“As much as we regret the spirit of mob violence as manifested by hundreds of Harlemites on Tuesday evening, it is obvious that it was the direct result of a pent-up feud that has lain in the breasts of Negroes for months – and years.”
These words, published in a column my father wrote after a riot broke out in Harlem on March 19, 1935, have new resonance in the wake of the conflagration that spread from Tottenham to Birmingham, UK, last week.
I visited London several times last year, and three news stories made me wonder whether I’d ever left home.
- Confrontations between students and police during protests against tuition hikes were a regular occurrence throughout the fall. Were it not for the scenes of Prince Charles and Camilla’s Royal Rolls Royce being kicked and jostled and pelted with paint bombs last December, I might have thought I was on a University of California or California State College campus.
- British Prime Minister David Cameron called the low numbers of blacks at Oxford “disgraceful,” putting the university on the defensive and setting off a verbal firestorm with echoes of the American higher education/affirmative action debate.
- Then there was the heartbreaking story of Agnes Sina-Inakoju, killed in 2010 when two reported gang members shot into an East London chicken and pizza place. In April of this year, the men, both in their early 20s, were sentenced to life in prison. Sina-Inakoju, 16 at the time of her murder, had dreamed of going to Oxford and by all accounts she was working hard to make that a reality. The tragic tale of a promising life cut short by random and stupid violence could have played out in any city USA.
I wasn’t there when the flames erupted in the UK last weekend, and I won’t presume to have a full understanding of British racial and class politics. But shocking as the murder and mayhem were, it was not surprising.
“The volcano is there and the surface is very thin; it merely needs a slight puncture, and out will flow the destructive elements that foment within,” Ebenezer wrote.
This time, as in many others, the “puncture” was a black man shot dead by police.
The confluence of dreams of the poor ignored, the aspirations of the middle class deferred and the prevalence of drugs and guns and criminality of all kinds, make for a toxic cocktail. Add to it an economic climate in which social services and law enforcement resources are cut and stretched thin on both sides of the Pond, and you can’t help but wonder where the next “volcano” will erupt.
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