Race row over 'Black Power' statue meant to bring a community together

It was meant as a powerful symbol commemorating the abolition of the slave trade and celebrating good community relations.

Instead, a £15,000 sculpture installed in an inner-city park - depicting a large, black clenched fist - has itself been accused of being racially divisive.

Local residents condemned the artwork as aggressive and offensive, and now the charity which commissioned it has bowed to pressure and ordered a redesign.




The metal fist, similar to the infamous Black Power salute by two U.S. athletes at the 1968 Olympics, is the centrepiece of the sculpture in Old Trafford, Manchester.

The area is racially mixed and the artwork - outside a youth centre - was designed with the help of local teenagers, who were apparently inspired by last year's bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.

However, some older residents, black and white, were horrified by the clenched fist and petitioned the council to remove it.

Seymour Park, where the sculpture stands, is popular with elderly residents as a meeting place and for walking dogs, as well as for young families.

Tommy Gallagher, vice-chairman of the Friends of Old Trafford community group, said: 'A clenched fist is really racist to a lot of people around here. I think people want to see it removed now. They are not happy about it at all.'

The sculpture is clearly reminiscent of the gloved salute by sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the Mexico Olympics.

Although their controversial gesture is now regarded as a principled protest from the civil rights era, the Black Power movement was associated with violence and separatism.

Following the outcry over the sculpture, it will be revamped with shackles and chains added to the fist along with a plaque explaining its anti-slavery message.

It was commissioned by environmental charity Groundwork with funding from the Government's Safer Stronger Communities Fund for deprived areas and the European Regional Development Fund. Continues here

It’s constant isn’t it, the blame game, the perpetual besiegement of “whitey”, we are to blame for everything, oh some of us can escape if we are female or disabled, then perhaps they will make some allowances, stop short of complete condemnation. The battering ram of guilt is constantly used to attack white sensibilities and you know, quite scarily some of us fall for it, some of us confess our sins to the new inquisition. I’m surprised some of us don’t indulge in self-flagellation, to really show them how really very sorry we are, forget our own ancestors, who in all probability had an equally hard life, given that almost all of the working class served their betters (sic).

Coal doesn’t get itself out of the ground; the land is not tilled by wishful thinking and chimneys are not swept by sprites, the industrial revolution was built upon the backs of whites, whites who laboured in appalling conditions, for a pittance, or in many cases for nothing. In effect most of the working class were slaves, nothing more nothing less, this enabled at some future date, socialism to use the plight of the worker to wheedle their way in, to establish itself under false pretences, until we have the situation we now see, whereby the union is nothing but a front for Marxism, a base for treachery.

Oh and it is treachery, they, the unions stand idly by whilst the working class they claim to represent are robbed of their livelihood, their wages undermined by immigration, which the unions promote, whilst many other jobs are out-sourced, we have the rather ironic situation, whereby the powers that be, in all its forms, have given our manufacturing industry away, whilst helping establish the same in the east and the union said nothing, not a word. As I type this, many sixteen year olds have either left school or are preparing to, what have they got, what future lies ahead, quite simply nothing, they have taken it away from them, is it any wonder that the young exhibit not an ounce of patriotism, in many cases hating this country rather than loving it.

They see immigrants and non-whites promoted above them, negro culture made chic, service industry jobs leading no-where, a government that hates them, a country that denies them and tirelessly works against them, lost in a tornado of anti-white prejudice what is there to love, what is there to admire, what is there to fight for. Is it any wonder that many resort to drugs; thievery and violence, lost in the land of savagery many men go native, most have no inkling as to nationalism, no sense of either what it is, or what it can do, views are created by the media and we know the image they like to portray. So we lose them, thousands of our young go astray, live in serfdom till lives end, never knowing a benevolent country, never experiencing a clean country where all the rot is cut away and goodness exposed.

Instead they are bombarded with negative imagery, beset by falsehoods, as are all whites; it is if we are taught to hate our past, our history moulded so that we loathe our ancestors that little bit more. May I say in passing that you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to beg forgiveness for, nothing to be ashamed of before we gave the world machinery man-power was all we had, all we could use to make our mark upon our environment. It is therefore perfectly natural and may I add understandable that nations and peoples used slave labour, a leader simply could not afford to commit his people to labour if other peoples were available. Imagine the scenario two nations at war, one nation captures thousands during its campaign, needing to shore up its defences, say for instance in building a great wall, it uses its own people whilst thousands of enemy combatants look on, this hypothetical nation then feeds these thousands, shelters them and clothes them, whilst its own people labours. Such a situation would be unthinkable, the people of that nation would rise up in understandable rage, questioning why their ruler feeds the alien, shelters the alien and clothes the alien, whilst they toil, in times of old such rulers would be swept from power and rightly so, we had to wait until the modern age for such a situation to transpire, for rulers to work against their own people.

Slavery whether we like it or not, was a necessity before the advent of machinery, there was simply no other way, yet the irony is that it was whites, we that most loathed of peoples, that did away with slavery, that invented machinery to do the job and outlawed the practice itself, there should be monuments to us all over the world, parks in black countries, should have statues of white fists clenched in salute, no that would be antagonistic and against their “human rights”, to erect a statue against the wishes of the local population, it would, wouldn’t it. 14

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