The Black Liberation Front (BLF) was one of the most integral organisations of
Britain’s Black Power movement, which was inspired heavily, but not solely, by
the higher profile Black Power and Civil Rights movements in the USA. The
American-Trinidadian black radical, Stokely Carmichael, had coined the term
“Black Power” in 1966, and delivered a consciousness invoking speech at
London’s Dialectics of Liberation Congress a year later. The black revolutionary
figurehead, Malcolm X, had first visited Britain in 1964, and again in 1965 just two
weeks before his death, wherein he made note of British mainstream politics’
popularisation of overt racism.
1 Within the same year, the Racial Adjustment
Action Society (RAAS) was founded in England by Michael X, an affiliate of
Malcolm X and self-professed icon for British Black Power in its emergent stages.2
Withal, succeeding Black Power groups began to erupt throughout Britain during
the late 1960s and early 1970s, igniting young black people to politicise the
meaning of blackness in confronting an establishment which rendered them
second-class citizens.