Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

lentlessly persecuted its owner. Frank Critchlow. They made it the test of police power; the blacks made
it a symbol of resistance. The battle of the blacks and the police would be fought over the Mangrove.
The trial of the Mangrove 9 (October-December 1971) is too well documented to be recounted here, but, briefly,
they won. They did more: they took on what the defence counsel called ‘naked judicial tyranny’ — some by conducting
their own defence — and won. Above all, they unfolded before the nation the corruption of the police
force, the bias of the judicial system, the racism of the media — and the refusal of black people to submit themselves
to the tyrannies of the state. Other trials would follow and even more bizarre prosecutions be brought, as
when the alleged editor of Grassroots was charged with ‘encouraging the murder of person’s unknown’ by reprinting
an article from the freely available American Black Panther paper on how to make Molotov cocktails. But
they would all be defended — by the whole community — and become another school of political education. (41)
If the Mangrove marked the high water-mark of Black Power and lowered the threshold of what black people
would take, it also marked the beginnings of another resistance: of black youth condemned by racism to
the margins of existence and then put upon by the police. Sus had always laid them open to police harassment,
but the government’s White Paper on Police-Immigrant Relations in 1973, which warned of ‘a small minority of
young coloured people... anxious to imitate behaviour amongst the black community in the United States’, put
the government’s imprimatur on police behaviour. The previous year the press and the police had discovered a
frightening new strain of crime’ and ‘mugging’ was added to Sus’ as an offence on which the police could go
on the offensive against West Indian youth. (42) The courts had already nodded their approval— by way of an
exemplary twenty-year sentence passed on a 16-year-old ‘mugger’. From then on, the lives of black youths
in the cities of Britain were subject to increased pressure. Their clubs were attacked on one pretext or another
their meeting places raided and their events - carnivals, bonfires, parties – blanketed by police presence. Black
youths could not walk the streets outside the ghetto or hang around streets within it without courting arrest. And
apart from individual arrests, whole communities were subjected to road blocks, stop and search and mass arrests.
In Brixton in 1975 the para-military Special Patrol Group (SPG) cruised the streets in force, made arbitrary
arrests and generally terrorised the community. In Lewisham, the same year, the SPG stopped 14.000 people on
the streets and made 400 arrests. The pattern was repeated by similar police units in other parts of the country.
The youth struck back and the community closed behind them at Brockwell Park fair in 1973, for instance, and at the
Carib Club (1974) and in Chapeltown, Leeds, on bonfire night (1975), and finally exploded into direct confrontation, with
bricks and bottles and burning of police cars., at the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976 — when 1,600 policemen took it on
themselves to kill joy on the streets. Clearly the politics of the stick had not paid off — or perhaps needed to be stepped
up to be really effective. But by now a Labour government was in power and the emphasis shifted to social control.
Meanwhile, the struggles in the workplace were throwing up ‘another community, a community of black class interests
— linking the shop-floor battles of Pakistanis. Indians and West Indians, sometimes directly through roving strike
committees, sometimes through black political organisations, while combating at the same time the racism of the
trade unions, from within their ranks. Where they were not unionised, black workers first used the unions, who were
rarely loth to increase unionisation – and then took on the racism of the unions themselves. Unions, after all, were the
organisations of their class and, however vital their struggles as blacks, to remain a people apart, would be to set back
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