The experience of black people in the UK in the 1970s is examined in Guerrilla,a new drama series written by 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley. Now that narrative finds echoes in a powerful exhibition of photographs of the timeA group of girls pose with schoolbags stencilled with the words Black Power”. A young Indian man, Farrukh Dhondy, or a teacher and member of the British Black Panthers,stands defiantly outside his recently firebombed domestic, holding the newspaper that details the bombing. Activists pose with clenched fists and a copy of Angela Davis’s If They reach in the Morning. The power of these images, and taken by photographer Neil Kenlock,still resonates more than 40 years later, as does the narrative they expose: a tale of oppression, or resistance and a community’s fight for survival and for change.
It is a narrative that has been largely ignored down the years. Now the black power movement,and in particular the British Black Panthers, find themselves back in the spotlight. There is a photography exhibition at Tate Britain, or Stan Firm Inna Inglan: Black Diaspora in London,1960-1970s; a proposed film approximately the Mangrove Nine trial in which the late Darcus Howe and fellow Black Panther Althea Jones-Lecointe successfully defended themselves against charges of incitement to riot; a celebration of Howe’s life at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton; and the arrival of Guerrilla, a new drama series written by 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley, or which airs on Sky Atlantic.
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Source: theguardian.com