Anti-racism March

After the Notting Hill riots in 1958, the tradition was revived by Claudia Jones. Jones is a Trinidadian member of the Communist party that arrived in London in 1955 who propose that a Caribbean carnival was the best response to the racists. She also organized a cabaret program at St. Pancras Town Hall, complete with steel bands and a carnival queen beauty contest, on January 30, 1959 following a small procession in Powis Square, Notting Hill. Claudia Jones and Pearl Prescod led an anti-racism march in St. Stephen’s Gardens in 1963 at John Hopkins. The nearest thing to a carnival procession took place on August 31, 1963 when she led an anti-racism march from Ladbroke Grove station to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. During this march, they sung ‘We Shall Overcome’ in solidarity with the Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream’ demonstration in Washington.

London Free School

When it comes to literary and artist works towards the Notting Hill Carnival, the most predominant ones are from a press ad by the London Free School covering the ‘Caribbean Touch to Notting Hill’s Carnival Procession’ and the progressive music by Pink Floyd performed at the Tabernacle. Pink Floyd played at All Saints Church Hall, initially as part of the Notting Hill Fayre (Carnival). Pink Floyd did a series of pageants and fund-raising concerts for London Free School (LFS). Pink Floyd is also, best known as the organization that found the Notting Hill Carnival. The press ad of ‘Caribbean Touch to Notting Hill’s Carnival Procession ‘ features pictures and articles of important moments that happened during the progression of the carnival.

1976 Notting Hill Riot

In 1976, there was a Carnival police clash in Notting Hill. Darcus Howe's militant Carnival committee, the Golborne 100 group, and a clash of 1,500 officers went to the carnival to conduct order. The crowd of the carnival was drawn back, which sparked the Notting Hill riot of 1976. Two hundred people went running and there was fighting 10 blocks in every direction. Their fighting back was shown to many as a spiritual awakening of black Britain. This was described as a demo of solidarity and peace with the black community. The year of '76 showed the strength of feeling with the reggae raging during those times, people putting on silly costumes and dancing in the street. As a result, the 1976 riot expanded the pop culture into reggae, feeding dun effects, "heavy manner" stencil graffiti, and the apocalyptic Rasta rhetoric included.

People's Free Carnival

In 1971, there was an angry hippy carnival in Notting Hill that was a call to all progressive people. Black people were to smash the racist immigration bill and worker of Britain to smash the Industrial Relations bill. All progressive people united and smashed growing fascism, and rallied on July 25 1971 for ‘Black Unity and Freedom Party’. In the summer there were several occasions of this at different locations. They had gigs to benefit local causes. There was an underground press add for the ‘People’s Free Carnival” August 29-September 4 1971’ proclaimed that ‘The Streets of Notting Hill Belong to the People’. And if people wanted or had more information about rock n’ roll, street bands, street theatre, many goodies, any bands, people, ideas or help of any sort, to contact Frendz or People’s Association. The fest continued all week, and people wanted it to be as noisy as possible in the road to make their voices be heard. They made the Notting Hill Free Carnival become a week of music, theatre, and dancing in the street. Unfortunately, the Angry Carnival was busted by a bomb squad. However, to stand up for their rights through positive methods are consider remarkable. 

Food with Jamaican Influence

Very famous foods known at the Notting Hill Carnival are jerk chicken, curry goat, and rice and peas. Here are the recipes of each dish if you wish to get a taste of authentic Caribbean food (though these dishes are mostly Jamaican-influenced).

Jerk Chicken

• 6 lb Roasting Chicken
• 1 tbsp. Salt
• 2 tsp. Garlic powder
• 1 tsp. Paprika
• 1 tsp. Soya Sauce
• 1 small onion
• 3 tbsp. Jerk Seasoning

First, rub the whole chicken with salt. Grater the onion and rub it into the chicken. Add the Paprika and Garlic powder to the chicken. Rub the Jerk Seasoning all over the whole chicken and allow the chicken to marinate for at least 2 hours. Roast in oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Curried Goat

• 2 lbs. Mutton or lamb trimmed and cut into cubes
• ¼ cup chopped onion
• 2 tbsp. Turmeric
• 2 cloves chopped garlic
• ½ tsp. Hot pepper sauce
• 2 tsp. Grated ginger

• ½ cup red wine
• ¼ tsp. cooking oil
• ¼ cup tomato ketchup
• 1 tsp. curry powder
• ½ tsp. Salt
• 1 tsp. vinegar
• 3 tbsp. Chutney

Season meat with garlic, salt, vinegar and hot pepper. Allow to marinate for about 1 hour. Heat oil, add curry powder, then meat and brown. Add remaining ingredients. Cover and simmer over low heat until meat is tender. Adjust seasoning. Serve on a bed of rice.

