The Caribbean community in Nottingham gathered this month to take young Danielle Beccan to her final resting place. The turnout - about 1,500 people - was astounding. Danielle was the 14-year-old child who was blown away by a pistol-bearing black youth as she made her way home after celebrating her birthday with friends at a local funfair.
I know the local black community well. We Caribbeans settled there just after the Second World War, increasing in number through the 1950s and 1960s. Our labour was required and, through its education system, British colonialism had given us the minimum needed for serving the owners of capital. We spoke English and were acquainted with British institutions.
The race issue loomed as large then as it does now. There were many physical attacks by white workers, leading to race riots in Nottingham in 1958 at the same time as those in Notting Hill, London.
In spite of primitive policing, we gave as good as we got. That experience, more than any other, drew us together and turned us into a community. We built organisations for our recreation: lodges, blues dances, cricket teams, places of worship. We saved part of our wages in a system known as the "partner" whereby, say, 50 people put a sum into a pot each week and then took it in turns to draw on it when they needed the down payment for a mortgage. Banks and building societies did not lend to blacks in those days.
At the same time, a culture of resistance emerged, with West Indian associations across the country linked under the banner of the West Indian Standing Conference. We voted Labour enthusiastically, and kept a keen eye on events in our countries of origin and on the struggle for independence in Africa. That process of self-assertion took a leap in the 1970s. We became Afro-Caribbeans inspired by the black movement in the US and by Bob Marley's songs of freedom.
With such serious antecedents, we might reasonably have had high hopes for Danielle and her assassin. They fell at the first hurdle. Yet Danielle's mother chose the path of reconciliation and forgiveness. She could easily have gone the other way, echoing the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade, calling for an invasion of police into the community to search every black youth in sight for guns. Instead, she was warm in her sadness and so kept our community together.
