October 2013

Everyone knows about the Black Panthers ‑ the militant wing of the American civil-rights movement, whose political activism still provokes strong emotions to this day. They made headlines only last week, with the news that 71-year-old Herman Wallace, one of the "Angola Three", who had been in solitary confinement for 41 years after being convicted of killing a guard in a Louisiana prison, died just three days after being released. Read the full  interview here.


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While, in the mid-1960s, the Black Panthers – the famous, American, shotgun-toting ones – were scaring the crap out of white America, the British Black Panthers (BBP) were educating their communities and fighting discrimination. Outrightly racist laws that threatened to repatriate entire swathes of the black population were being pushed into place, and sections of the white middle classes were resentful towards the black community. But the BBP – based in Brixton, south London – helped to change all that, educating British black people about their history and giving them a voice to speak...


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The impact of the American Civil Rights Movement on people of color around the globe cannot be overstated. Millions continue to commemorate the peaceful protests of organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), that eventually led to a modicum of social and economic equality. Fifty years after the March on Washington, Black Londoners; however, set out to acknowledge the leadership of a small British contingent of revolutionaries, who fashioned after America’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, tackled...


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