Rice and Peas

• 1 ½ c Dried red kidney beans, Soaked overnight
• 1 Clove garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp. Salt
• ½ c Unsweetened coconut milk
• 2 Scallions, chopped
• 2 Sprigs fresh thyme
• ½ Whole Scotch Bonnet Pepper
• ½ tsp. Black pepper
• 2 c Long-grain white rice

Boil the beans, garlic and salt until the beans are tender. Save three cups of the liquid, discarding the garlic. Return the beans and the three cups liquid to the pot (if there’s not enough of the cooking liquid use water), along with the coconut milk, scallions, thyme, scotch bonnet pepper, and black pepper and salt to taste. When it comes to a boil, add in the rice. Let it boil for 20 minutes, then remove it from the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes. Stir it with a fork to taste.

Russ Henderson

Russ Henderson and his Trinidad Steel Band were leading figures in the steel band movement within Britain. For more than 60 years Henderson used music as a focus for community cohesion, bettering race relations, and being directly involved in the establishment of Notting Hill Carnival in London. He also gave a sense of rhythm and beats that moved and connected people's souls.

The steel band started off playing in the Coleherne pub, then embarked on a road march. Henderson grew up in a middle class environment and became talented in piano, waltz, and jazz that later turned into "calypso-jazz."

Trinidadian steel pans were introduced in the band's act in 1952. His band performed at Buckingham Palace, and made history as the first steel band to play for royalty. Henderson toured in various places with the steel band and did theatre and radio work. Henderson lectured on the steel pan in school, organized workshops and percussion ensembles, and remains to be in demand for social functions.

Static Sound Systems

Static sound systems have been a very important part of the Notting Hill Carnival for the past 50 years. They produced a social life for the Caribbean. These sound systems were needed for the youth to put their energy into. The display and use of these gave black Brits a sense of self-empowerment. Throughout the hardships they face in everyday life, sound systems gave Caribbeans a reason to enjoy life more. The most important people that operate these parties with the sound systems are the Sound Man, the MC, and the DJ.

Sound Men are specifically skilled coordinators of operating the sound system, which isn't easy to do and requires a lot of help. The MC is the life of the party, able to influence the crowd to live in the moment and express themselves through dance and music.

DJs make sure to acquire all types of music, including rare collections or singles. They do this to not only entertain the crowd but to make them feel complete and truly satisfied. The early days started off with sounds of reggae and root rhythms, then expanded over the decades to music of reggae, hip hop and R&B, house/garage/drum and bass, Latin, SKA, soul, and techno. Sound systems occupy the central street along the carnival route to give the best experience.

Migrants Made Carnival

This picture speaks for itself. The Notting Hill Carnival is made of immigrants. It's led by London's West Indian community, and is a celebration of the Trinidadian's end of slavery. This carnival is full of expressions with their parades, music, diversity, costumes, vibrant color, and parties. This picture represents coming of age because this carnival is a form of liberation from server oppression.

After World War I, many Afro-Caribbeans were immigrants that moved to Britain. When a person is enslaved, they have no sense of identity and this sign portrays the identity they found with this carnival.

This picture represents the pride they found within themselves, and what they want to convey for others. Next to the "Migrants Made Carnival," there is writing stating "Immigration Centre's Are [prisons] No Human Is..." Not only did the Trinidadians receive liberation in freedom, but they were able to speak up and voice their opinions and influence others of their culture.

I found the brief mentions of crime that surrounded Notting Hill intriguing, and I found it even more interesting that I couldn't find it mentioned as a warning or downside in the countless travel website posts about Notting Hill. After doing a little more digging, I found the following article from a black male from London on why he hates Notting Hill. 

This is an account of a black male from London, who expresses his disdain for the modern Notting Hill.

Why I Hate Notting Hill Carnival

August 20, 2014

by Joshua Surtees

Photo by Chris Bethell

I'm not afraid to say it – I've always hated Notting Hill Carnival. Granted, it's lucky that I'm black; If I were white, I'd run into a whole world of shit writing this. Lots of people out there share my view but won't say it for fear of appearing racist. I, on the other hand, can say it loud and proud: I hate Notting Hill Carnival.

I may be called a traitor or "choc ice" – to use Rio Ferdinand's basic terminology – but look, this isn't the 1970s. It's 2014 and if anything, I'm a Milky Way bar. Chocolate on the outside with a light, fluffy nougat centre.

My disdain dates back to childhood. Our father would take my brother and I to the kids' parade and not bring us home to our mum until late at night, way past the agreed time. Which annoyed her so much she eventually banned him from taking us.

Reminiscing this week, she told me: "The first time I went to Carnival was with Leabert [my dad]. We ended up running away from bricks being thrown everywhere under the underpass. So, no fond memories for me."

