Political Activism
Southall's interest in radical politics may have been awakened by his uncle George Baker, whose family had a history of radicalism going back to the seventeenth century. Southall's 1885 sketch of John Bright addressing a Birmingham political meeting might be taken as an early indication of radical interest.
Southall politics were strongly influenced by the pacifism of his Quaker faith. His opposition to the tide of jingoism that surrounded the Jameson Raid in 1895 provoked him into political action, and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 caused him to switch his allegiance from the Liberal Party to the anti-war Independent Labour Party, for whose Birmingham branch he served as secretary from 1914 until 1931.
Southall's obituary in the Birmingham Post recorded that he was always "an enthusiastic supporter of that Socialism or Communism which William Morris expressed in his News from Nowhere".
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“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
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