English Town Cleans Up After Race Riots

In this hardscrabble former mill town, they were sweeping broken glass and piling heaps of shattered bricks Monday, cleaning up after Britain’s worst outbreak of racial violence in years.

Harder to rebuild, community leaders say, will be the harmony they insist that Oldham--a onetime textile center of about 220,000 people on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Manchester--once enjoyed.

After two nights of fierce rioting, police and activists called for calm--and laid much of the blame on far-right groups they say exploited tensions between the town’s whites and its large population of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and their descendants.

Police, who were pelted with bricks and firebombs during fighting that raged Saturday and Sunday nights and into the early-morning hours, warned that they would be out in force Monday night and would act with resolve to quell any new violence.

As much as one-quarter of Oldham residents are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.