Hundreds weren’t mowed down in parks, but our lives were circumscribed by racial violence of a colonial tenor, whether it was a white mob attacking a black household in Wolverhampton (1965), twelve discrete incidents in the city which included one where fourteen white men chanted ‘Powell’ at a black christening, inspired by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech (1968), a judge at Birmingham Crown Court complaining that ‘roughing up of coloureds is almost a hobby in some parts of the Black Country’ (1973), five assaults on Indians in one week in Wolverhampton pubs (1976) and civil disturbances
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