deeply painful and traumatic events that the Notting Hill Carnival springs. Moving from a town hall to the streets, it began to take full shape in 1966, when community activists Rhaune Laslett and Andre Shervington organized a street party for children in Notting Hill. A street party for neighborhood kids turned into a carnival procession when acclaimed musician Russell Henderson’s steel band went on a walking tour and most of the community joined in. Combining elements from Claudia Jones’s 1959 celebration, it came to form what we now know as Notting Hill Carnival: music, dance and community processing through the streets of west London.

The violence that broke out in Notting Hill in the 1950s deeply shocked Britain. For the first time, it became clear that the nation was not above the kind of racial conflict that was playing out in the American Deep South at the same time.

Attending the carnival today, it’s tempting to believe that these racial tensions that characterized the area 70 years ago have been consigned to the annals of history. Scanning the crowds this year, you’ll be just as likely to see bucket hats and gun fingers as vests and string feathers. It’s a melting pot of different races and ages, showcasing the best of London’s diversity.

But there are still underlying issues that continue to plague the community. The Notting Hill of today is almost unrecognizable from the growing West Indian community of the fifties. Now one of the most affluent areas in the country, pristine million-pound homes line the streets with as little as a spare curtain (including those belonging to the Beckham family and Jeremy Clarkson). It’s a microcosm of the gentrification that has affected many of London’s former hotbeds of immigration, driving out residents who can no longer afford the high rents.

Grenfell Tower can be clearly seen from the Notting Hill Carnival parade route. It looms over the festivities, standing as a stark reminder of the ongoing inequality still faced by black and brown communities in the area. Of the residents who died in the 2017 fire, 85 percent were ethnic minorities. Many in the tower block did not speak English as their first language and felt this meant their concerns were dismissed by the council during and after a refurbishment project which is now clear to have made the fire worse. In the days following the fire, hundreds of angry protesters descended on Kensington council offices, angry at how concerns raised by residents had been ignored.

Five years after the disaster, organizers will almost certainly pay tribute to the victims during the parade. As participants, it is our duty to remember them as well as the West Indian community of the 1950s.