Bloody Saturday

The country's worst race riot

It was the kind of warm spring Saturday afternoon that draws all of London into the streets. As two bobbies pounded their beat in Brixton, a grimy, racially mixed neighborhood south of the Thames, they stopped to question a black youth. A hostile crowd gathered, and suddenly all hell seemed to break loose. Rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails began to fly. As police reinforcements rushed in, an orgy of burning and looting swept down Railton Road, a principal neighborhood shopping avenue, leaving automobiles gutted and shops in flames. Streets were littered with looted appliances, clothing and costume jewelry. At the peak of the violence, more than 1,000 police in riot gear, huddled like Roman legionnaires behind shields, battled some 600 black West Indian youths, interspersed with a few masked white rioters.

When the hurricane of violence ended after five brutal hours, the toll was heavy: 165 policemen injured--26 requiring hospitalization--along with scores of civilians. Nearly 100 rioters were arrested. Estimates of property damage ran to more than $2.2 million. Beyond the burnt buildings and ravaged streets twinkling with shards of glass from shattered storefront windows, however, London now bears a more lasting scar: the psychic damage from the worst race riot in British history, an ugly explosion reminiscent of the violence that tore apart dozens of American cities in the '60s and, only eleven months ago, left whole sections of Miami in flames.

Many local residents were quick to say that racial tensions were not involved, blaming soured police-neighborhood relations and Britain's current grim unemployment problem. Said one Brixton dweller: "This is not a race riot. We are not here to hurt white people. It is about jobs, money, all the rest. You can only take so much." But the fact is that tension has been building for months in Brixton, home of many of the 620,000 black West Indians who have immigrated to Britain, or been born there, since the 1950s. As in the U.S., racial friction and unemployment often seem to go together: the jobless rate in areas like Brixton is twice Britain's 10.3% national average.

Residents have long chafed at local police use of a 150-year-old loitering statute that allows them to detain anyone they believe intends to commit a crime; studies show that the law is ten times as likely to be used against blacks as whites. In February about 10,000 demonstrators, including many from Brixton, marched peacefully in nearby Deptford to protest what they considered deliberately lethargic police investigation of the deaths of two young blacks in a fire. The latest spark appears to have been struck the evening before the rioting, when blacks accused police of failing to respond quickly enough after a black Brixton man was stabbed to death.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir David McNee held out the possibility that the riot had been politically inspired. Said he: "You don't find petrol bombs and the kind of missiles that have been thrown at my officers just by chance." Indeed one sign of Britain's growing racial tension has been clashes between blacks and neofascist white organizations like the thuggish National Front. Brixton's riot did not seem to follow that disturbing model, but instead traced another pattern, one that could be copied elsewhere. As a Brixton resident gloomily put it, "Next time it might be Cardiff or Liverpool. They've got the same problems: rundown cities and high unemployment."

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