Joe Louis, who held the world heavyweight boxing title from 1937 to 1949, is remembered today chiefly as a sporting legend. His life as a racial justice pioneer has been all but forgotten. And on this day in 1944, he struck an important blow for racial justice. Born Joseph Louis Barrow in 1914 to sharecroppers […]
War criminal exposed by Searchlight will face trial posthumously
The Supreme Court of Belarus has announced that it will begin criminal proceedings against Antanas Gecevičius, better known in Scotland as Antanas Gecas, for genocide. The case is scheduled to open on 18 March. The defendant has been dead for 25 years. For anyone who followed Searchlight’s investigations in the late1980s into Nazi war criminals […]
Theatre review: Here There Are Blueberries, by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich
This extraordinary production at Stratford East lands with the quiet, cumulative force of a dossier being opened in front of you. What emerges is not a conventional piece of Holocaust drama but an inquiry into how very ordinary people become functionaries of atrocity, and how institutions charged with memorialising victims must navigate the unsettling images […]
Obituary: Gerry Gable (1937-2026), architect of modern British anti-fascism
The death of Searchlight’s founder Gerry Gable at the age of 88 marks the passing of a man without whom modern British anti-fascism would scarcely be recognisable. For more than sixty years, he stood at the centre of the struggle against fascism and the extreme right, as a relentless organiser, investigator and strategist. To many, […]
Red Lion Square, June 1974 – the killing of an anti-fascist
There is much on the internet about this demonstration, and the death of Kevin Gately. I was there, and this note just adds some personal recollections of my own. On this day, in 1974, at an anti-fascist demonstration in London, Kevin Gately, a student from Warwick University, was killed, almost certainly by a blow with […]
Remembering Maurice Ludmer, giant of the post war anti-fascist movement
On 14 May,1981, at the age of only 54, Searchlight’s editor Maurice Ludmer died suddenly, depriving the post war anti-fascist and anti-racist movement of one of its leading figures. Maurice, famously, said “Never again” in 1946 when, as his 1981 Searchlight obituary written by the playwright David Edgar, recounted: “…a young British Army private, a […]