Word: brixton
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...kind of warm spring Saturday afternoon that draws all of London into the streets. As two bobbies pounded their beat in Brixton, a grimy, racially mixed neighborhood south of the Thames, they stopped to question a black youth. A hostile crowd gathered, and suddenly all hell seemed to break loose. Rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails began to fly. As police reinforcements rushed in, an orgy of burning and looting swept down Railton Road, a principal neighborhood shopping avenue, leaving automobiles gutted and shops in flames. Streets were littered with looted appliances, clothing and costume jewelry. At the peak...
Many local residents were quick to say that racial tensions were not involved, blaming soured police-neighborhood relations and Britain's current grim unemployment problem. Said one Brixton dweller: "This is not a race riot. We are not here to hurt white people. It is about jobs, money, all the rest. You can only take so much." But the fact is that tension has been building for months in Brixton, home of many of the 620,000 black West Indians who have immigrated to Britain, or been born there, since the 1950s. As in the U.S., racial friction...
...local police use of a 150-year-old loitering statute that allows them to detain anyone they believe intends to commit a crime; studies show that the law is ten times as likely to be used against blacks as whites. In February about 10,000 demonstrators, including many from Brixton, marched peacefully in nearby Deptford to protest what they considered deliberately lethargic police investigation of the deaths of two young blacks in a fire. The latest spark appears to have been struck the evening before the rioting, when blacks accused police of failing to respond quickly enough after a black...
...inspired. Said he: "You don't find petrol bombs and the kind of missiles that have been thrown at my officers just by chance." Indeed one sign of Britain's growing racial tension has been clashes between blacks and neofascist white organizations like the thuggish National Front. Brixton's riot did not seem to follow that disturbing model, but instead traced another pattern, one that could be copied elsewhere. As a Brixton resident gloomily put it, "Next time it might be Cardiff or Liverpool. They've got the same problems: rundown cities and high unemployment...
...contrast, the only warmth on London Calling comes from the Clash's idiosyncratic reggae tunes, songs of Kingston refracted by Brixton into an unruly, festive rainbow. They portray the down-and-out but proud, card cheats, gangsters and two-bit revolutionaries, using brass, piano, and organ to supplement the traditional guitar-bass-drums outfit...