Free Pitch Black by Emy Onuora Page B

name at West Ham. In the same year, south London boy Paul Davis became the first black player to play for Arsenal since Brendon Batson. Making their respective debuts in the 1978/79 season, Dave Bennett and Roger Palmer from Manchester were breaking through into first-team football at Manchester City. Howard Gayle from Toxteth made his debut in October 1980 for European powerhouse Liverpool, and Chapeltown lad Terry Connor was making a massive impact at his local club, Leeds United, scoring the only goal on his debut against West Bromwich Albion, as a seventeen-year-old in November 1979. In addition to the young black players beginning to take their first steps in the professional game, more established stars were also making an impact. One of the most significant examples was that of Justin Fashanu, who in 1981 moved from his local club, Norwich City, to Nottingham Forest and in so doing became the first million-pound black footballer. In 1980, Garth Crooks made a big-money move to Spurs, from his home-town club of Stoke City.
    As Cyrille Regis opined, as more clubs began to field black players, the racists had something of a dilemma. How could they hurl abuse at black players on the opposition team when they had black players within the ranks of their own side? Furthermore, if opposition fans abused black players playing for the side they supported, the tribal nature of football support dictated that they couldn’t side with the opposition’s fans. Therefore, as more and more black footballers became established within their sides, the level of terrace abuse subsided and eventually disappeared altogether at some grounds.
    That was certainly the case at Arsenal. During the 1970s, the club had acquired a certain reputation for terraceracism, a reputation that lasted until Paul Davis appeared in the side. The famous 5–3 victory for West Brom against Manchester United in December 1978 was significant for the brilliance of the Three Degrees and the sickening racism of the Old Trafford support that had forced commentator Gerald Sinstadt to condemn sections of the crowd. The arrival of Remi Moses, ironically from West Bromwich Albion, seemed to bring an end to the terrace racism that had been prevalent at the ground. However, this trend was general, rather than a cast-iron law. Some teams fielded black players yet large sections of their support still indulged in racist abuse; the irony of abusing the opposition’s black players while cheering black players on your own side had not been adequately grasped. Where the nature of racist abuse could be characterised as largely casual, it gradually fell away, but where racism was organised and where the far right were able to have an influence, it remained a pernicious feature at those clubs.
    Away from football, the far right continued their attempt to intimidate black communities as campaigning for the 1979 general election took place. The NF, confident of making an electoral breakthrough, held their St George’s Day meeting in Southall Town Hall. Paul Canoville grew up in the area and reflected on what it was like around the time.
    Lots of racism in Southall, it was a very terrible time, scary time … I remember times going to little youth clubs … You know, your mum gives you a precise time, you got to be back at that time, no minute, no second after … You’re running late … Then you notice that this car slows down with four white guys in … So you stop and they stop, and that decision now, you got to go the long way round and obviously you’regoing to be home late, but don’t explain any of that to your mum, she don’t want to hear that. That’s how bad it was at that time.
    Canoville had every right to be apprehensive. There were many racist attacks in and around the area and in 1976, seventeen-year-old Sikh schoolboy Gurdip Singh Chaggar was brutally stabbed to death in a racist murder outside a Southall pub. The murder had galvanised the local community to