Cardiff Race Riots/Community Resistance

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This is a documentary about the 1919 Cardiff 'Race Riots'/Community Resistance

Dedicated to the elders of Butetown and Tiger Bay.

LINK

[Administrator]

On this day, 11 June 1919, racist rioting broke out in Cardiff, Wales, when white, mostly ex-servicemen attacked local residents of Afro-Caribbean, Somali and Yemeni descent.

Experiencing considerable hardship after the end of World War I, many ex-servicemen were in dire financial straits, and had been encouraged by racist media, as well as some unions, to see workers of colour as having taken some of "their" jobs and housing.

Tensions erupted on June 11 after a confrontation between a group of Black and white men in the Butetown area of area of the city escalated. Mobs of whites then attacked houses where Black and Arab workers lived, smashing windows, wrecking interiors and throwing furniture into the street. People of colour then began to defend themselves, boarding themselves inside their homes and arming themselves with stones and rocks.

One man, a ship's fireman called Mohammed Abdullah was attacked and soon died in hospital with a fractured skull. By the time the disturbances ended three days later, three other men were dead, although it is unclear if one of those deaths was related to the riots as such.

The riots in Cardiff were just one of several such incidents around Britain in 1919. Other racist mob attacks on African, Chinese, South Asian, Afro-Caribbean and Arab workers – usually seamen – also broke out in cities like London, Glasgow, Newport, Liverpool, Salford, South Shields, Barry and Hull. Shamefully, in some cases the violence was egged on by union leaders like Manny Shinwell, later a Labour MP, who demanded "action" against Black sailors on the morning of an attack on sailors from Sierra Leone in Glasgow earlier that year.

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