It's fifty years since Enoch Powell's provocative and racist speech, rattling on about how black immigration would cause 'rivers of blood' on British streets.
Powell, then the Tory shadow Defence Secretary, delivered his waffling tirade in Birmingham, and, in this year's Frow Lecture, Shirin Hirsch, Research Fellow in History at the University of Wolverhampton, will be tracing the impact of the speech within Powell's Wolverhampton constituency...
She will be "looking at the ways in which racism was both absorbed and challenged by working class people" states a spokesperson for the Working Class Movement Library, co-founded by anti-racist Ruth Frow in whose honour the annual lecture is held.
"At a time when Enoch Powell is back on the political agenda with new attempts to rehabilitate him, the lecture will reflect on memories of the speech and on how we can organise against the growing racism of the present day" they add.
Within 24 hours of Powell's speech, he was sacked from the shadow Cabinet by Ted Heath, who labelled it "racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions", while the Daily Mirror wrote it was "bursting at the seams with demagogic distortion ...inflammatory, bigoted and irresponsible...".
With Powell-loving 'politicians' like Nigel Farage still polluting the scene, this year's Frow Lecture is right for the moment.
In The Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Class and Resistance
Ruth Frow Lecture
Saturday 12th May 2pm
Old Fire Station, The Crescent.
Free
For further details see the Working Class Movement Library Facebook event page - click here
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