Change Is Gonna Come: The Voice Of Black America 1963-1973

The picture on the cover of CHANGE IS GONNA COME will need no explanation for any Ace or Kent fan over the age of 50.

We all grew up in a world where such sights were brought to our attention by the world’s media resources, via the nightly news or now-long-vanished cinema newsreels. Few who saw them ‘as new’ will ever be able to get out of their minds the appalling images of white American policemen and soldiers turning fire hoses and night sticks loose on smartly-dressed young black Americans, who were doing nothing more than staking a claim on their basic human rights. Here in the UK, we certainly knew what a ‘race riot’ was, but there were no laws that governed the social treatment of any man or woman based solely on the colour of their skin. It was somehow all the more shocking to those of us who cared that these images were coming from a land that most looked to as the place we’d most like to live in, given the choice.