By Claudia Sanchez
Notting Hill Carnival was not born as a celebration of multicultural Britain. It emerged from a period when black people were being attacked in the streets, fascists were organising openly, and racist discrimination was part of everyday life. Sixty years on, those conditions are starting to feel familiar and present once again.
In August 1958, white mobs attacked Caribbean residents in Notting Hill. On 30 January 1959, the Trinidad-born communist Claudia Jones, editor of the West Indian Gazette (and buried to the left of Karl Marx at Highgate Cemetery), organised an indoor Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall. It was a cultural answer to racist violence: an assertion that a people being told they did not belong would organise, create and celebrate on their own terms.
Four months later, on 17 May, Kelso Cochrane, a 32-year-old carpenter from Antigua, was murdered by white men as he walked home through Notting Hill. His killing remains unsolved.
Yet his name is disappearing from public memory. Research published by Black Current News this week found that only 163 of 1,456 black British professionals surveyed (11.2%) had heard of Cochrane, compared with 84.6% who had heard of Emmett Till (who was murdered in the US some 4 years before Cochrane). The survey is not representative of black Britain as a whole, but the amnesia it highlights is significant.
The street Carnival we know dates from 1966, when local community activist Rhaune Laslett organised the Notting Hill Fayre and invited Russell Henderson’s steel band to take part. Henderson’s band moved through the streets and the people followed.
Stuart Hall’s observation that “it was only in Britain that we became West Indians” captures something of this process. Caribbean people from different islands were being forced together by their shared experience of British racism and were creating new forms of resistance in response.
By the 1970s, Carnival had become a black British institution. That also made control of it a political question. Police pressure and attempts to remove Carnival from the streets intensified (and continue to this day). After the confrontation between police and young black people at Carnival in 1976, keeping it on the streets of Notting Hill was itself a political victory. The Race Today pamphlet, The Road Make to Walk on Carnival Day, recorded the struggle to keep it there.
Sivanandan placed these battles within a longer history in which black resistance in Britain was “set on the loom of British racism”. That remains a useful way to understand Notting Hill Carnival today.
In recent years, increasingly emboldened, well-funded and organised racist groups have attacked asylum accommodation and mosques across the country. Just this month, in Thetford, racists forced their way into homes believed to be housing asylum seekers.
Racist violence cannot be separated from the political conditions in which it grows: anti-migrant racism and Islamophobia have been normalised in mainstream political and media debate, while migrants and Muslims are repeatedly scapegoated for social crisis.
We saw this clearly in the racist hounding of Professor Jason Arday this summer, where every allegation against one black academic was turned into evidence against black advancement itself.
That is why Notting Hill Carnival cannot be reduced to corporate slogans about diversity. Its joy has always been political. It says that people who were attacked, excluded, and policed will not disappear. We will organise. We will remember. And we are here to stay.
Sixty years on, the road is still made to walk on Carnival day.
The above article was originally published here on the For Liberation, Against Racism blog.
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