GUS JOHN recalls well the days when landladies with rooms to rent would post notices at their front door proclaiming: "No dogs. No blacks. No Irish". Almost 40 years ago, the colour of your skin often determined not just where you lived, but whether you could work, as John discovered as a campaigner taking part in a national study. He and a white partner went round applying for the same jobs, with the same qualifications, but with different outcomes.

"They would tell me the job was gone, and then my partner would go along an hour later and be taken on right away," he says. This damning evidence caused national outrage and was one spur for the Race Relations Act 1968.

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It was experiences such as these which helped put John at the centre of racial politics. He had come to England from Trinidad in 1964, a 19-year old trainee for the priesthood, the son of a janitor and a hospital auxiliary who settled in Acton, London.

John moved into youth and community work, writing a book, Race In The Inner City, in 1971 which claimed that black incomers to inner cities had been unfairly blamed for long-standing social problems which were the fault of official neglect.

Those theories came into startling life when he moved to Moss Side as a research social worker and, in July 1981, found himself in the midst of the riots. He acted as an advocate for many youths accused of crimes.

Mayhem

In two nights of mayhem, black and white youths indulged in running battles with police, shops were looted and burned and a 1,000-strong mob laid siege to Moss Side police station.

"Those disturbances have to be set against the background of young people in the area being denied hope," says John. "The schools' expectation of them was pretty low. At one point the unemployment rate among black school-leavers in Moss Side and Longsight was running at 60 per cent.

"There is no question that the police used to criminalise young people for no good reason. There was petty harassment going on all the time."

Whatever the immediate spark for the Moss Side riots, the tinder had been assembling for months. In January 1981 there had been the New Cross fire in London, in which 13 young black people died, prompting demonstrations against what was seen as an inadequate police investigation.

A stop-and-search police operation in Brixton in April 1981 provoked furious claims of harassment. Brixton erupted in riots. Weeks later, Toxteth, then Moss Side followed.

Strathclyde

After spells as director of education for Hackney and in Glasgow, where he is still visiting professor of education at the University of Strathclyde, John has been back in Manchester almost ten years, and now runs the Gus John Partnership, a management consultancy.

Asked how Moss Side has changed since 1981, John cites the demolition of old housing, the arrival of a big Asda store and an increase in employment opportunities for the young.

But some of the social vibrancy has departed with the arrival of gangs and gun crime. Ironically, John cites this gang violence as one reason why a repeat of the riots in Moss Side would be unlikely.

"The difference now is that because of the horrendous crimes we have had in Moss Side and Longsight in the last ten or 15 years, people are much less tolerant of the activities of particular groups of young people and they would be less likely to make common cause with them against the police."

As for police relations with the African-Caribbean community, John says: "You do not get that sense of young people being routinely harassed, or police being unconcerned about how operational decisions would impact on the community. In that sense, I think they have learned a great deal, whether from the lessons of the riots or from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry."

But John, a 61-year old father of six, still despairs of an education system in which young black males are over- represented among school exclusions, and then drift towards crime.

Disruptive

He argues: "Rather than spend all that money after they have become criminals, why can't you make classes smaller and have a mixed menu in schools so when you have young people showing signs of being disruptive you can have a group of five or six with the right staff to help their development?"

The greater numbers of black people in positions of power and influence has not dispelled racism because "we as black people have become too comfortable and have joined the 'cult of individualism' that was so rampant during the Thatcher years", says John. By way of illustration, he tells how difficult it is to get black professionals to act as mentors to the young.

"We can't go blaming racism every two minutes. There is a lot in our house that needs fixing," he says.

But a quarter century on from Moss Side's riots, race does remain high on the agenda, what with the 2001 spate of riots in northern towns, racist murders such as that of Anthony Walker in Liverpool, riots in Birmingham last October, a constant debate over asylum-seekers, pockets of local election success for the British National Party and all the repercussions of the July 7 bombings.

Society

"The saddest thing is that all the people involved in that barbaric act were part of this society," says John. "It wasn't a foreign enemy."

Just to remind us how deeply embedded in our history are issues of race, a debate also rages currently over whether Bristol should apologise today for its part in the slave trade.

"This country should not only make a national apology, it should acknowledge to us and to white people what the legacy of slavery has been and how this society is constructed upon the expansion of mercantile capitalism because of the slave trade," says John.

"This stuff isn't over yet."

Taking A Stand, a collection of writings on education, social action and civil unrest by Gus John, is published by the Gus John Partnership.