Universal Coloured People's Association

The Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) was founded on 5 June 1967 at a meeting of 76 members of the Black British community in Notting Hill, London. The UCPA's development as a black power organisation was driven by Stokely Carmichael's July 1967 visit to Britain, where he spoke at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London. Just days after Carmichael's visit, Nigerian-born novelist and playwright Obi Egbuna, who had been living in England since 1961, was elected chairman of the association. On 10 September that year, the UCPA launched a pamphlet called Black Power in Britain, the stated purpose of which was "to awake the coloured people of Britain to the lessons of Stokely Carmichael". Roy Sawh was initially second-in-command of the organisation, but due to disagreements with Obi Egbuna, Sawh and his supporters left the association only a month after its establishment to form a small splinter group called the Universal Coloured People and Arab Association (UCPAAA). Plagued by in-fighting from its inception, the UCPA split up when most of its members opted to form a new organisation called the Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP) on 26 July 1970. == Ideology ==

As a black power organisation, white people were prohibited from joining the UCPA. However, an association leaflet called "Black Power is Black Unity" defined "black" to include all non-white people, and there were several Asian members including Roy Sawh and Tony Soares. Both Marxism-Leninism and pan-Africanism had a significant impact on the UCPA's philosophy. The inclusion of all non-white people as "black" was in line with their conception of imperialism, which declared that the world was being driven into two camps consisting of the imperialist and predominantly white Western powers on the one hand, and those of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas on the other. The influence of Marxism-Leninism continued to be central to the UCPA's successor, the Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP). Like the BUFP and the British Black Panthers, the UCPA adopted a third-worldist line which dismissed the revolutionary potential of the white working class population due to its indifference to racial prejudice, declaring in 1969 that "Communists are no longer communists. They have become Coloured and White." == Activities ==

The UCPA set up study groups across the UK, as well as a "Free University for Black Studies". Obi Egbuna was also arrested on charges of threatening police, for which he was found guilty. == See also ==