By the time I reached my teens I was thankful Carnival coincided with Reading Festival so I could get the fuck out of town. Sadly, Reading is now utterly appalling, too.

Photo by Jake Lewis

In the past, my aversion to Carnival was instinctive – a get-me-out-of-here-and-away-from-all-these-people kind of response. But now, having lived in Trinidad for a year, and seen what real Carnival is like – a spectacular show of beauty, music, wild abandon and modernity reinterpreting tradition – I am even more certain of my feelings: Notting Hill is not a Carnival. It's just loads of people being silly in West London.

The massed bodies, awful clothes, stilted behaviour, slightly ashamed body language, the piss, the arrests, the weather, the traffic, the concrete, the white Rastafarians, fat jolly policemen being twerked on by big black women (fuck off and arrest someone), even the Carnival costumes – however admirable an attempt, it's all rather embarrassing.

Then there's the sinister side. The part of Notting Hill Carnival that reflects underlying tensions, mostly ignored in the day-by-day. For two days a year, white, middle-class liberals visit Notting Hill for black tourism. This year the Daily Telegraph even has a guide to it in its travel section. They all have a great time acting "black", dancing "black", eating, drinking and smoking "black".

That's all very positive, I suppose. The problem arrives the next day, when most of those white fans of black culture will go back to the depressing default position of being nervous around black people – especially in places like rapidly gentrifying Hackney. Notting Hill is itself an example of extreme gentrification, and one of the first areas to have experienced it. No black people live in Notting Hill or Ladbroke Grove now. People from Huntingdonshire do.

Photo by Chris Bethell

Meanwhile, as the poshos on pills revel in the streets, buying warm cans of Red Stripe for £3.50 and pissing in somebody's garden for a fiver, black men are openly stopped and searched by police for being genuinely, quite unmistakably, black. The crowds of woolly liberals stand and stare, appalled and confused but impotent to act.

This is hugely problematic and I doubt it was what Claudia Jones, the woman who launched Carnival in 1959, intended. Jones – a Trinidadian who migrated to America at the age of nine, to later be deported for being a Marxist – wanted to give a positive spin on Caribbean immigration in the UK by importing the excitement of the tropics into cold, grey London.

Back then, Notting Hill was a deprived area that had received the Windrush generation. Those guys were attacked by Teddy Boys, spat at by random passers by and denied housing. Race riots took place in 1958 when mobs of white men, spurred on by Oswald Mosley, hunted down black men. Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan law student, was stabbed to death on his way home by a group of white youths the following year; the first recorded racially-motivated murder in Britain.

It was 1966 when Notting Hill saw its first outdoor carnival. Jones had died in 1964, aged just 49, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx. Thank god she never had to see the kind of violence that marred the event in later years.

Photo by Jake Lewis

The last time I went, a few years ago, gangs of young boys were roaming around trying to stab or shoot each other. In Ladbroke Grove, the streets were jam-packed and the soundsystems were fantastic. At the top of the stairs leading up to every beautiful townhouse overlooking the street stood policemen wearing high-visibility jackets, hands behind their backs, surveying the scene. A gang of about 25 boys, all wearing Yankees caps, snaked through the crowd intermittently calling out "North London". A minute later, girls started screaming and boys started running. The huge crowd dispersed in a matter of seconds.

"What happened?" I asked somebody. "One of them must have pulled a gun," they replied. Later, in front of the soundsystem, the gang found their intended target – "East London" – and the rival gangs stood about ten-feet apart in a tense stand-off waiting for the first knife to be drawn.

It was anthropologically fascinating, and reasonably exciting after a few Wray & Nephews, though I don't think my then-girlfriend appreciated the fieldwork, cowering behind me as "North London" steamed in.

It was a far cry from Carnival del Pueblo (London's Latin America festival) where weeks before we'd been happily dancing to samba in the rain. Violence doesn't mar the real carnivals in Port-of-Spain, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia. Trinidad and Brazil are violent societies with high murder rates but, during Carnival, there is a definite sense that criminals put the violence on the back burner as they're far too busy having a good time. In fact, research shows that in Carnival month, the number of murders in Trinidad actually drops. Britain is the complete opposite.

Photo by Jake Lewis

The heavy police presence alone is always a forewarning of trouble. That same year, police had stopped 100 youths from "South London" as they were about to enter the tube network at Elephant and Castle. Had they not been successfully detained, there may have been a murder that year. There have been five murders at Notting Hill Carnival between 1987 and 2004. One of them was a stabbing over some food.

The journalist, Alex Pascall OBE – founder of The Voice and host of the first black radio show on BBC Radio London – was a leading organiser of the early years of Carnival.

