Wightman Road, a centre of the Black Power Movement in the Seventies

Black Liberation Front Poster showing Wightman Road address, (Image Encyclopaedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line)

The Black Liberation Front (BLF) was founded at the start of 1971 by former members of the the Black Panther Movement. Its headquarters were at 54 Wightman Road, formerly the Black Panther Movement’s North London branch address.

The BLF maintained close links with the Black Panther Party in the United States and was organised on the same lines, with separate divisions for areas such as self-defence, propaganda and youth.

The 54 Wightman Road premises also hosted a  'Black People's Information Centre', a storefront for the organisation's newspaper, Grass Roots and 'supplementary schools' and classes.

The 54 Wightman Road premises, now bricked up (Image: Google Street View)

Outside of the black community the BLF was best known for its newspaper Grass Roots, which was edited by a variety of different people including Tony Soares and Ansel Wong. Started in mid-1971, by its third issue, Grass Roots was being distributed in Bristol, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Liverpool, Hull, Sheffield and London.

The paper was at the centre of the first of two incidents that propelled the BLF into a wider spotlight.

In September 1971, the Grassroots newspaper contained a reproduction of a page from the American Black Panther Party newspaper, which featured instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail. Although The Black Panther, from which the ‘recipe’ was taken, was legally available in radical book shops and even some libraries, in March 1972 the BLF’s Tony Soares was charged with attempted incitement to arson; bomb-making; possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life and murder of persons.

The Defence campaign received wide support and publicity. The manifest injustice of the charges brought against Soares and the behaviour of the judge in the 1973 trial won the BLF much publicity and public sympathy, which was marshalled by the well-supported Grass Roots Defence Committee. On the other hand, the  time the BLF’s linchpin Soares, spent absent from the movement and the strain the trial put the BLF under undoubtedly burdened the organisation. In 1977, he left the organisation for entirely unrelated reasons.

Protest poster for Tony Soares arrest (Image Encyclopaedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line)

The Black Liberation Front hit the headlines again, in October 1975, when three young black men claiming to be part of the Black Liberation Army, a supposed adjunct of the BLF, attempted to rob the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge and ended up taking eight members of its staff hostage for five days.

Much of the text above is copied directly from the 2017 paper, Independent radical black politics: Looking at the BUFP & BLF. It is attached in full below. Also attached is an interview with Ansell Wong (referencing a West Green operation) and a copy of a newspaper article about the molotov cocktail trial.

Your Google finger will turn up a range of references on this topic. 

Note: Prior to coming to national prominence, 54 Wightman Road had spent its first 60 years as a butcher's. From 1900 to 1933, it was run as George Churchley Butcher. It was then taken over and run as Stilts and Herbert until 1958. After a year under new ownership, it was taken over again in 1959 and run as Hibbin & Son (H J & R Hibbin) until 1967. (The business also had a shop just round the corner at 7 Station Approach for a while).