• Linton Kwesi Johnson, "New Craas Massakah" and "Di Great Insohreckshan"
  • New Cross Fire (Wikipedia)
  • 1981 Brixton Riot (Wikipedia) (Includes links to the 2006 BBC documentary "The Battle for Brixton"; see also 1981 England Riots)
  • BBC's Brixton Riot 25th Anniversary site | 2011 BBC radio program on the Brixton Riots
• Benjamin Zephaniah, "Call It What You Like"
  • Two Tone Britain (Channel 4, 2004)

• Paul Gilroy, from Chapter 2 of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack

Linton Kwesi Johnson

• Linton Kwesi Johnson links
• LKJ interviewed on "The Brixton riots: 30 years on" (BBC)
• LKJ's Preface to The New Cross Massacre Story: Interviews with John LaRose

• Benjamin Zephaniah's Website (includes written and performed versions of several poems)
• Profiles & Bibliographies: by Peter Forbes (ContemporaryWriters.com) | BBC H2G2 | Wikipedia | Kate Kellaway, "Dread poet's society" (Sunday Observer, 4 November 2001) | Marcel Berlins, "Poetic Justice" (London Guardian, 20 November 2000)
• Interviews:  Socialist Review (Weyman Bennett & Judith Orr, June 2008) | Democracy Now! (Amy Goodman, September 2010)
• Feature story on Zephaniah from BBC Radio 4
• "Banana Skin: The Metropolitan Police" (London Guardian 4 July 2001): The Met runs afoul of Zephaniah
• "Easy Going," a travel article on Jamaica written by Zephaniah for the Sunday Observer (20 January 2002)
• "What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us," an original poem commissioned by the London Guardian (24 February 1999)
• Two poems (in RealAudio) from BBC Arts' Poetry:Out Loud site: "Miss World" and "Talking Turkeys"
• BBC News: "Black poet spurns OBE [Order of the British Empire award]" (includes link to audio file, "I've been fighting against this Empire all my life")

• David Dabydeen, "On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today"
• John Agard, "Listen Mr. Oxford Don," "Finders Keepers" and "Palm Tree King"
• Grace Nichols, from The Fat Black Woman's Poems (these may be distributed in class; meantime, read about Grace Nichols at the Poetry Archive and the British Council)

• Merle Collins, "No Dialects Please" and "When Britain Had Its GREAT"
• Salman Rushdie, "The New Empire Within Britain"

David Dabydeen

• Biography & Bibliography (British Council Literature)

John Agard

• Profile by Peter Forbes (British Council Literature)
• Felicity Capon, "John Agard: 'I feel an empathy with the bad characters'" (profile in The Telegraph 12 March 2013)
• Three poems by Agard:  "Windrush Welcome," "Citizenship," and "Howdoyoudo" (sidebars on "Windrush - ticket to a new Britain [BBC])
• Two more: "Remember the Ship," and "Windrush Child" (Poetry Society)
• And four more (Poetry Archive)
• John Agard videos and more from World News.com (lots more on YouTube)

Further Resources

The Brixton Riots (The BBC's coverage of rioting in Brixton, South London, in 1981)

Dervla Murphy's Tales from Two Cities contains a first-person journalistic account of several days of rioting in the Handsworth neighborhood of Birmingham [Benjamin Zephaniah's home turf] in 1986.  Ask me for a copy if you're interested. The events also inspired John Akomfrah's landmark film Handsworth Songs (see also the British Film Institute and Mark Fisher's 2015 reflection "The Land Still Lies: Handsworth Songs and the English Riots," published in the BFI's Sight and Sound).