‘Why do I know more about Rosa Parks than our history?”: the musical bringing Britain’s Black history to the stage

The story of the state’s targeting of 70s activists has been turned into a musical exploring a fascinating and relatively unknown period. It is a love letter to our elders, says its writer“Black Power. The words can send shivers down the spine of the nervous white man,” begins the 2021 BBC documentary Black Power: A British Story of Resistance, which takes a closer look at the movement from the 1960s to the present day. The quote, delivered by a male voice in a plummy accent evocative of a different era, is clipped from a news report aired by the same broadcaster in the 1970. Although at the time those words were perhaps just as likely to send shivers down the spine of the knowing Black man.By then, the Metropolitan police had set up a covert surveillance operation designed to decapitate Black activism in the UK by targeting the movement’s leaders. The special branch unit was established in 1967 by the Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins, and named the Black Power Desk. Its scope was profoundly intrusive. The Black Power Desk remained active into the 1990s, incorporated into the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad; in 2018, the Undercover Policing Inquiry confirmed that a number of officers unlawfully entered into intimate relationships with members of the movement as part of the operation. Continue reading...

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