Journalist, activist and publisher Darcus Howe, who has died aged 74,
spent his life working for justice for black British people – and the
struggle is far from over
Radical … Darcus Howe addresses a rally for the Mangrove Nine in Notting Hill in 1971.
Photograph: Horace Ove
When I heard the news of Darcus Howe’s
passing, it reminded me that one of the worst-told stories in Britain
is the history of black struggle on these shores. It is almost
impossible to trace the impact of his work, because we so poorly
understand the context in which he laboured. I managed to go through 20
years of formal education without ever being told a single fact about
black resistance movements in the nation. The closest we ever got was
learning about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks time and again during
black history month.
Howe, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1943, was an
instrumental force for change in the black British struggle for equal
rights and justice over five decades.
He migrated to the UK in 1961, a pivotal time for black activism in
Britain. It had become clear that the movement of people from the former
British colonies would not be temporary, with people going back to “whence they came”,
as Conservative politician Enoch Powell had hoped. As subjects of the
British crown, who fought and died for king and country in the world
wars, Caribbean migrants had expected their children to get the best of
the British schools system. Those dreams could not have been dashed more
abruptly; by the mid-1960s, Caribbean communities were setting up supplementary schools in order to teach children the basics of maths and English, which the system was failing to provide.
It was not only in the schools that discrimination was rife. For
young black people, the police were – and continue to be – the boots on
the ground, the public face of state racism. Police harassment was rife,
and the notorious sus laws – where you could be arrested merely on an
officer’s suspicion – were routinely abused and often ended in violence
towards young black men. This treatment sparked mass reaction from black
communities, who organised and protested and took to the streets. Howe
is such an important figure because he managed to bridge the divide
between the grassroots social movements, in which he participated, and
the state-led campaigns to address inequality, which he influenced.
His key skill, as one of the main figures in the anti-racist,
anti-police brutality movement, was to translate the energy and anger of
street protests into government action. He had a major impact on Lord
Scarman, who was commissioned to investigate the causes of the 1981
riots. The rebellions in Brixton and elsewhere against the sus laws had shaken the nation; the Scarman Report was
the first in Britain to take the police force to task for racial bias.
As limited as Scarman was in his condemnation of police (he spoke of “a
few bad apples” rather than systemic racism), it was a landmark moment
in opening up the forces to criticism it laid the foundations for the Macpherson Report
in 1999, which investigated the police’s response to the racist murder
of teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and propelled an understanding of
institutional racism into public discourse.
Howe was the nephew of Caribbean intellectual giant CLR James, who
among many other works wrote The Black Jacobins, the definitive history
of the 1804 Haitian revolution, when enslaved Africans rose up
to overthrow their colonial French masters and formed the world’s first
black republic. Howe continued this intellectual tradition, giving a
wider, more political voice to the street protests.
Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and Darcus Howe at the Race
Today office on Railton Road, Brixton, 1979 Photograph: Adrian
Boot/Adrian Boot / urbanimage.tv
The radical journal Race Today, on which he worked on as editor, was
hugely influential in black political movements in the 1970s. Dr Denise
Noble, a US-based professor of African American and African Studies,
says it was especially powerful to have a “serious black British journal
that was both politically and theoretically nuanced.”
Reclaiming this history is important for me not only politically, but
also personally. My father, Maurice Andrews, migrated from Jamaica at a
similar time to Howe and was engaged in grassroots activism for
decades. He was part of the African Caribbean Self-Help Organisation, which is still running after 50 years in Birmingham; he also founded the Harambee Organisation,
with which he is still involved. My mother, Carole Andrews, was also
prominently involved in anti-racist campaigning, working for years at
the organisation formerly known as the Commission for Racial Equality
(CRE).
For both of my parents, Howe was a figure who could not be ignored
and who made a major commitment to the struggle of the times. He was a
central figure in many of the key activist movements over the past
40 years. He was a member of the British Black Panthers,
along with key figures such as Althea Jones-Lecointe, Eddie Chambers
and Olive Morris. Guerrilla, which airs this week on Sky Atlantic,
dramatises that period; Howe was a consultant on the show. The series
centres on the so-called “black power” desk at the London Metropolitan
police, which was set up to counter the perceived threat posed by black
activism over 40 years ago.
In March 1981, the Black People’s Day of Action drew 20,000 people on
to the streets of London to protest the police investigation in the New
Cross massacre. In May 1981, 13 teenagers had died in a fire at a house
party in south-east London, in suspicious circumstances. Howe was a key
figure in organising the demonstration, where one of the leading chants
was “13 dead, nothing said”. But we would be wrong to memorialise
events such as these as history. Over 30 years later, the Interim
National African People’s Parliament still organise annual marches
because we still have no answers. Justice is too often suspended for
black people; the long list of families waiting for justice for their kin who have died after police contact is chilling.
The Mangrove Nine trial
in 1971 was a pivotal event in the black British struggle, and another
in which Howe played a key role. Howe was arrested and charged after
protesting against repeated police raids on the Caribbean restaurant
Mangrove in Notting Hill in 1970. He and Jones-Lecointe insisted on
representing themselves against the false charges brought against them
and seven other defendants. After 55 days at the Old Bailey, the
Mangrove Nine were acquitted and– for the first time – judges declared
that there was “evidence of racial hatred” in the Met.
Howe also served as chairman for the Notting Hill carnival in 1977
and resisted attempts to move the celebration from the streets of west
London where it originated. The political nature of carnival is often overlooked,
but it emerged from efforts to provide legal assistance to the black
youth who were caught up in the racist riots in the area in 1958. The
very concept of carnival is a political act that comes from the history
of African enslavement. Enslaved people were given one day off a year
and used this to celebrate and reconnect to their African past, which
the slaveholders tried in vain to destroy. Attempts to stop carnival,
which has happened successfully in Birmingham, and which are still
hinted at in Notting Hill, can only be seen as an attempt to suppress
political expression.
As we remember and celebrate his life and influence and mourn his
death, the best way to remember Howe is as someone who gave voice to a
politics and community that was often overlooked. He made a lot of noise
and he drew a lot of attention to the struggle for equal rights and
justice – and since these battles are far from over, it’s exactly what
we should continue to do.
