Race and resistance

What lay behind the founding of the Institute of Race Relations in 1958 and its subsequent transformation in the early 1970s, through the agency of its staff, radical academics and black activists, is told here by a major protagonist of that change. Edited and abbreviated from a 1974 pamphlet, long out of print, not only does the article give an object lesson in how to effect far-reaching and radical organisational change, but it also contextualises the IRR story in the history of post-war race relations in Britain, pointing the way to its future development.