Anti-BNP March in South East London, 1993

Murder in South East London

By 1993, South East London had seen a string of racist killings, among them the murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence in Eltham that April. Many residents blamed the British National Party (BNP), whose headquarters operated out of a bookshop in nearby Welling.

Sixty Thousand on the Road to Welling

On October 16, 1993, some 60,000 anti-racists marched toward that headquarters. Chants included "We are Black, we are white, together we are dynamite!" and "BNP — burn it down!"

Police Lines and a Long Battle

The march turned violent when police, protecting the BNP site, blocked the marchers' path. Officers in riot gear and on horseback — many with their ID numbers removed — fought demonstrators for hours. At least 41 demonstrators were injured and 31 arrested. The day became a landmark in Britain's anti-fascist movement and foreshadowed the national reckoning that followed the Lawrence case.

What Welling Changed

The killings of Rolan Adams in 1991 and Rohit Duggal in 1992, both in the same corner of South East London, had already made the area a symbol of racist violence before Stephen Lawrence's death. After years of protest, Bexley Council moved to close the BNP bookshop in 1995. The Macpherson Inquiry, published in 1999, found the Metropolitan Police "institutionally racist" in its handling of the Lawrence case, and in 2012 two of his killers, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were finally convicted. The marchers at Welling had demanded exactly that kind of reckoning years before officials accepted it.

Related Reading on HistorianSpeaks

• Never Unanswered: Anti-Racist Movements in Europe and South America, how Welling fits a century of organized resistance on two continents.
• UK Black History, Part 2: Windrush
• UK Black History, Part 3: Brixton, Peckham and Scarman
• UK Black History, Part 4: Reparations and Black Britain Today

Republished in partnership with Working Class History.