And no force under the sun can stem and block and stop this civil rights revolution. Martin Luther King and the March on Washington, narrator Denzel Washington, A Philip Randolph 1963, BBC 2013
We can make this the new civil rights movement, the new human rights movement. Bill Still, The Secret of Oz, 2009
This system has got to go. ibid.
The sit-in movement has challenged certain fundamental concepts of law and is shaking the regional traditions of the South in an entirely new way. The Sixties: A Long March to Freedom ***** Chet Huntley NBC News, CNN 2014
An angry mob just came out of nowhere. ibid. John Lewis
‘This was a vicious violent system; you could die trying to register to vote.’ Rise Up: The Movement that Changed America, History 2018
‘What we saw as a problem, they saw as a solution.’ ibid.
‘Their courage, their love, transformed the history of this country by affecting the hearts of people thousands of miles away.’ ibid.
Nearly a century after slavery, racial segregation was the law across the South. ibid.
The strategy begins with a single act of defiance. ibid.
The movement also chooses its leader: 26 year old minister who is determined to keep the protests going. ibid.
The Civil Rights Act is the most sweeping change in social policy since the Civil War. ibid.
‘We must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.’ ibid. Johnson
Equality is still elusive. ibid.
We were making history. And there wasn’t nice and clean. There wasn’t easy. It was complex. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Erica Huggins, member, Netflix 2015
The police jump on you, beat you up, put the gun at your head, this is what we’re going through on a daily basis. ibid. Warne Pharr
We want freedom, we want decent housing, we want education for our people, we want an immediate end to police brutality … ibid. Black Panthers
The Black Panther Party demands that Huey P Newton be set free. ibid. Eldridge Cleaver
Free Breakfast For Children Served Here Every School Morning. ibid. sign
The reality is that the majority of the rank and file by the end of the ’60s are women. ibid. Claybourne Carson, historian
In other cities the Panthers were under physical attack from the police departments. But New York City was going to handle its Panther problem differently: they created a conspiracy case that allowed them to arrest the entire leadership of the New York City Black Panther Party. ibid. Jamal Joseph
He [Bobby Seale] kept insisting on his right to represent himself, and the judge’s response to that was to order the bailiffs to put gaffer tape over his mouth and tie him to his chair. ibid. Mike Gray, filmmaker
It was like a slaughterhouse. And there was blood all over the place. ibid. Mike Gray, assassination of Fred Hampton
It was a death squad that did this raid. It was a police death squad. And the whole thing was set up by the FBI. ibid. historian
It was a split in the party. And within days we began to feel just how bad it was. ibid. William Calhoun
There are over 20 Panthers that remain in prison. ibid. caption
Every Saturday we go to demonstrate in Paris. Georgia Pouliquen, Alternative View 10 lecture, ‘The 21st Century French Yellow Vest Revolution, Youtube 1.11.49
I want to provide a testimony from France to the world about massive domestic oppression in my country France and violence of our government. ibid. Georgia’s video testimony
Yellow Vests are a humanist movement, a beautiful movement, and now we suffer massive domestic oppression … This is about freedom, and government commits violence of fundamental human rights here in France. ibid.
That’s not crowd control: that’s massive and bloody repression, and French government try to hide the truth. ibid.
Macron passed a law to prevent us to demonstrate in the streets: now it’s an offence … We don’t have freedom of assembly any more. ibid.
A lot of young people lost an eye. ibid.
We have no choice: that’s a survival movement. ibid.
I feel lucky and blessed that I’m serving in the Congress but there are forces today trying to take us back to another time and another dark period. John Lewis: Good Trouble, Lewis, Sky Documentaries 2020
His voice and his example are probably needed now as much as they’ve ever been. ibid. Hillary Clinton
Arrest us if we’re wrong, don’t beat us. ibid. Selma protester
As we crossed the bridge we saw a sea of blue – Alabama state troopers. ibid. Lewis
I hated this system telling people you cannot be seated at a lunch counter, you cannot go into a restaurant simply because of the colour of your skin. ibid.
We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. ibid. Martin Luther King, essay Loving Your Enemies
Within a matter of weeks, freedom riders are boarding buses all over the South. The riders are harassed and jailed, sometimes they are beaten by angry crowds of whites while southern sheriffs look the other way. ibid.
On the August 9, 1970, 150 black protesters marched against the Metropolitan Police, challenging the campaign of intimidation that had been waged against their community. This protest set in motion the train of events that led to the trial of the Mangrove Nine where the power of the British state went up against black power and lost.
The trial of the Mangrove Nine was a historical event. The first time the British establishment, sitting incarnate as a robed judge in the Old Bailey, recognised that there was institutionalised racism at the heart of the British state. Alongside this, it played its part in the rise of the radical barrister, Ian Macdonald QC, who died this month. Macdonald was a landmark figure in the civil liberties community, campaigning both in court and beyond for equality in society. He was instrumental to the trial of the Mangrove Nine, guiding the black activists in the presentation of their case, and relentlessly challenging the prejudices of the bench, the prosecution and their witnesses.
The issue which lay at the heart of the Mangrove Nine case was the rise of a black power movement in Britain. As the black civil rights movement rose in America, figures like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X at the forefront, a British wing paralleled its ascent. This was Britain at the end of Empire, a Britain that had opened its doors to subjects of the Commonwealth, the Windrush generation flocking to Britain, taking up the British government’s offer of new jobs and a new life.
In London, the West Indian community congregated in Notting Hill, with Frank Crichlow’s Mangrove restaurant becoming their ‘resting place in Babylon’, a safe place of shared cultures and values, but also a place to plot political revolution. Its charms were not confined to the black community alone, the restaurant drawing its custom from across Notting Hill’s diverse community. Robin Bunce and Paul Field, writing in Darcus Howe: A Political Biography, noted that ‘figures such as Mary Tuck … assistant editor of Vogue, and Lord Grifford QC, a radical human rights lawyer’ were amongst its patrons, whilst it was visited by Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone and other celebrities, drawn to its status in London’s counterculture.
Mangrove’s reputation meant that Crichlow drew the attention and the ire of the Notting Hill police, who sought to bring the weight of their jackboots down on the revolution’s burgeoning roots. The ‘heavy mob’, a division of the Metropolitan Police in Notting Hill who saw the district as their own imperial outpost, sought to expunge the activists and destroy Crichlow’s business, offended at the thought of a black man thriving on their patch. Using the pretence of drugs searches, they subjected the Mangrove to inspection after inspection, baselessly raiding it on twelve occasions over an eighteen month period, all to no avail.
Throughout this, Crichlow endeavoured to remain within the law, trying to stop the discrimination through turning the gears of British bureaucracy, but other radicals at the Mangrove sought to take more direct action, drawing inspiration from the American civil rights movement. At the forefront of this was Darcus Howe, a black activist and writer, who had moved to the UK from Trinidad with the intent of studying law.
Howe had little time for Crichlow’s moderate approach, encouraging him to take more direct action. Drawing inspiration from the Black Panthers in America, and his Trinidadian roots, he worked with their chapter in the UK to mobilise the black community, remarking in the film of the Mangrove Nine that ‘this government is not going to take up its responsibility unless it sees people on the street’.
It was Howe’s organisational skills which meant that on that August day in 1970, the 150 protesters marched peacefully on police stations in Notting Hill. The mood was celebratory, some protesters echoing the Black Panthers’ style, many carrying placards bearing slogans like ‘Calling All Pigs, Freak Out or Get Out’ and ‘Power to the People’. They were outnumbered by a force of over 200 officers, standing five deep, with another 500 held in reserve. This was force intent on inciting violence, and prepared to inflict it.