The Manchester Historian – Page 14 – Manchester Historian

On hearing the phrase ‘bus boycott’, for most people, a certain plethora of images would spring to mind. The determined Rosa Parks sitting next to a white passenger on the bus, white policemen conducting her subsequent arrest, Martin Luther King in his prime protesting on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama. All images which constitute the most significant, and successful example of resistance to oppression in modern Western history. Replace those names and faces with the likes of Paul Stephenson, Guy Bailey and Roy Hackett. It’s probable that the average person has never heard of these people; nor could they put a name to a face. And this is exactly the problem – The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 has slipped out of mainstream modern history. It may be omnipresent in the minds of those who witnessed it upfront in Bristol, but is mostly absent from the minds of young historians and from school curriculums today, despite its position as one of the most symbolic moments in Black British history.

As if composed of a lost set of newsreels, it evokes an observational truth similar in style to guerilla filmmaking – Pontecorvo calls this “the dictatorship of the truth”. He achieves this truth through meticulous reconstruction, using real life locations, such as rebuilding bombsites, and non-professional actors, including petty thieves and a former National Liberation Front (FLN) leader.

Many European football fans view South America as the ultimate embodiment of football as much more than just a game, with incredible fan culture and intimate relationships between football and politics. In Passion of the People (1994), Tony Mason seeks to study the origins of the beautiful game in the continent and examine the accuracy of this romanticised depiction.

The Black Panther Party and Black Power as a whole, are often not given this space: they are deemed separate from the civil rights movement and thus, not worthy of commemoration. For instance, there are at least thirty statues of Martin Luther King across the United States, but none to Black Panthers.

This article will feature in Issue 37: Oppression and Resistance It is hard to imagine what Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector from Austria who was executed for his refusal to pledge his allegiance to Hitler during The Second World War, had to go through. Bearing in mind that he had to sacrifice his large family’s Continue Reading