As flags are raised on British streets and nationalism reasserts itself as common sense, the question of where to look for hope becomes newly urgent. This paper turns first to the past: to the Black Power movement who resisted street racism in the 1970s, and to the Black and Asian youth of British towns who, in the 1980s and 2000s, faced down racist mobs and indifference alike. The legacy of Britain’s Black Power Movement—organised, insistent, internationalist—runs through these histories of defiance. Yet the argument is not confined to retrospection. It looks toward the present, to the fragile coalitions of urban multicultures, experiments in electoral reform, and a revived politics of grassroots dissent. Taken together, these offer not nostalgia but the possibility of remaking what class struggle, conviviality and anti-fascism mean in contemporary Britain.