My memories ofthe skins in the 60s was deffo of violence and racism full of it and a very nasty bunch of folk.
Were you reading the Daily Mail back then TJ ?
Maybe your prejudice was fuelled by the widespread media campaign to vilify the skinhead culture. I certainly remember the shock and horror stories which were published to sell newspapers. As I do the ones about mods, rockers, teddy boys, punks, and all youth cultures…….the good-for-nothing, longhaired/skinhead, drug taking, layabouts with no respect.
The skinhead culture predominately, came from inner-city areas. These areas, since the industrial revolution, have always experienced higher levels of violence – so no great surprise then. The school I went to was in a fairly tough area, so a tendency towards violence would have existed with or without the skinhead culture.
Furthermore, these inner-city areas were also areas with high levels of immigrants. Racism has always existed – well certainly since the Slave Trade anyway, so it would be absurd to suggest that there was no racism in British inner-cities in the 1960s – of course there was. But this was not the basis to the skinhead culture.
In fact, as the skinhead culture derived from the soul/beat loving mods, they piggybacked on much of the West Indian immigrant culture. Reggae was absolutely central to the skinhead culture (although the importance of Motown should not be underestimated) And reggae has always been a powerful tool with which to fight racism – you only need to look at the role it played in Rock Against Racism and it's highly successful campaign to discredit the NF, at a time when it was having a significant influence amongst Britain's youth.
The post-sixties and European/American skinheads were/are totally different, and have a completely different history.
BTW, were you a soft spotty-faced scruffy long-haired hippy TJ ? ………..bet you were <scowls disapprovingly>