The British Establishment Has Always Demonized Protesters

This is an extract from Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World by Dan Hancox, now available from Verso Books.

It is an experience as exhilarating as it is rare, but sometimes you can actually feel the electric crackle of history being made in the air around you. On June 7, 2020, amid the tumult of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising, a long-hated statue of the seventeenth-century slave trader Edward Colston was lassoed with ropes and pulled off its pedestal in Bristol by a crowd of hundreds of mostly young protesters.

The action made headlines around the world, but it mattered most of all to those people who were right there, in the midst of it: chanting for racial justice and then screaming with elation, exulting at the metallic clonk of the bronze statue finally hitting the ground, jeering as it was rolled along the ground, before the final giant splosh as it was dumped into the river Avon, where Colston’s slave ships used to dock.

There was “a rain of cheers” as the statue came down, “a standing ovation on the platform of [his] neck,” wrote Bristolian poet Vanessa Kisuule the next day, in a poem titled “Hollow.” She was dazzled by the astonishing power of the crowd to achieve something they had been told repeatedly by the authorities should not and could not be done.

It was a moment of pure catharsis, generated by the righteous anger and action of the protesters, who had pulled off that magical trick of transmuting rage into joy, changing the physical fabric of Bristol, and with it themselves and the world they moved in. This is crowd alchemy, and you know it when you experience it. “The air,” wrote Kisuule, “is gently throbbing with newness. Can you feel it?”

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