Abstract
The ‘short, hot summer’ of 1981 started with a springtime misunderstanding.1 On a warm and sunny Friday evening in early April, when police constable Stephen Margiotta, on duty in Brixton, first glimpsed a black youth running towards him, he could not have known that this was but the beginning of a long weekend of violent unrest that would trigger a national debate on the questions of identity and belonging in post-imperial Britain. Presuming that the youth had committed a crime, he and his colleague proceeded to attempt an arrest, only to discover that the young man was suffering from a stab wound to the back. Trying to help, the police officers called an ambulance, but these efforts went unnoticed by the group of onlookers that had congregated in the meantime. Rumours rapidly spread that the officers were arresting the stab victim rather than helping him, and agitated black youths dragged the injured young man away. Tensions that had been simmering for weeks in this district of South London soon escalated into extensive rioting that continued uninterrupted throughout the night and went on until Sunday evening.2 The confrontations on Saturday evening alone saw 279 policemen and 45 members of the public injured and many police cars and 28 buildings damaged or destroyed by fire.3
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Notes
L. Marks (1981) ‘Riot Britain: Our Short Hot Summer of Discontent’ Observer, 12 August, p. 13, p. 16; M. Kettle and L. Hodges (1982) Uprising!: The Police, the People and the Riots in Britain’s Cities (London: Pan Books), p. 155.
For the official and widely accepted version of events see L.G. Scarman (1986) The Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981, reprinted edn. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books), pp. 38–41.
See D.P. Waddington and M. King (2009a) ‘Identifying Common Causes of UK and French Riots Occurring since the 1980s’ The Howard Journal, vol. 48, no. 3, 245–56, 247.
See P. Fryer (1992) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, 6th edn. (London: Pluto Press), p. 299.
See for example M. Rowe (1994) Race Riots in Twentieth Century Britain (Leicester: Centre for the Study of Public Order, University of Leicester).
See J. Benyon (1987) ‘Interpretations of Civil Disorder’, in J. Benyon and J. Solomos (eds) The Roots of Urban Unrest (Oxford: Pergamon), pp. 23–38, p. 23;
S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan), p. 323;
J. Solomos, B. Findlay, S. Jones and P. Gilroy (1986) ‘The Organic Crisis of British Capitalism and Race: The Experience of the Seventies’, in CCCS (ed.) The Empire Strikes Back, repr. ed. (London: Hutchinson), pp. 9–46, p. 32;
M. Rowe (1998) The Racialisation of Disorder in Twentieth Century Britain (Aldershot [u.a.]: Ashgate), p. 2, p. 5.
For a critical discussion of the term ‘permissive society’ see F. Mort (2011) ‘The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2010: The Permissive Society Revisited’ Twentieth Century British History, vol. 22, no. 2, 269–98, 270–71.
Frank Mort deconstructs this master narrative of sexual revolution, see F. Mort (2010) Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 349–51.
See T. Bunyan (1981) ‘The Police Against the People’ Race & Class, vol. 23, no. 2/3, 153–70, 153.
See J. Welshman (2006) Underclass: A History of the Excluded since 1880 (London; New York: Hambledon Continuum), p. 158.
On the changed role of the police see R. Reiner (2010) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 81–89.
See P. Gilroy (2002) There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London; New York: Routledge), p. 46.
See R. Tamme (2012) ‘“Promoting Racial Harmony”: Race Relations-Forschung und soziale Ungleichheit in Großbritannien in den 1950er bis 1960er Jahren’, in C. Reinecke and T. Mergel (eds) Das Soziale ordnen: Sozialwissenschaften und gesellschaftliche Ungleicheit im 20. Jahrhundert. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus), pp. 183–217, pp. 211–13.
The impact of the Empire on British politics and society has been a contested issue in British historiography since the mid-1980s. For the attempt of an analytical middle ground, see A.S. Thompson (2005) The Empire Strikes Back?: The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-nineteenth Century (Harlow, England and New York: Pearson Longman).
Anne Spry Rush analysed these conflicting conceptions of Britishness for middle class West Indians; see A.S. Rush (2011) Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 2, p. 236.
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© 2016 Almuth Ebke
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Ebke, A. (2016). From ‘Bloody Brixton’ to ‘Burning Britain’: Placing the Riots of 1981 in British Post-Imperial History. In: Andresen, K., van der Steen, B. (eds) A European Youth Revolt. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56570-9_18
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