Perhaps unhelpfully, we use the term “race riot” to describe two very different phenomena, each with its own dismal history. In the 1980s, it was the term attached to the uprisings that erupted among Black communities in Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, London and elsewhere. Outbreaks of lawlessness and violence that were in large part a response to racial targeting by the police: harassment that aggravated existing disadvantages and intensified deep disillusionment, especially among the younger generation who had been born in Britain.
However, a very different set of events with a far longer history has also been defined as race riots. The deadly disturbances of 1919 in Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Salford, Newport, Barry, Hull and South Shields, like the riots that came again to Liverpool in 1948, and those that broke out in 1958 in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill.
