Staying Power Book 14 in the Action! Series

For the white working-class community that I grew up in, the war was the most exciting and significant event ever to collide with our terraced streets and decaying factories. It had changed the lives of my white grandparents, whom I loved deeply, and I was intoxicated by the thought that German bombers had prowled the skies above my home town and that my grandfather had scanned those skies while on watch on the roof of the Vickers Armstrong factory by the Tyne, where he worked building tanks.

I wandered into history looking for excitement. I never expected that there I would encounter black and brown people who were like me and my family. I was alerted to those stories of presence and participation by my white mother and I stumbled across more and more stories of black British people as my interests took me further back, into the 19th and then the 18th century. It was, I believe, the first book I ever bought for myself. This history of the black presence in Britain was published in , the year in which my family had been besieged in our home, and it set the racism that had so deeply affected our lives within a historical context.

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It allowed me to understand my own experiences as part of a longer story and to appreciate that in an age when black men were dying on the floors of police cells, my own encounters with British racism had been relatively mild. Fryer took his readers back through the centuries and introduced us to an enormous pantheon of black historical characters, about whom we had previously known nothing. Those black Britons have been with me ever since.

I have visited their graves and read their letters and memoirs. They have become part of British history and in some cases part of the national curriculum. Staying Power remains a uniquely important book and anyone who has ever written about black history has found themselves referencing it, quoting from it or seeking out some of the myriad of primary sources it drew together. Although not the first work of black British history, its impact spread further than most, in part because its publication came at a crucial moment, three years after a wave of riots sparked by hostile policing set ablaze black neighbourhoods of London, Bristol and Liverpool.

There was a terrible symmetry to the fact that the most serious and sustained of the early s riots took place in the cities from which the slave-traders had set sail in the 17th and 18th centuries. Not far from the flickering flames of the Bristol riots, a statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader and member of the Royal African Company in the 17th century, looked on as the police were driven out of the black St Pauls district.

This was not the case in the s.

They were fought by young black people in response to years of systematic persecution and prejudice. They were destructive and damaging but they were understandable. While it is clear today that the riots marked the beginning of the end of one chapter, the nature of the new age that followed remains to be seen.

The s and the s were, in many ways, better days. Survey after survey plotted the decline of racist sentiment as a younger generation emerged who had not experienced the racism of the postwar period nor been brought up to view the world in racial terms. Yet this period was the era in which the name of Stephen Lawrence was added to the long list of black Britons who have been murdered by racists.

Historians tend to be cautious when it comes to commentating on the modern age, the period through which we are currently living. For me, the period from the s onwards is the one I know from personal memory as well as through historical study, which probably clouds more than it clarifies judgment. But I strongly recall that in the s there was a strong sense among black people of being under siege and of feeling the need to fight for a place and a future in the country. One of the ways in which black people, and their white allies, attempted to secure that future was by reclaiming their lost past.

The uncovering of black British history was so important because the present was so contested. Black history became critical to the generation whom Enoch Powell could not bring himself to see as British. A history was needed to demonstrate to all that black British children, born of immigrant parents, were part of a longer story that stretched back to the Afro-Romans whose remains are only now being properly identified.

Black History Month was needed in Britain because the black past had been largely buried and it was during the s that the task of exhumation took on real urgency.

Unusually, history became critical to a whole community, while at the same time becoming highly personal to those who discovered it. To look at the portrait of Olaudah Equiano for the first time, and stare into the eyes of a black Georgian, was, for me, as for many thousands of black Britons, a profound experience. To see Equiano, with his cravat and scarlet coat, was to feel the embrace of the past and of a deeper belonging. The black British history that was written in the s was built on the foundations of earlier scholars such as James Walvin and was expanded by hundreds of committed volunteers; local historians, community historians and brilliant, determined, sometimes obsessive amateurs.

Most worked and still work outside of academia, producing local history or uncovering the presence of black people in parts of the British story from which they have been expunged — the world wars, the history of seafaring, the world of entertainment and many others. A sum that matched, by chance, the price the nation had paid the slave owners in compensation for the loss of their human property in The next step, I contend, is to expand the horizon and reimagine black British history as not just a story that took place in Britain, and not just as the story of settlement, although it matters enormously.

From the 16th century onwards, Britain exploded like a supernova, radiating its power and influence across the world.

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Black people were placed at the centre of that revolution. Our history is global, transnational, triangular and much of it is still to be written.

This replica was made of a metal frame around which had been stretched fabric printed with the covers of hundreds of postwar British newspapers. She appeared in the Olympic stadium as one among a series of symbolic representations of the pivotal events in British history: There had been, at most, a few thousand black Londoners in The history symbolised by the Windrush has become a part of the British story, in a way that no one who attended the Olympic Games could have possibly imagined.

The Empire Windrush has entered the folklore and vocabulary of the nation. But this triumph of remembering has come at a cost. The symbolic power of the Windrush moment has at times obscured the deeper and longer black history. As well as losing sight of the more distant past, our focus on the postwar story has meant that, at times, we have been slow to recognise more recent changes. Since the start of the s, Britain has undergone a second great wave of black migration, one that has largely gone unnoticed. Now that Dylan has a firm grasp on one aspect of his life, and the satisfaction of a job well done, he loses his grip on another.

Every minor accomplishment he achieves is a major victory for him and the reader. Our connection to Dylan also means the blows that he takes are that much more devastating. To think, after all the mental obstacles he overcame, his sanity may still be in question is a bombshell when it hits. Ed Brubaker is at the height of his powers, which is saying a lot given his accomplishments. The visual style is picturesque in the best possible way. New York is a living, breathing part of every page.

On every panel, you can hear cars beeping and people shuffling. Sean Phillips draws people as well as he does landscapes. Elizabeth Breitweiser does exceptional work with even a dirtier, grittier pallet of color. The city only provides so many vibrant colors in a nighttime landscape and drenched in murder.

They start out green, get closer to brown, then damn near black by the time he speaks his mind. These little details make Kill Or Be Killed a splendid repeat read.

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The black background behind Dylan as he confronts the Russian mob boss one-on-one sends shivers down your spine. All the comic book tricks are on full, tasteful display in Kill Or Be Killed. That devastating final page reveal. Kill Or Be Killed has some monumental staying power. The killer creative team shows no signs of stopping as we follow Dylan into another dark place.

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