Ahmed Iqbal Ullah was 13 when he was stabbed to death in the playground of Burnage High School in south Manchester in 1986, killed by a 13-year-old white pupil who received the youth equivalent of a life sentence. The murder triggered the Macdonald inquiry into racism and racial violence in Manchester schools. The inquiry's report, Murder in the Playground, co-authored by Prof Gus John, argued schools had a responsibility to teach children how racism operates. Then-Education Secretary Kenneth Baker refused to accept the report, refused to raise it in parliament, and refused to place it in the House of Commons library. Forty years later, John notes, racist incidents in schools continue to multiply. The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre, founded in 1987 by Lou Kushnick, a Jewish-American professor at the University of Manchester, with teacher Jackie Ould as education co-ordinator, now houses archives on Black figures in Manchester, community history including Manchester carnival, and pan-African activism. It provides archivists, teachers, and campaigners with resources to document under-recorded Black, antiracist, and migration histories. A memorial event last month — The Legacy of Ahmed: 40 years on — drew Ahmed's family, AIU head Maya Sharma, original justice campaigners including lawyer Robert Lizar, and a new generation of activists. The event revived debate around "political Blackness," the 1970s concept of a strategic multiracial alliance across groups affected by racism. The framework fell out of favour in the 1990s as critics argued it flattened differing experiences. But speakers including writer and filmmaker Tariq Mehmood — who joined the original justice campaign spearheaded by Selina Ullah in 1986 — argued the concept has renewed relevance against a resurgent far right. Mehmood urged activists to move offline into grassroots organising across communities, citing a "continuing struggle" against racism in the UK and genocide in Gaza. Zara Manoehoetoe of Manchester antiracism organisation Kids of Colour framed political Blackness as foundational: "Anti-blackness manifests for all of us." She described working with young people across Greater Manchester whose international context "lives in their DNA, it lives in their homes, it lives at the kitchen table." Nika Muthra-Shah of the Rekindle Collective, a Black-led supplementary schools programme, reported young people "feeling a lot of anger and a lot of fear about the rise of the far right," with the collective countering through youth empowerment, critical thinking education, and dialogue. The human cost surfaced in testimony from those who were children alongside Ahmed. Naeem, who was in the playground the day of the stabbing, described receiving no support: "My life just deteriorated, I wasn't bothered with school, I was fighting, I was suspended, I became racially abusive towards people." Pervez Iqbal, a year older than Ahmed and part of the original justice campaign, became a teacher and returned to Burnage for 23 years: "Schools and communities can change, education can change attitudes." The numbers tell the structural story. Home Office figures from October revealed racially and religiously motivated offences have reached record highs. Police recorded 146,825 hate crimes in the year ending March 2026 — a 7% annual rise. Offences targeting Muslims increased the most, up 15%, from 4,479 to 5,132. The state apparatus that refused the Macdonald report in 1986 has not built the institutional capacity to reverse these trends. The burden remains with grassroots archives, supplementary schools, and community organisers operating on shoestring budgets. The pattern is clear: a racist murder prompts an inquiry, the inquiry produces recommendations, the government refuses to implement them, the community builds its own infrastructure, and four decades later the same violence persists at larger scale. The AIU RACE Centre and organisations like Kids of Colour and the Rekindle Collective are doing the work that schools and state institutions were told to do in 1986. That the work continues is a testament to community resilience. That it must continue is an indictment of institutional failure.
