Activism in Notting Hill

Activism in Notting Hill

Scott Reeves considers the impact seven Notting Hill activists had on British society

 

Source A Claudia Jones at the offices of the West Indian Gazette in 1962

By the end of the Second World War, the once wealthy London suburb of Notting Hill was rundown and ramshackle. Large homes that had once housed middle-class families were subdivided into shabby slums. When migrants started to arrive in Britain, particularly from the Caribbean, they found Notting Hill was one of the few areas they could afford and landlords were prepared to rent to them. Yet these bleak surroundings inspired a generation of political activists to mold their beliefs and take action to improve their lives.

Claudia Jones

Jones was always interested in political activism. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she emigrated to the USA but was deported from there in 1955 for being a member of the US Communist Party. When the governor of Trinidad and Tobago refused to take her back, she claimed asylum in Britain.

Three years after landing in the UK, Jones launched a newspaper, the West Indian Gazette. Widely regarded as Britain’s first black newspaper, the Gazette quickly gained 15,000 readers, although it always struggled to make a profit and closed in 1965. During the 8 years it was printed, the newspaper reported on events in the Caribbean and across the world, but it also promoted the achievements of black actors, musicians and entertainers in Britain and reported incidents of racist violence.

In November 1958, in response to race riots, Jones suggested an event be organised to ‘wash the taste of Notting Hill and Nottingham out of our mouths’. A Caribbean Carnival featuring music, dancing and a beauty pageant was hastily organised and took place in January 1959 at St Pancras Town Hall. Jones wanted to unite the community and some of the money raised helped pay the fines that both black and white youths incurred in the Notting Hill race riots.

Source C The Caribbean Carnival held in January 1959

Rhaune Laslett

The daughter of a Native American mother and a Russian father, Laslett was born in London and set up a children’s playgroup in Notting Hill to bring together families of all races and nationalities. In March 1966, working with other community leaders, Laslett helped set up the London Free School. This was an informal adult education network in which people with specific skills like painting, music, photography and film would tutor others. Much like the playgroup, the Free School was designed to welcome people from across the community, regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity.

Laslett helped found a festival to help promote the Free School and raise its profile. The Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant, like the Caribbean Carnival before it, featured music and entertainment, but on a greater scale. The week-long festival in September 1966 culminated in a parade through the streets.

Between them, Laslett’s Notting Hill Fayre and Jones’ Caribbean Carnival were precursors of the Notting Hill Carnival, now the largest street party in the country.

Another offshoot of the Free School was the Notting Hill Neighbourhood Service, a group of volunteers that offered people advice on drugs, money and the law. The self-help network aimed to improve the lives of residents in Notting Hill by intervening before people ran out of money or got into legal trouble.

Michael X

Whereas Jones and Laslett wanted the different racial groups of Notting Hill to work together, others thought it better to divide them further when necessary. Among them was a migrant from Trinidad and Tobago named Michael de Freitas. He was initially an enforcer for Peter Rachman, a notorious slum landlord. His official job was to collect rents, but he would threaten and intimidate people who Rachman wanted out, even resorting to killing pets and dumping people’s property into the streets.

However, de Freitas gradually turned his back on his unsavoury past and began helping out at the London Free School and other community organisations. After meeting the black American activist Malcolm X, de Freitas began to refer to himself as Michael X. He set up the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), a pro-black organisation that grew to 45,000 members. He invited boxing world champion Muhammad Ali to visit Laslett’s playgroup and the Free School when he fought in London in May 1966.

However, the RAAS supported the use of violence to achieve black equality. In 1967, Michael X — who took the name Michael Abdul Malik after converting to Islam — was arrested following a RAAS meeting in Reading and sentenced to a year in prison for breaching the Race Relations Act. He had told the crowd: ‘If you ever see a white laying hands on a black woman, kill him immediately.’ He was the first black person to be jailed for attempting to stir up racial hatred — an offence usually committed against black people, not by them.

