Max Farrar

It’s now 50 years since 11 black youths and me were arrested during or after the first uprising by black British youth. Rage against the police erupted in Chapeltown, Leeds, in the north of England, on Bonfire Night in 1975. Youths attacked an unmarked police car as it drove through the crowd on Spencer Place near their annual bonfire party. Later, another police car crashed and two officers were very badly injured, yet another police car was overturned, and all this was denounced in the mass media as a ‘riot’.

The black youths’ revolt was the result of years of being persistently stopped and searched, assaulted and being generally harassed by Leeds policemen. Despite the United Caribbean Association’s participation in the “Leeds Scheme” for improving police-community relations (set up after the death of David Oluwale), and the inclusion of the UCA’s strong critique of the police in a 1971 parliamentary enquiry report, the youth could see no reduction in harassment. On 5th November 1975 they rose up in protest

I was charged with incitement to riot, affray, assault on a policeman and threatening behaviour. Others were charged with affray, grievous bodily harm and criminal damage on a police car.  In July 1976 most of us (having adopted the ‘Black Power’ legal defence strategy) were acquitted.

The police fitted me up, I believe, because they objected to the reports and photos I had helped publish in the local, home-made paper Chapeltown News. Some of these were critical of the police and many other articles were correctly read as ‘anti-establishment’.

My suspicion is that the police saw this protest as another opportunity to have a go at black youth, and their parents, perhaps still angry at the torrent of criticism they’d received after the trial in 1971 of two of their number who were responsible for David Oluwale‘s death.

The Bonfire Night youths’ defence case was that the police had arrested them and intimidated them into confessing to crimes they did not commit. Black and Asian barristers told the police that they were lying.  My defence was that the officers were also telling a pack of lies against me.

The young, all white jury believed us, rather than the police. They told me afterwards that six of them had also been bullied and fitted up Leeds police officers. One of them said: “We thought you were the type of person who would start a riot, but we didn’t believe the police evidence”. I guess they were right on both counts. I was 25 and very angry.

This type of history is now being written up by a new generation of young black scholars, and one of them, Olivia Wyatt MA, kindly invited me to speak at a panel she organised at a recent symposium titled Black Power at the Grassroots.

I took the opportunity, given the 50th anniversary, to speak about the role played by radicals in Leeds and London who supported the movement for Black Power in helping get most of the black youth acquitted. I added a note about the troubled relationship I had with some of the black power supporters in Leeds.

Here is what I said. It’ll take about  ten minutes to read. All comments are welcome.

MF Bonfire Night Trial essay with photos