Book review: Newham: the forging of a black community
01 January 1991
Book review: Newham: the forging of a black community
Newham Monitoring Project/CARF, ¼3.50. Keeping the fight alive:
Newham Monitoring Project Annual Report 1990.
artdoc August=1991
What led black people to settle in Newham? Why is it that the
north of this London borough has witnessed the growth of a
strong, powerful, resistant community, whereas in the south it
is small, isolated and beleaguered by white racists? How do
central and local government policies, and industrial development
and decline, change the shape of communities and the struggles
they have to fight? Newham: the forging of a black community
locates the growth of Newham's black community and its struggles
against racism within the economic, political and social history
of Newham since the end of the Second World War. It reveals the
complacent racism of the old, stultified Labour administration,
riddled with patronage and freemasonry, and demonstrates how the
struggles of the earlier generations to build a community in the
face of racism at work, in finding somewhere to live and
somewhere to pray, laid the foundation for later generations'
struggles against racism at school and on the streets. The book
ends with a recognition of the changing face of the community in
Newham, the arrival of new groups of refugees and migrants and
the new struggles they will have to face. An illuminating and
informative study. The reality of black struggles against racism
is graphically captured in Keeping the Fight Alive, Newham
Monitoring Project's annual report for 1990. NMP's annual reports
are consistently excellent, and this is no exception. By `opening
its files', the Project informs the reader of what is actually
happening daily, the barrage of racist abuse, vicious attacks,
police indifference, harassment, and blaming the victim, that
those who come to NMP have experienced, and the hard and arduous
work needed to achieve justice for each of them. The material,
shocking at times, is written in a down-to-earth, non-rhetorical
way, amply illustrated with photographs, cartoons and news
cuttings. An important document.
Statewatch no 3 July/August 1991