CHILDREN were among the scores of black people gunned down by white police as they protested against racist laws in South Africa in March 1960. The Sharpeville Massacre, as it became known, sent shock waves around the world. It helped pave the way for eventual black liberation in South Africa, a country previously divided along racial lines by the notorious apartheid system with black people at the bottom of the pile in their own land.

The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania had organised a demonstration outside a police station in the poor Sharpeville township. It was called to oppose the hated “pass laws” that meant black South Africans had to carry identity cards and could be arrested and jailed if they didn’t.

South African police opened fire on thousands of protesters when they reached a fence around the police station. Official sources put the number of victims at 249, including 29 children, with 69 people killed and 180 injured. Some of those murdered were shot in the back as they fled.

The UN condemned South Africa’s regime over the massacre and designated March 21, its anniversary, as UN Anti-Racism Day. Newly founded and black-led, the Liberation Movement has managed to gather together a stellar cast of international speakers for an online webinar titled Building an International Resistance to Racism: What’s Next after Black Lives Matter?

Among them are the charismatic Tsoana Nhlapo, chief executive officer of the Sharpeville Foundation in South Africa, and leading black MP Clive Lewis. It takes place at 7pm on Monday March 21 and you can register for it free of charge at www.mstar.link/RacismDayWebinar.

The public lynching of unarmed black man George Floyd by a white US police officer sparked worldwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations. After the US, Britain had the biggest.

In Bristol, protesters tore down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader in an iconic act of white solidarity. BLM demanded not just an end to police brutality and deaths of black people in custody but also the decolonisation of education and culture, an end to the systemic racism denied by the British government and reparations for slavery.

The Liberation Movement wants to keep this momentum going as a grassroots, youth-centred anti-racist initiative supported by community groups, trade unions and faith groups.

Its timing couldn’t be more urgent, with the British government putting the Nationality and Borders Bill through Parliament, which could take away at a stroke the nationality of citizens, particularly African, Asian, Caribbean and other people of colour, as well as Muslims. Britain’s rulers are also attempting to clamp down on protests they don’t like, such as Black Lives Matter, by giving police new powers to ban them.

Today, racism is still as stark as it was three decades ago. It has morphed into different forms, such as Islamophobia, while the government continues to deny that systemic racism exists.

At least 60 per cent of the NHS workers who died at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic were people of colour. Out of the 72 people who were incinerated by the totally avoidable Grenfell fire most of them were people of colour — and several of them were Muslims, migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.

The Windrush scandal has seen 23 of its victims die before getting government compensation, three years after the scheme to help them was set up. Only a paltry 5 per cent of those people eligible have had settlements.

Last year, 31 migrants, fleeing Western-created wars and refugee crises, drowned in the English Channel while they attempted to reach British shores that our ruthless leaders Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have as part of their “hostile environment.”

Traumatised refugees and asylum-seekers are locked up in squalid detention centres. Black people, some of whom came to this country with their parents as children, are bundled by private security guards onto government-chartered deportation flights.

The Liberation Movement will fight these injustices.

Marc Wadsworth is the founder of the Liberation Movement — www.liberationmovement.org.uk.

Deborah Hobson is seeking nominations from constituency Labour parties to stand for its ruling national executive committee.