The 1980 St Paul's ‘Riots’
Citizens, by and large, tend not to wreak havoc on the streets for no reason. In 1819, the citizens of Peterloo, weren’t even causing trouble: sixty thousand men, women and children had gathered peacefully to demand parliamentary reform following a year of industrial depression and high food prices. But they were confronted by sabre-wielding yeomanry and soldiers from 15th Hussars. Ten minutes after the arrival of the latter, five hundred people were dead. In 1789, the French decided they’d had enough of increased taxes and corrupt government, and they revolted. And in 1804, Toussaint L’Ouverture led the Africans of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to liberation from their French slave masters.
No one with any credibility today would look back on those events and demonise the Peterloo protesters, the French and the Africans. After years of brutal subjugation, the people had – quite rightly – had enough.
Context is Key
And so it was with the Bristol ‘Riot’ that took place on the 2nd April 1980 in the area of St. Pauls. I’ve placed ‘Riot’ in inverted commas because if you ask the African-Caribbean residents who were involved, they’d probably describe what happened as an ‘uprising’. According to Jagun Akinshegun, who was a teenager at the time, a riot,
“might do if it was a bar brawl or football hooliganism but it certainly does not apply to this situation.”
Those who took to the streets were reacting to years of systemic injustice that their parents, immigrants from the Caribbean, had endured since their arrival to the UK at the end of the 1940s.
On the 2nd April, 1980, officers were sent to the Black and White Cafe to remove confiscated alcohol. But their arrival was seen as yet another example of police harassment, and they were driven out by a large crowd no longer prepared to put up and shut up.
Later that night, shops were looted and burned, and the following day, more officers were drafted in to restore law and order. Of the one hundred and forty people arrested, sixteen were charged with rioting offences. All, however, were acquitted.
Cause and Effect
So, what triggered the uprising/rebellion/riot in St. Pauls? It would be too easy to cite as the cause of the unrest inherent violent tendencies on the part of young Black men who responded to the police raid. In fact, the usual suspects – racism, police harassment and unemployment were identified as the reasons. According to Paul Stephenson, who’d been at the forefront of the Bristol bus boycott of 1963,
“[the riot] was about young blacks who were born in this country saying that they weren’t prepared to be treated as second-class citizens any longer.”
Unemployment in Bristol at the time was 5.5% and in St. Pauls, it was 15%. Such high levels of unemployment were caused in part by the Thatcherite government’s move away from manufacturing towards service-based industries, which resulted in fewer apprenticeship opportunities.
For Black Bristolians, St. Pauls was a safe haven. There were parts of the city that they avoided, areas made unsafe by far right groups. And with concerns about the racist attitudes held by the police, any prospect of being protected in the event of an attack was nothing more than a pipe dream.
The SUS (Suspected Person) law, dating back to the 19th century, allowed the police to stop and search anyone whom they suspected of being about to commit a crime. The feeling then was that Black people were disproportionately targeted. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem, ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, was written in 1980 and conveyed the sense of injustice felt by young Black men frequently apprehended while going about their business:
“Me an Jim stand up waitin pon a bus,/Not causing no fuss,/When all of a sudden a police van pull up.”
The raid on the Black and White Café was the straw that broke the camel’s back, representing as it did over two decades of relentless discrimination. After years of macroaggressions and an unwillingness on the part of the host nation to truly embrace those who had come home to the ‘Mother Country’, a new generation decided in that moment that enough was enough. As the Caribbean saying goes, ‘He who can’t hear, must feel’.
Lessons learned?
The reaction of the Thatcher government to the unrest in St. Pauls was predictable: local politicians, as well as members of the House of Commons, went on a fact-finding tour to discover what had gone wrong. But bridges built between the police and the community were exposed as unstable when in 1986, a police ‘intervention’ – again at the Black and White Café – resulted in violence. Even before that, it was clear that the government had learned little, if anything, from its Bristol walkabout. One year later, in April 1981, young Black people took to the streets in Brixton and a few months later, Toxteth erupted.
Forty years on from St. Pauls, it would be wrong to say there have not been changes for the better. However, riots in Tottenham in 1985 and the shooting by the police of Mark Duggan in 2011 which sparked the summer riots, were evidence that more work needed to be done.
Perhaps in fifty years, those in power will look back at the riots and realise that they were indeed uprisings deemed necessary by citizens who, just like the French, Haitians and Mancunians came to the realisation that, in the words of Frederick Douglass,
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
By Laurie O’Garro
Laurie has recently come out as a writer of poetry, flash fiction, including her hilarious 'God Monologues', and articles. She has lived in London for twenty-seven years, having moved to the capital to take up her first teaching job.
Laurie's hobby is string art which she discovered off the back of a childhood art from the 70s. The craft is best compared to embroidery, except it's done on card. And it's funkier. Her plan is to go global with string art and turn her creations into clothing and other accessories that people will fall in love with.