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= Roy Hackett =

Roy Hackett OBE (19 September, 1928 – 3 August, 2022) was an activist and long-time civil rights campaigner for the British African-Caribbean community in Bristol, England. He was one of the primary organisers of the Bristol Bus Boycott, which protested against the Bristol Omnibus Company's ban on employing black and Asian drivers and conductors. These events then paved the way for the Race Relations Act of 1965, the first legislation in the UK to address racial discrimination. He was also a co-founder of the Commonwealth Co-ordinated Committee (CCC) which set up the St. Paul's Carnival (originally known as the St Paul’s Festival), a major cultural event in Bristol.

He was appointed an OBE in 2009 and an MBE in 2020. He was also a member of the Bristol Race Equality Council and founder of West Indian Parents’ and Friends’ Association (WIPFA).

Early life
Hackett grew up in Trench Town in Kingston, Jamaica. He worked as an insurance broker alongside other jobs, but still struggled to make enough money to eat. In 1952, he travelled to to Britain by ship, as part of the Windrush generation, and lived in Liverpool, London and Wolverhampton, before settling in Bristol. Once in Bristol, he faced racism from his first day, as boarding houses refused to give him a room as soon as they saw he was black, and he ended up spending his first night sleeping in a doorway.

Bus Boycott
In 1955 the Passenger Group of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), which represented bus workers, had passed a resolution that black and Asian workers should not be employed as bus crews at the Bristol Omnibus Company, despite a reported labour shortage on the buses. This was revealed by the Bristol Evening Post in 1961 and caused outrage among black communities.

Along with Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown, Hackett formed an action group to respond to this colour bar. Henry introduced Paul Stephenson, who was the city's first black youth officer, to the group, who then became their spokesperson. The group were inspired by Rosa Parks' activism and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and decided to hold their own Bristol Bus Boycott, which they announced at a press conference on 29 April 1963. The boycott attracted national attention, with politican Tony Benn, then Labour MP for Bristol South East, committing to staying “off the buses, even if I have to find a bike”. The Labour party leader, soon-to-be Prime Minister Harold Wilson, spoke out against the colour bar at an Anti-Apartheid Movement rally in London in early May. The organisers' strategies included drawing parallels with US segregation and shaming the authorities, while causing as much disruption as possible via pickets of bus depots and routes.

The ‘colour ban’ was eventually lifted on August 28, the same day that Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech in the United States.

On 28 August, the general manager of the Bristol Omnibus Company Ian Patey declared a change in policy at the Bristol Omnibus Company, marking success for the bus boycott. The evening before, a meeting of 500 TGWU bus workers had voted to agree to "the employment of suitable coloured workers as bus crews". The first non-white bus conductor, Raghbir Singh, became Bristol's first non-white bus conductor on 17 September, followed soon after by two Jamaican and two Pakistani men.