Word: rioting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rubble in the South London neighborhood of Brixton last week, some oldtimers were reminded of the damage caused by the blitz in World War II. This time the damage was self-inflicted. For three nights, the crowded, hardscrabble neighborhood of 62,000 had been torn by the worst interracial rioting the country had ever experienced. Gangs of predominantly black West Indian youths hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at hundreds of riot police. Waves of other youngsters took part in an orgy of burning and looting By the time a tense calm finally returned to Brixton, the toll of violence...
...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 of the violence, more than 1,000 police in riot gear, huddled like Roman legionnaires behind shields, battled some 600 black West Indian youths, interspersed with a few masked white rioters...
...scores of civilians. Nearly 100 rioters were arrested. Estimates of property damage ran to more than $2.2 million. Beyond the burnt buildings and ravaged streets twinkling with shards of glass from shattered storefront windows, however, London now bears a more lasting scar: the psychic damage from the worst race riot in British history, an ugly explosion reminiscent of the violence that tore apart dozens of American cities in the '60s and, only eleven months ago, left whole sections of Miami in flames...
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...
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir David McNee held out the possibility that the riot had been politically 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...