We Want To Riot

Description

The 1981 Brixton Riots

“Between Friday, 10th April, 1981, and Monday April 13th April 1981, serious disorder occurred in Brixton… when large numbers of persons, predominantly black youths, attacked police, police vehicles (many of which were totally destroyed), attacked the Fire Brigade, destroyed private premises and vehicles by fire, looted, ransacked and damaged shops…”

After more than a decade of repeated attacks, arrests, harassment, beatings, racist provocations by the local police and the Special Patrol Group, Brixton erupted in a massive uprising. The riot – followed by more in July, part of a nationwide wave of disorder – shocked the British state. Though quickly labelled ‘race riots’ by the press, in fact blacks and whites had fought side by side, in the first anti-police riots for more than a century.

We Want to Riot, Not to Work (originally published in 1982) combines rip-roaring personal accounts of the riots from unashamed participants, with a radical analysis of their causes, and the response of the authorities.

Past Tense

Originally published 1982, recently reprinted

86 pages / A5

Black and white