: Britain Celebrates ‘Windrush Day’ Amid Broader Reckoning on Race #WorldNEWS Britain observes Windrush Day on Monday, a celebration of the contribution of first-generation migrants, especially those

Britain Celebrates ‘Windrush Day’ Amid Broader Reckoning on Race #WorldNEWS
Britain observes Windrush Day on Monday, a celebration of the contribution of first-generation migrants, especially those with an Afro-Caribbean background, to British life. This year, it comes amid a broader reckoning on institutional racism, kicked off by the killing of George Floyd.
The day is named after the Empire Windrush, a ship that docked near London in 1948 carrying the first cohort of migrants from the Caribbean who had been invited by the government to relocate to Britain to help fill a labour shortage after World War II.
But Windrush Day was not widely celebrated until 2018, in the wake of a scandal about institutional racism in the British government and its deadly outcomes for Black people from the Windrush generation. This year, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the U. K. , Windrush Day is being marked amid an even broader social reckoning over structural racism around the world.

The moment is a fertile one in Britain. In response to Floyd’s murder, thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters marched in cities across the U. K. in early June. Several statues of slave traders and colonialists were removed, including one of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, which protesters toppled and threw into the city’s harbor. Others were removed by local councils and private landowners.
As well as educational events being held in schools, towns and cities across the U. K. to mark Windrush Day on Monday, Hackney council in east London announced it would erect two sculptures honoring the Windrush generation in the ethnically diverse borough.
Here’s what to know.
Who are the Windrush Generation?
The “Windrush generation” is a term used to describe the people who arrived on the Empire Windrush and other boats after it, part of a wave of migrants who would help to rebuild, and reshape, the United Kingdom after World War II.
In 1948, as the British Empire was being dismantled, Parliament passed a law giving residents of the Commonwealth (Britain’s former colonies) the right to live and work in the U. K.

SSPL via Getty Images—SSPL/NMeM/Daily Herald ArchiveThe Empire Windrush arriving at Tibury Docks in Essex, 22 June 1948.
The hundreds of thousands who arrived before immigration rules were tightened in 1971 helped to fill a labor shortage, rebuilding the country’s war damage, helping staff its new National Health Service, and facilitating economic growth as bus drivers, factory hands, entrepreneurs and more.
But they encountered a country that largely still subscribed to ideas of imperial greatness, even as the Empire was falling apart and the Windrush generation (themselves descendants of slaves) brought added perspectives of colonial subjugation.