Britain and the repression of Black Power in the 1960s and ‘70s

Abstract

This article details the extensive security regimes deployed against Black Power in the Caribbean that were operated by regional governments and the (neo)colonial British state. These regimes of securitisation targeted radical Black political groups and actors whose Black Power ideology placed them in an antagonistic relation to independent West Indian states and Britain. The author argues that the British state’s involvement in the suppression of Black Power in the Caribbean is inseparable from the domestic repression of the British Black Power movement. But also, shared opposition to British (neo)imperialism and the personal ties of West Indian migrants to Britain connected Black Power resistance on both sides of the Atlantic. By drawing on British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office files, as well as political newspapers and publications produced at the time, the author traces the British state’s involvement in the transnational repression of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s.