New Cross Fire — Black British Hidden Stories
Thirteen young black people were killed
Originally published on Jamii for Black History Month 2018
On 17 January 1981, black teenager Yvonne Ruddock was celebrating her 16th birthday at a house in Deptford, South London. In the early hours of the morning, the place caught fire and thirteen young black people were killed, including Yvonne. The origins of New Cross fire have never been established, although it was initially suggested that it was a racist attack. But in the aftermath, it seemed that the authorities hurried to create a narrative in which these black teenagers, so irresponsible and rowdy, had caused the blaze themselves.
As Baroness Ros Howells remembers, “there was an assumption that something illegal had been going on at the party. They didn’t believe it could just be a group of children enjoying themselves. It was at that point that the black community started to believe that the lives of their children were worthless.”
Following the fire, twenty thousand took part in a protest march from New Cross to Hyde Park, holding the authorities accountable for incompetence. Later in the same year, in the context of police brutality, high unemployment in the black community and regular stop and search, riots in Brixton would symbolise black peoples’ shattered relationship with the police.
As we know by now, the New Cross fire is not the only example of institutional racism that has devastated the Black British community: the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 tells an appalling story of prejudice, corruption and police incompetence. Christopher Alder, Julian Cole and Philmore Mills are just a few names of black individuals who have died or been incapacitated in police custody, with no officers being brought to justice.
It was the police shooting of black mother Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce that sparked the Brixton riots in 1985. For so long, Black Britons have been painted as disorderly and criminal, hostile towards police for no reason and creators of our own adversity. That thirteen black teenagers died in the New Cross fire would have been the result of their own recklessness; that Stephen Lawrence was murdered by five white racists would have been down to illicit gang connections.
As Ella Jones says, the student creator of an art project inspired by the New Cross fire, we aren’t taught about what happened or the racial context surrounding it. But it marked an important moment in Britain’s history of race relations and black protest.