Michael X was a divisive figure and many activists in Notting Hill shunned him. He left London in 1971 and was later executed in his native Trinidad and Tobago for murder.

Bruce Kenrick

Born in Liverpool, white church minister Kenrick spent time in the USA before returning to the UK and moving to Notting Hill in 1963. Shocked by the state of accommodation that people were forced to live in, Kenrick decided to set up a housing association similar to those he had seen in New York. The Notting Hill Housing Trust (NHHT) aimed to buy property, renovate it and rent it out at a fair price.

The NHHT exploded in 1964 after Kenrick used a £7,000 donation on newspaper advertising. Donations flooded in, dwarfing the initial sum that paid for the adverts. Within a year, the NHHT had five new properties housing 57 renters. Donations continued to pour in and the NHHT soon became a major landholder in Notting Hill. No longer were the area’s poorest residents dependent on slum landlords whose primary aim was to fleece their tenants for as much money as possible.

Courtney Tulloch

A 24-year-old Jamaican who settled in London in 1966, Tulloch quickly became a respected community leader. He helped in the creation of the London Free School and the People’s Centre, another community organisation designed to help different races and nationalities. He also spearheaded Defense, an organisation providing legal aid and advice to black people.

Tulloch was a journalist too and helped to raise awareness of racism in Notting Hill and Britain as a whole. He set up the Hustler, a fortnightly newspaper that reported racist abuse and attacks. He also wrote for the International Times, acting as editor for a time, although he was never officially named to the position since the authorities tried to clamp down on the paper and put it out of business.

Darcus Howe

Among the writers who contributed to the Hustler was Howe, a former law student who was a regular at political meetings in Notting Hill and formed the Black Eagles in 1968. The Eagles campaigned for better housing, the release of black political prisoners and the right for black people to be tried by an all-black jury. Howe thought that one of the biggest barriers facing black people in Notting Hill were the police, who he regarded as racist. The Black Eagles patrolled the streets and observed the police, gathering evidence of police brutality and harassment. The Eagles antagonised the Metropolitan Police and officers often turned their attention to the Black Eagles themselves.

Source H Darcus Howe and Michael X in 1968

The Eagles were short-lived, lasting only 5 months, and Howe soon joined a similar organisation, the British Black Panthers. The Panthers had similar aims to the Eagles and had around 3,000 members by the 1970s, mostly in Notting Hill and the surrounding areas.

Frank Crichlow

The British Black Panthers’ most notable campaign came in 1970. Fed up with the police targeting the Mangrove, a restaurant frequented by many activists and celebrities in Notting Hill, Mangrove owner and Black Panther member, Frank Crichlow, organised a protest march on 9 August. He had endured years of police raids on his premises. The officers claimed they were looking for drugs — despite it being common knowledge that Crichlow was very anti-drugs — or minor infringements like serving food after 11pm.

Demonstrators marched past three police stations with a pig’s head and chanted anti-police slogans. When scuffles broke out near the third station, the police arrested 19 people. Nine people, including Crichlow and Howe, faced trial for the serious offence of inciting a riot, but the judge dismissed the charges — he said the protestors’ shouts of ‘Kill the pigs’ was not a genuine threat to police officers.

However, the case returned to court when the government took the unusual step of overturning the judge’s decision. The ‘Mangrove Nine’ were found innocent by a jury in a case that was covered by newspapers across the country. Although Crichlow initially wanted to make sure his restaurant was not unfairly targeted by the police, his trial made people aware that racism within the police was a genuine issue.

Perhaps he was right — police raids on the Mangrove continued and Crichlow was twice put on trial for the possession of drugs. Both times the jury found him innocent.

Conclusion

Nowadays, Notting Hill is back to being a soughtafter location where wealthy people choose to live. Yet a number of blue plaques on buildings in the area tell the story of a poor suburb in which political activists lived and worked to improve the lives of the migrants and black people who lived there.