Roy Hackett

Lurel Roy Hackett was born in Jamaica in 1928. He travelled to England in 1952 to find work, as one of thousands of people from Britain's colonies who helped rebuild the country after the war. He settled first in Toxteth, Liverpool, which had a large African-Caribbean community, and worked in several places, including at the Hinkley Point atomic power station in 1957.

He faced racism from his first day in Bristol. Boarding houses refused him a room as soon as they saw he was Black, and he spent his first night in the city sleeping in a doorway. Eventually he found a room in St Pauls, the area at the centre of Bristol's Caribbean community, and he made the city his home.

In 1962 Hackett, along with Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown, formed a group that became the West Indian Development Council, with the youth worker Paul Stephenson as its spokesman. They campaigned against the colour bar at the Bristol Omnibus Company, which refused to employ Black or Asian bus crews. Hackett recalled that the campaign began when he saw a young Black man crying outside the company's offices. Partly inspired by the US civil rights movement, they organised a boycott of Bristol's buses, announced on 29 April 1963.

The boycott lasted four months, and on 28 August 1963 the company announced that it would end the colour bar. Bristol's first non-white bus conductor, Raghbir Singh, started on 17 September 1963, and the campaign is credited with helping to bring about the Race Relations Act of 1965. Hackett also co-founded the Commonwealth Co-ordinated Committee, which organised the first St Paul's Carnival in 1967, now one of the biggest events in Bristol's cultural calendar.

He was the oldest member of the Bristol Race Equality Council, founded the West Indian Parents' and Friends' Association, and volunteered for community groups into his nineties. He received an MBE in 2020 and was honoured in a mural in St Pauls. Hackett died in August 2022, aged 93, and after the toppling of the Colston statue in 2020 a petition was launched to erect a statue of him in its place.