Today’s protesters need to “get tooled up with information” veteran artist Caroline Coon tells ‘…Revolution’ Q&A

New V&A film – screened nationwide on September 8 – includes unheard John Lennon audio

Today’s activists should get “tooled up with information” and prepare for a long, hard fight, according to the veteran campaigner, journalist and artist Caroline Coon.

She told a Q&A session at the Everyman Theatre after the first screening of ‘You Say You Want A Revolution?’ that activism is “more than a party or a ‘like’ on your phone” but also paid tribute to today’s generation of young protesters for continuing many of the fights that started in the 1960s.

She told the audience that legislation and police tactics such as kittling have made protest harder.  Protesters should “get tooled up with information, learn their rights and not go to prison,” adding that thousands of those – a disproportionate number among them coming from the black community – who had helped to re-shape society through activism in the 60s had ended up behind bars.

‘You Say You Want A Revolution?’ is based around the V&A Museum’s 2016-2020 exhibition of the same name and traces the cultural revolutions of the late 60s in fashion, music, politics, race, gender, drugs and technology, the progress they achieved and parallels with protest movements today.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION? from EmilyKateHarris on Vimeo.

As well as exclusive interviews with many of the key names that shaped the generation from Yoko Ono to the organisers of Woodstock and London’s UFO club, the film includes previously unheard audio of John Lennon and new footage from the Kent State university riots, at which four students were killed by state troopers and a further nine wounded.

The film, directed by the V&A’s curator of film Emily Kate Harris, about the exhibition co-curated by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, will be screened at cinemas in Islington, Stratford-upon-Avon, Muswell Hill, Harrogate and Bristol on September 8.

The film’s launch co-incidentally came on the first day of Extinction Rebellion’s new protest action in London, with dozens of protesters arrested after blocking a bust road junction in London’s Covent Garden.