A phase of confusion, debate and hostility: Our insights from the IRR newspaper clippings collection

Library Assistants Waqar Younis and Letitia Budu have had some important insights whilst re-organising our Institute of Race Relations Newspaper Clippings collection…

The IRR newspaper clippings collection focuses on race related matters from the late 1970s until the early 1980s. In the process of reorganising the clippings to make them more accessible, we’ve also been able to understand how far the UK has come in terms of race equality and where improvements still need to be made.

It’s important to look at history to prevent it from repeating itself. Looking back at the past might help us in the future!

Hidden Depths: The Institute of Race Relations Newspaper Clippings Collection

We’ve recently done a little conservation and access work on our Institute of Race Relations (IRR) Newspaper Clippings collection. It really is one of the gems of our archive – a vast collection of race-related stories from provincial UK newspapers, covering the short but intense period of September 1977 to April 1984.

The collection has been in need of some TLC for a while. It takes up 49 lever arch files, in varying states of dilapidation. We’ve only been able to replace the ones that were most severely falling apart, but we’ve also relocated a whole box of orphaned pages and moved the more fragile sheets to separate storage. With the detailed content summaries we now have for each folder, this is starting to feel like a much more accessible collection, ready to have its hidden depths explored by intrepid researchers….

The Crucial Hours: The Stephen Lawrence Newspaper Cuttings Collection – Part 2

By Jo Manby

This is the second post in the two-part series which aims to give an overview of the contents of the Stephen Lawrence Newspaper Cuttings archive collection, gathered together over the decades by AIUC founding director, Louis Kushnick, and now being made available for reference by researchers and members of the public.

The first post looked at the first three of six themes running through the collection (The Metropolitan Police, the Lawrence family and the Macpherson Report). This second post looks at the community reaction, the perpetrators and the criminal justice system.

Clippings from 1999

The Crucial Hours: The Stephen Lawrence Newspaper Cuttings Collection – Part I

By Jo Manby

24 years ago this week Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death at the age of 18 by a gang of white youths, in an unprovoked racist attack at a bus stop in Eltham, south east London. The date was April 22nd 1993. Two of his killers, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were only convicted (for life) in January 2012 for their part in the attack.

The same year, founding director of the AIU Centre, Louis Kushnick, began to collect press cuttings, mainly from the broadsheet newspapers, reporting on the case. As part of my job at the Centre I was responsible for archiving the collection.

The Writing on the Wall

Our archive volunteer Helen has uncovered a fascinating story about women confronting racism in 1970s Manchester…

Decades before Facebook and Twitter allowed people who had never met to communicate anonymously, a group of women from Manchester decided to use a real life ‘wall’ to gather views from local people on the subject of racism. The women, from Longsight and Levenshulme, were united by their opposition to the National Front, a right-wing, racist organisation that was responsible for preaching racial hatred and carrying out violent attacks on members of Britain’s ethnic minority communities. On discussing how to react to a planned National Front march in the city, the women came up with the idea of a ‘wall newspaper’ where they could get local people to air their views on the National Front.