On this day in 1979, Awaz (UK Asian women’s collective) + OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African+Asian descent) organised a powerful picket at Heathrow, protesting the horrific virginity tests, which some migrant women were subject to by immigration services on arrival to the UK.
Archives: Timeline Stories
Timeline Post Type Description
West Indian Gazette Launched
March 1958 West Indian Gazette was launched: ‘a child of the slums and shamefully little is known about it and its founding under the inspiring leadership of Claudia Jones.’ As Britain’s first campaigning black paper it sought to lead not just inform
1948 Nationality Act
The Act announces a new legal status, “Citizen of the United Kingdom and the Colonies” [CUCKs], legally dissolving “the racialized distinction between Anglo-Saxon family and non-white colonial subject – the distinction that had heretofore premised the eugenicist innovations in national insurance and welfare” (Sivanandan). Both CUCKs and the new Citizens of the Independent Commonwealth Countries
Execution of Udham Singh, London.
Punjabi revolutionary Udham Singh is executed in Pentonville Prison, London, for his assassination of the Governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, the man responsible for the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in Caxton Hall, London, on 13 March 1940. Singh, a skilled electrician, had formed the first Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) in Coventry in 1938.