SIR: The outbreak and upsurge of pent-up anger will be dismaying for many people far removed from the circumstances and life-histories of the aggrieved and the root causes animating a sense of solidarity with those directly affected by the history but with a sense of historic implication. We will recoil from much of the endemic causes in the USA which are deplorably embedded some 60 years after the murder of Martin Luther King. Sympathies can ebb away when anger spills over into violence.

At home, there is dismay and indignation at the denigration and threatened destruction of the memorials to iconic figures of our Imperial past. I for one, having personal association with Poole harbour and quay would resist the removal of the statue of a pensively seated Robert Baden Powell where visiting Scout groups may be seen in normal summers waiting for or leaving a Brownsea ferry. Scouts in shades of white, black or pinky-brown, hailing from near & far.

Any of us who self-regard as reasonable subjects will seek to understand the distress underlying anger. While Dr King eschewed violence he also described it as "the language of the unheard". He sought to articulate a non-violent voice on behalf of the unheard but suffered martyrdom in so doing.

Opportunity beckons for us all to see last year's exceptionally brilliant adaptation of the late Andrea Levy's tome Small Island which is ever more salient in present circumstances as was last week's docu-drama, Sitting in Limbo (see BBC i-player if you missed it).

Our National Theatre's current (final) series of free-to-view productions includes Small Island which traces over 200 years of black British Caribbean/West Indian experience from the inside, up to the present. I would urge upon readers this opportunity to share in what is in turns a heart-rending but also heart-warming narrative of unique authenticity (see NT website). It may prove in our British context to have been an epochal drama at an epochal juncture.

We may hope so...Black lives matter - all lives matter - one race - the human race'.

Paul Anthony Newman (Rev)

Cranworth Road,

Fulflood,

Winchester