If a bully smacks you in the face with a half-brick, you either fall to the ground and stay there, praying they don’t do it again—or you get up and fight back.

Over the last fifty years, Derry city has been fighting back.

It was not inevitable. For 100 years, the unionist state enforced a blatant gerrymander on the city and it was abandoned to grinding poverty. To quote Phil Coulter’s song ‘The Town I Loved So Well’, it was economically ‘brought to its knees’.

The Parachute Regiment’s 1972 murder of fourteen people on Bloody Sunday, in broad daylight, witnessed by a large number of the victims’ fellow citizens, added to the already seething communal resentment. A further fifteen were wounded in the space of twenty minutes, with twenty-one soldiers firing a total of 108 live rounds.

The outrage caused by the Widgery Tribunal whitewash, with its conclusion that some of the shooting merely ‘bordered on the reckless’, added blistering insult to the bleeding wounds inflicted by the Paras.

During the last week of January this year, however, a full programme of events with the theme ‘One World, One Struggle’ has shown how Derry city has established itself as a global centre of intellectual, political, and community resilience.

The series included talks by former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (a long-time supporter of the campaign), an exhibition detailing the legacy of British colonialism, a discussion on Israel’s banning of Palestinian human rights groups, and a debate with former Lieutenant Colonel, the Rev. Nicholas Mercer who has spoken out against British soldiers’ use of torture in Iraq.

All this in a city with the award-winning Museum of Free Derry, and where the largest Halloween party in the world takes place annually (not to mention being the backdrop for Channel 4’s hit series Derry Girls).

Derry is certainly not without its problems, however. The unionist state’s sectarian decision in 1965 to locate Northern Ireland’s second university on a greenfield site in Coleraine, rather than its second city, still rankles, despite a new medical training college opening last year.

The city’s poverty and economic inactivity levels are still significantly higher than, for example, Belfast’s—partly due, says economic commentator Paul Gosling, to Invest NI’s decision not to focus on areas of specific need (unlike the equivalent IDA Ireland’s priorities south of the border).

So how did Derry turn an event that history could simply have recorded as a ‘legitimate British military response to provocation’ into an internationally accepted massacre of innocents?

The first thing to say is that, while there was an instant knee-jerk reaction, a broad-based campaign did not develop quickly.

In the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, anger ran so deep in Dublin that the British Embassy was burned down by protestors. In Derry, would-be recruits queued up to join the IRA.

Poems, such as Thomas Kinsella’s celebrated ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ and ‘Freedom of the City’ by Brian Friel (who was on the original Bloody Sunday march) were written and songs such as ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’ were adapted to suit the times.

But it took a further twenty years before the families’ campaign changed from a once-yearly march into a genuine community enterprise that led to a multi-million pound inquiry, forcing then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron to call Bloody Sunday ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’.

One of those most closely involved in the campaign is John Kelly, who helped to load his wounded younger brother, Michael (17), into an ambulance on Bloody Sunday and attended the morgue where, at that stage, ten bodies were laid out.

He says a critical factor in the families’ success was assuming control of the campaign from any one political party, in this case Sinn Féin, and enlisting civil society, church leaders, artists, and the media—by giving journalists easy access to the bereaved families themselves.

A decision to broaden out the annual commemoration from a vigil and parade into a full weekend (and later whole week) of events, says Kelly, was critical, as was the setting up of the Bloody Sunday Initiative (now the Pat Finucane Centre) to support the families.

The longer events gave a platform to speakers from outside Ireland and Britain, and organised debates on collusion, torture, colonialism, plastic bullet killings and other important topics.

The change in pace took place in parallel with the paramilitary ceasefires and talks leading up to the Good Friday Agreement. Ireland, in those days, was in a heady ferment of discussions on its future.

Tony Doherty, who lost his father in the massacre, agrees with John Kelly. ‘For me, the acquittal of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six showed what was possible. The march every year kept the campaign going but it was only in the early 1990s, when the conflict was drawing to a close, that we had room to expand.’

One of the main driving forces over the years, he says, was not only the pain of a loved-one being killed but that London ‘devised a whole series of stories that were lies and slurs. The massacre was bad enough but what happened after was worse.

‘The twentieth anniversary in 1991 was a launch pad. We internationalised the campaign, drew up clear aims, and a leadership grew from within the families. A different feeling emerged, creating a wider, deeper, more thoughtful campaign that caught the public imagination.’

Julieann Campbell, whose new book On Bloody Sunday: By Those Who Were There is published this month and whose uncle, Jackie Duddy (17), was killed, says people outside Derry slowly began to realise that the families had been ‘telling the truth all these years’ and that ‘the IRA gun battle story had indeed been a cover-up’.

‘Researchers were unearthing shocking new evidence that propelled the case forward. Documents such as the 1972 Heath-Widgery memo made front page news, recording the British prime minister advising Widgery, ahead of his new tribunal to remember, “We are in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war.”’

‘Then there was news of evidence, guns and footage mysteriously missing or destroyed as the campaign took hold and an inquiry seemed within reach. As the campaign snowballed, ultimately the British had to address Bloody Sunday.’

In the 1990s, new murals depicting the faces of the fourteen dead appeared on gable walls in the Bogside and were joined by other iconic symbols (like Bernadette McAliskey, a speaker at the original parade, and a young man in a gas-mask), becoming a focus for visitors to the city.

In 2002, Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday premiered, focusing on one of the original march organisers, Ivan Cooper, and, eight days later, Channel 4 screened Jimmy McGovern’s Sunday which concentrated more on the bereaved families.

Over twenty books analysing the causes of Bloody Sunday have been written, the latest being David Burke’s Kitson’s Irish War, but perhaps the most influential was a report commissioned by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, written by diplomat Eamon McKee (and published around the same time as Don Mullan’s Eyewitness Bloody Sunday).

Sources close to the Bloody Sunday families say McKee’s evidence was presented to the then newly-elected British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who took it home to read over a weekend in late 1997. The Bloody Sunday tribunal was announced in January 1998.

After fifty years, it is now possible to discern, in the wreckage, that gains were made as a result of a determined campaign to uncover the truth waged by the families and their supporters.

Never again will London be able to foist the kind of insulting whitewash onto a grieving and angry community in Ireland that it did in the Widgery Tribunal.

Bloody Sunday is now an event that is understood globally. The campaign has turned what could have been special pleading on behalf of one community into a universal example of state brutality and community resilience.