Activities
The WDL gained notoriety after members of the group were widely reported in the press as having taken part in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Indeed during that summer the WDL held rallies through immigrant neighbourhoods on a nightly basis. Towards the end of the riots Antiguan immigrant Kelso Cochrane was murdered and local black opinion often suggested that the WDL was responsible although ultimately no one was arrested for the killing. Like the Union Movement, which was also active in the local area, the WDL co-operated with gangs of racist Teddy boys who harassed and launched attacks on blacks in the area. Indeed in the run-up to the riots followers of the Union Movement and the WDL had came into immigrant neighbourhoods in the area to indulge in what they called "nigger hunts".
In 1959 the WDL began to co-operate with the National Labour Party, a group led by another former LEL dissident John Bean which was also active in Notting Hill. The WDL helped Bean's group with their election campaigns and the two groups held a joint rally called Stop the Coloured Invasion in Trafalgar Square in May 1959 with banners that read Keep Britain White. The monitors at the rally wore white armbands emblazoned with a black sun wheel, the symbol of the Aryan race. The sun wheel symbol was used as the symbol of White Defence League. Jordan, who had developed a network of international contacts through The Nationalist, impressed both Bean and Andrew Fountaine and in February 1960 the two groups fused to form the British National Party, which was also to be based at Arnold Leese House.
Read more about this topic: White Defence League
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)