Search results
This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long sixties’. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. It traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border-crossings – of nation, race and class identifications – of grassroots activists.
Exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, postcolonial migrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with liberation struggles in Vietnam and the Gulf and with civil rights movements elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab migrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found a myriad of ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as stories of anticolonial activist networks and meetings in North America, Italy, the Netherlands and Sudan, forging connections with those freedom fighters attempting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. These entwined routes of the 1960s chart a complex map of transnational political recognition and radical interconnections.
Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.
An inspiration for the many student’ protests and workers’ industrial struggles of the 1960s came from the black civil rights struggle in America and the worldwide opposition to the US war in Vietnam. When a civil rights struggle then started in Northern Ireland, many sixties activists in the UK began to make this a focus for their political work. In the early 1970s a number of them came together to form the Troops Out Movement (TOM).
This chapter contributes to a history of the TOM that is yet to be written. Set in the context of 1960s activism, it examines the start of TOM in late 1973 in relation to the situation that erupted in Northern Ireland. This included the Civil Rights Movement and the Unionist reaction to it, discrimination and the Special Powers Act, the work of the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster at Westminster, and early protests in the UK against British political and military involvement. The chapter goes on to discuss the TOM’s campaign for the withdrawal of British troops, our work with the Labour Movement, and our influence on public opinion in Britain, including the evidence of polls indicating popular support for British withdrawal.
3 Narratives of radical lives The roots of 1960s activism and the making of the British left Celia Hughes 1960s activism and the making of the British left In 1958, 14-year-old Di Parkin accompanied her mother, a housing worker, collecting rents from council tenants in London’s Notting Hill. The middle-class teenager was shocked to see several households sharing a single outside toilet. At one address a female tenant did not know how to write her name, and had to be helped by Di’s mother to sign the form. Upon rounding a corner the teenage girl was confronted
Burkett, Constructing Post-Imperial Britain; J. Burkett, ‘The National Union of Students and Transnational Solidarity, 1958–1968’, European Review of History, 21/4 (2014); J. Burkett (ed.), Students in Twentieth Century Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2017). 26 Waiting for the revolution 17 C. Hughes, ‘Narratives of Radical Lives: The Roots of 1960s Activism and the Making of the British Left’, in E Smith and M. Worley (eds), Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 75–6. 18 Ali
-going conversational style in my writing. And I wanted it to be readable not just for people with college educations but any person who reads.” 49 In the minds of both author and publisher, the book’s marketability and access to readers originated in its all-new approach to U.S. history, its representation of the values of 1960s activism, and the way it rendered them accessible to school-age readers as well as adults. Upon publication, the book’s readability was immediately highlighted by a range of reviewers. In the words of historian Eric Foner, for example, who wrote about the
identify coherent public narratives available to my respondents to draw on when constructing accounts of their collective action. There was no obvious ‘third man in the room’, an expression coined by Rebecca Clifford that refers to the shared public memories and meta-narratives surrounding 1960s activism that influenced her interviewees’ testimony about their experiences of 1968 in Italy.75 Although each dispute received public attention at the time, and has since been recognised within histories of women, trade unions and feminism, my respondents were often unaware of