He won't like this article. When I spoke to him about it he told me that "the British press have always portrayed the carnival negatively. It's always about arrests – nothing tangible about the art, music and entertainment. Carnival has been the greatest medium for race relations."

But I still think it has damaged race relations by confirming the worst suspicions of racists. During our chat, Pascall went on to reveal more sinister things: "This year the police and others have decided to strategically push out some of the soundsystems by using bylaws," he told me. "I was once made an offer to assist the government to remove the carnival from the Royal Borough. They wanted me to take it to Brixton. Prior to that, they wanted it in Wormwoods Scrubs."

Photo by Chris Bethell

Cunts, yes, but can you really blame the establishment for wanting to take it somewhere that can be more easily policed? A tip Clive Martin alluded to in his "How to Conquer Notting Hill Carnival" article in 2012 was: "Get the fuck out of there before nightfall." If you don't, you'll be trapped in an alcohol-fuelled war zone which is absolutely typical of the way we British like to get on after a skinful. Sorry to keep going on about it, but in Trinidad, people drink 80 percent proof Puncheon rum and somehow manage to avoid headbutting each other.

So, what is the answer? Well, Norman Jay has organised Good Times in the Park for September; a two-day outdoor festival of soul, house, disco and dancehall in Wormwood Scrubs. If that goes down well, could it not act as a pre-cursor to a different, less urban, unrestrained kind of Carnival? The original 1960s idea was splendid. And it's still politically important that it exists.

But I'm not so sure on what Carnival has become and what it should be in the future. It's not "on trend" to be anti-Carnival right now – not with Major Lazer and the hipsters on board – and I don't want to be a contrary killjoy, but it's long overdue an overhaul. As it stands, Carnival is crying out for reinvention.

This article is from Joshua Surtees and was posted on vice.com and the link is provided above. 

Food

Carnival food by numbers (and how much gets eaten)

• 30,000 corn on the cobs
• 15,000 fried plantains
• 1 ton of rice and peas
• 1 ton of Jamaican patties
• 12,000 mangoes
• 16,000 coconuts
• 10,000 litres of Jamaican stout
• 25,000 bottles of rum
• 70,000 litres of carrot juice

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/22/food-at-notting-hill-carnival_n_5697261.html

There are over 300 food stalls just waiting to be cleaned out at the Notting Hill Carnival every year. Above is a list of all the traditional foods found at carnival and how much is often consumed every year. Of course the types of food you are destined to come across at carnival are all related to Caribbean culture and the dishes normally served in the islands, such as a lot of jerk chicken and pork.

Jerk chicken is the most popular Caribbean meat often prepared. It is cooked in what is called a “jerk drum,” which is equivalent to an oil drum turned sideways and used for barbequing. The most common ingredients that bring about that famous jerk flavor are elements such as ground allspice berries, scotch bonnet chillies, spring onions, thyme, and a lot more. The key to perfect jerk chicken is a hot and slightly sweet smoky flavor with crisp skin and tender meat. And with this you’ll usually find sides such as rice and peas, plantains, corn, and a lot of rum.

Kelso Cochrane

Man who stabbed Antiguan carpenter through the heart in Notting Hill 'race killing' finally named after 50 years

• A new book claims the identity of the killer had been an 'open secret' since Kelso Cochrane's death
• 'Weapon is still under the floorboards in the house where alleged murderer, Patrick Digby, lived with his mother'

By LOUISE BOYLE
UPDATED: 08:14 EST, 8 September 2011

       

                              

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2034957/Patrick-Digby-killed-Kelso-Cochrane-Notting-Hill-book-says.html

Kelso Cochrane was a carpenter from Antigua. On his way home from the hospital with a fractured thumb on May 17, 1959, he was attacked by a group of white youths and stabbed to death in the streets of Notting Hill, London. More than 1,200 people showed up at his funeral.

While police reported the incident as a robbery, the black community in London was outraged and convinced that the murder was an act of racist motive. Just a year previous, race riots had broken out around the area, and with the addition of Cochrane’s murder, the community decided they’d had enough. Soon after the murder, Claudia Jones organized events to celebrate Caribbean culture, as she put it, “in the face of the hate from the white racists,” and these events are looked upon as forerunners of the first Notting hill Carnival.

For 50 years the murder of Cochrane had gone unsolved, until investigators received claims that a man named Patrick Digby had confessed Cochrane’s killing to a group of friends and expressed that he’d never be caught. Allegedly, the weapon used to kill Cochrane is still under the floorboards in the house where Digby lived with his mother at the time of the murder.  

Though officials had feared that Cochrane's death would only feed the tension between blacks and whites in the community, it actually spurred the beginnings of the Notting Hill Carnival, which is now an event known to bring a variety of races together to celebrate one culture.