NEW research has shown that at least 80 people — many of them youths — were murdered by South Africa’s racist apartheid police 63 years ago this month in what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre. Officials at the time lied that the figure was only 69 as part of a big state cover-up.

The damning findings by US scholars say that, in addition, 297 people were seriously injured at Sharpeville when officers with submachine guns opened fire on peaceful, unarmed protesters outside a police station. It was a demonstration called by the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania against the hated “pass laws” that forced black people to either carry identity cards or be thrown in jail.

To commemorate the massacre, which shocked the world and helped to eventually crush apartheid and usher in black-majority rule, UN chiefs made March 21 its Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

So that is the date when my organisation, the Liberation Movement (TLM), holds an international event. This year TLM is doing an online Zoom meeting, which will feature a stellar line-up of speakers.

The keynote speech will be given by Tsoana Nhlapo, the leader of the Sharpeville Foundation in South Africa. Cementing TLM’s commitment to having trade unions at its core, Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack and Unison vice-president Amerit Rait are also on the line-up. Last year bakers’ union general secretary Sarah Woolley spoke.

There’s a Sharpeville monument in Brixton’s Windrush Square, put up by Linda Bellos, the Labour Party Black Sections vice-chair, after she was Lambeth Council leader in 1987. It was the momentous year when four Black Sections members, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz, made history by being elected to a previously all-white British Parliament, which made it no different to South Africa’s parliament at the time.

But today, racism and inequality have never been starker in Britain and abroad.

The government’s “hostile environment” policies continue to scapegoat migrants, refugees, and the Muslim community, including Britain’s appalling #RefugeeBanBill.

TLM believes the fightback must be led by people of colour, who are at the sharp end of such hatred. Unity with allies in organisations, including trade unions, community, and faith groups, is essential.

TLM stands with high-profile influencers, like football’s Gary Lineker, who has shown courage speaking out against the British government’s “immeasurably cruel” new asylum policy and its peddling of divisive “invasion” rhetoric “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s.” He and other critics have bravely filled the resistance vacuum created by cowardly politicians and their client mainstream media.

From the Grenfell Tower fire and other such disasters, the Windrush scandal to the Covid pandemic, we have seen a disproportionately heavier impact on Africans, Asians, Caribbeans and other people of colour.

Among the TLM meeting speakers will be a leading campaigner against the deaths of black people in custody Ajibola Lewis, of the United Families and Friends Campaign, who will talk about the brutal death of her son, Seni Lewis, at the hands of 11 police officers in a hospital.  

It would have been his 36th birthday on March 22. There’s now a “Seni’s law” to reduce the use of force against patients in mental health units, as a result of Lewis’s tireless campaigning.

PhD student of British black politics Leonard Butingan will speak from across the Atlantic to provide a US perspective. Suresh Grover, founder of the highly regarded Monitoring Group, anti-racist champions who took over the organising of the Justice for Stephen Lawrence Campaign from me in the 1990s, will provide British insights.

It is 30 years since Lawrence, a black teenager was murdered by racist thugs. I managed to get Nelson Mandela to meet his parents, Doreen and Neville, in London — an event that turned the campaign into an international cause celebre. It led to two of Lawrence’s murderers being put in prison for life.

Other speakers at the online meeting will be Voice newspaper editor Lester Holloway, who was previously the TUC’s anti-racism taskforce officer, Elda Cordoso, a Brazilian representative in Britain of President Lula’s election campaign and Windrush Generation Legacy Association chief Deborah Klass.

It’s most appropriate Klass is speaking, as this year is the 75th anniversary of the iconic Empire Windrush ship, carrying almost 500 Caribbean mainly ex-servicemen, including my father, to Britain.

Moderators for the TLM meeting will be Hassan Ahmed, a leading Nottingham councillor and co-chair of Grassroots Black Left, and Deborah Hobson, national co-ordinator of TLM and a prominent trade union activist.

It’s a shame some other prominent British anti-racism campaigners don’t even mention Sharpeville in their publicity for events they organise around this important date.

My guess is that’s because, unlike TLM, they’re not black-led. In this regard, TLM has loaned the slogan: nothing about us, without us.

Register at www.bit.ly/TLMmeeting23.