A Black Lives Matter rally, London. Photo: Isabel Infantes / EMPICS Entertainment. All rights reserved.Over the past three years, the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has raged through the American body politic. After countless demonstrations, protests, community meetings, a persistently virulent social media campaign, the deaths of black people at the hands of the police has become one of the prime hot-button issues in contemporary US politics. Indeed, this issue is such a persistently tragic feature of our news cycles that, in the wake of Brexit and its ensuing unholy parade of demagoguery and incompetence, it’s one of the few remaining hooks upon which Brits hang a vague sense of political smugness. It may be bad on this little island of ours, we sometimes tell ourselves – but at least it’s not that bad. Black activists in the UK, however, see little grounds for this comforting sense of superiority. Franklyn, a musician and student from London, said that “As much as people praise it for its cosmopolitanism, the UK is a historically racist institution, with its history rooted in imperialism. We’re still living with the inheritance of that system”. And so, last Friday, Black Lives Matter UK took to the streets, launching a series of secretively-planned direct actions throughout the day, followed by large public rallies in cities across the country.
Activists shut down major arterial transport links in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Manchester. Whilst some displayed banners declaiming ‘This Is A Crisis” and “#blacklivesmatter”, others laid down spread-eagled over the road, locked together at the hands by concrete arm tubes, designed to give intervening authorities as much hassle as possible when it comes to the troublesome task of removing activists from the streets. One passive resistor going rag-doll can be fairly easy to remove. It becomes tricker when there’s a whole human paper-chain of them, jointed together by cuffs that can take hours to remove. If the trams wanted to cut their usual route through central Nottingham, or if cars wanted to make it to Heathrow, they would have had to plough their way over the Black Lives Matter Activists in their path. And so, traffic ground to a halt – to the profound irritation of commuters, holiday makers, and their sympathisers, who took to social media to make their exasperation heard. But this, of course, was the point of the whole exercise. Under the moniker ‘shutdown’ – serving as hashtag, rallying cry and tactical advice all in one - activists and supporters called for the country to be brought to a standstill.
activists and supporters called for the country to be brought to a standstill.
