Notting Hill race riots

The Notting Hill race riots were a series of racially motivated riots that took place in Notting Hill, England, between 30 August–5 September 1958.

The end of the Second World War had seen a marked increase in West Indian migrants to Britain. By the 1950s, white working-class "Teddy Boys" were beginning to display hostility towards black families in the area, a situation exploited and inflamed by groups such as Oswald Mosley's Union Movement and other far-right groups such as the White Defence League, who urged disaffected white residents to "Keep Britain White".

There was an increase in violent attacks on black people through the summer. On 24 August 1958 a group of ten white youths committed serious assaults on six West Indian men in four separate incidents. At 5.40am, the youths' car was spotted by two police officers who pursued them into the White City estate, where the gang abandoned the car. Using the car as a lead, investigating detectives arrested nine of the gang the next day, after working non-stop for twenty hours.

Just prior to the Notting Hill riots, there was racial unrest in Nottingham, which began on 23 August, and continued intermittently for two weeks.

The riot is popularly believed to have been triggered by an assault against Majbritt Morrison, a white Swedish woman, on 29 August 1958. Morrison had been arguing with her Jamaican husband Raymond Morrison at the Latimer Road tube station. A group of various white people attempted to intervene in the argument and a small fight broke out between the intervening people and some of Raymond Morrison's friends. The following day Majbritt Morrison was verbally and physically assaulted by a gang of white youths that had recalled seeing her the night before. According to one report, the youths threw milk bottles at Morrison and called her racial slurs such as "Black man's trollop", while a later report stated that she had also been struck in the back with an iron bar.

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