We must make a stand'

Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from a scan of a newspaper page, and the page was cut into articles by machine, at the headlines found by their type size. Nothing has been corrected: expect misread words, text from a neighbouring article, and titles that are the machine reading of the headline, some of them only fragments. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: headline found by type size in the OCR geometry (split_tabloid.py); 4-5 of 5; machine-segmented newspaper page; uncorrected Vision OCR.

page 12 of the scan

ALI DASSU, a leading militant in the Asian Youth Organisation, explained to Red Weekly how the AYO came to be formed in Blackburn:

'Racism has been reaching monproportions in Blackburn. Youths have been beaten up on the streets, and blacks have been the first sacked when redundancies have been made. The whole Asian community has been intimidated.

We were frustrated with the atti tudes of our elders, of the local rightwing Indian Workers Association and all the rest. We thought the time was right to start organising ourselves and start working within the community and the unione The alertion owe made it urgent.

We were for action while our leaders were pacifist. We weren't prepared to go into Action Against Racism around slogans of peace and 'One Race - The Human Race'. When the International Socialists challeng ed these slogans inside AAR they were thrown out.

We wanted to make a stand so we formed the Asian Youth Organisation. The black elders were very hostile and some of our members were beaten up At the time when racist attacks were at their height we went to the bus stops to defend our people on their way back home. The idea of black self-defence must be spread