Baptised by fire: an interview with Suresh Grover

Abstract

In this contribution to narrating the black British history of struggle, one of the leading lights of community-based anti-racism, who has worked over four decades from Southall, west of London and one of the first post-war settlements of ‘New Commonwealth’ Asian workers, is interviewed. He records some of the milestone struggles of The Monitoring Group from the street campaigning against lethal racist violence in the 1970s to the nationally important watershed government-commissioned report by Macpherson acknowledging institutional racism in 1999. Suresh Grover explains the impetus for organising, and the ways of building an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal movement around and beyond family campaigns against state injustices – changing over time to meet new circumstances.