In Brixton, Cherry Groce’s gunshot wound left her paralysed from the waist down. Her children became her full-time carers. Twenty-six years later, aged sixty-three, she died of kidney failure. Her doctors confirmed that her death was directly linked to the gunshot wound. A 2014 inquest placed the responsibility of her death squarely on the police, finding that they failed to properly plan for the raid on the Groces’ home, including adequately checking exactly who was living there.61 That same year, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, head of the Metropolitan Police, apologised to the family.
Thirty years after the 1985 riots, and the cause of the abject neglect of black communities in Britain’s big cities was laid bare for all to see. Files from 10 Downing Street released to the National Archives revealed that Oliver Letwin MP, then an adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, chose not to accept proposals from cabinet ministers who were keen to implement positive action schemes in the inner cities and refurbish run-down and neglected estates. Letwin, still a Member of Parliament at the time of writing, refused these initiatives. ‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes,’ he wrote to Thatcher alongside inner cities adviser Hartley Booth. ‘So long as bad moral attitudes remain’, they said, ‘all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade.’62
Combing through the literature on clashes between black people and the police, I noticed another clash – one of perspective. While some people called what happened in Tottenham and Brixton a riot, others called it an uprising – a rebellion of otherwise unheard people. I think there’s truth in both perspectives, and that the extremity of a riot only ever reflects the extremity of the living conditions of said rioters. Language is important – and the term ‘race riot’ undoubtedly doubles down on ideas linking blackness and criminality, while overlooking what black people were reacting against. The conditions don’t seem to have changed. When the London riots of August 2011 mirrored, almost step by step, what happened in Brixton in 1985, I wondered how often history would have to repeat itself before we choose to tackle the underlying problems.
I recall these histories not to obsessively comb over the past, but simply to know it. Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance, but until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them. I had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police. But I didn’t ask why this was the case. It made more sense to me once I understood that innocent people had died, that homes were broken into with scant evidence for searching them, that teenagers and young adults were frisked in a ritual of humiliation. It makes sense to me now how animosity could brew in that environment, and why some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.
But I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.
We need to stop lying to ourselves, and we need to stop lying to each other. To assume that there was no civil rights movement in the UK is not just untrue, it does a disservice to our black history, leaving gaping holes where the story of progress should be. Black Britain deserves a context. Speaking to the Radio Times, actor David Oyelowo highlighted the lack of historical British films about black people, saying, ‘We make period dramas [in Britain], but there are almost never black people in them, even though we’ve been on these shores for hundreds of years. I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that if it’s not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don’t understand. And I thought, “OK – you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me. I can’t live with that. So I’ve got to get out.”63 Faced with a collective forgetting, we must fight to remember.
I know that there is so much more history out there about people of colour in Britain, if you’re willing to put in the effort to find it. After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, we were told reported hate crimes drastically grew in number, and that racism was on the rise in Britain again. But looking at our history shows racism does not erupt from nothing, rather it is embedded in British society. It’s in the very core of how the state is set up. It’s not external. It’s in the system.
2
THE SYSTEM
On the evening of 22 April 1993, eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence left his uncle’s house in Plumstead, south-east London, with his friend, Duwayne Brooks. As Stephen and Duwayne waited at a bus stop, Stephen started crossing the road to see if the bus was coming. He didn’t make it to the other side. A later inquiry found that he was confronted by a gang of young white men around his age, who surrounded him as they approached. Stephen was set upon, and stabbed repeatedly. Duwayne fled, and Stephen followed, running over a hundred yards before collapsing due to sustained blood loss. He bled to death on the road.
A day after Stephen Lawrence’s death, a letter listing the names of the people who turned out to be top suspects in the case was left in a telephone box near the bus stop. In the following months, that letter led to surveillance and arrests. Two people were charged. But by the end of July 1993, all the charges against them had been dropped, with the Metropolitan Police citing that evidence from Duwayne, the only witness to the crime, was not reliable enough. An inquest began later that year. It was halted after the barrister representing the family brought new evidence to the table. A year on, the Crown Prosecution Service chose not to prosecute any of the suspects, again saying that there was insufficient evidence to do so.
Stephen’s parents launched a private prosecution against three of the suspects. Meanwhile, police surveillance saw the same men suspected of murdering Stephen Lawrence using violent and racist language. By April 1996, the private prosecution launched by his family had failed. This time the judge ruled that evidence from Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brooks, was not valid.
In 1997, the decision from the inquest initiated in 1993 was announced. Although each of the five suspects refused to answer the questions put to them, a verdict of an unlawful killing in an ‘unprovoked racist attack’ was delivered. Later that year, Kent Police investigated police conduct after an official complaint from Stephen Lawrence’s parents to the Police Complaints Authority. The result nine months later would find ‘significant weaknesses, omissions and lost opportunities’ in the way that the police dealt with the investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s death. Kent Police’s Deputy Chief Constable Bob Ayling spoke to the BBC’s Newsnight programme two years later, calling the police’s investigation into Stephen’s death ‘seriously flawed’. Another key witness had come forward, Ayling revealed, but he had been seen by a low-ranking police officer, and his testimony had been dismissed. Three phone calls had been made to the police by a woman who sounded like she was close to one of the suspects, but her statements were not adequately followed up.