Notting Hill Racialists Strike Again (West Indian wounded by white gang)

RACE violence blasted across north Kensington once again in the early hours of last Monday morning. Latest victim is Dill Simon, a 29-year-old West Indian labourer who was shot and wounded by an unknown white man.

Simon's assailant and his six companions, four men and two women, have still not been found by the police.

Less than 200 yards from Simon's single room in Golborne Road, W.10. is the junction with Southam Street, where last Whit Sunday, coloured carpenter, Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death by race thugs.

Five months have gone by since that murder. The police have still made no arrests. Scotland Yard still remains non-committal about the disclosure made in the Sunday Pictorial on May 31. Then the Pictorial featured an article by a youth who claimed he had told Chief Superintendent Ian Forbes-Leith, that he had been asked by an anti-coloured political group to assist in the 'roughing up' of Cochrane.

After Cochrane's death, Alonzo Briggs another coloured man was badly beaten up by a white gang.

On Monday evening I met Simon at his home. There, with four of his West Indian friends, he told me: 'I was fired at because I am a coloured man.'

He pulled out a gun

Joseph, a slim-built man from San Domingo, interrupted us: 'Nothing was done about Cochrane. The police let the fascists talk anti-coloured and do nothing about it. So you know what happens? Every thug feels free to insult us, to try and humiliate us and now to shoot us.'

The others nodded their heads in agreement.

Mr Simon said: 'These people asked me did I know where a certain club was. Truthfully I told them no.

'Then one of the men, he was dark-haired, suddenly swore at me, "You dirty bastard" was what he said, grabbed one of the girl's handbags and pulled out a gun.

'We ran away. I had a friend with me, but the man fired and hit my wrist. I saw them get in a taxi and all drive off.'

When I left Dill Simon it was dark. The coloured people still on the streets were obviously anxious to get home.

As I walked along with my companion, a young Jamaican, I caught the odd expression of sullen resentment that flashed across the faces of some of the white youths who were loitering on the street corners.

North Kensington, with its dingy streets, its decaying houses with their high rents and its poorly paid jobs, is a fertile area for the race-haters to peddle their perverted ideologies. In this area the anti-coloured groups assiduously spread their theories in the bars, on the street corners and in the shoddy cafes.

Meanwhile the official Labour movement remains impotent. All the local member of parliament, George Rogers, can offer, is a suggestion to restrict immigration. A suggestion with which every racialist will concur.

If north Kensington is not to become Britain's Deep South, with the Harrow Road forming some Mason-Dixon line, then Labour must act.

White and coloured workers must come together now to form defence organizations which can give coloured people the protection that the police are so clearly unable and unprepared to provide. The Labour movement must be mobilized to support these steps.