The police had calculated that the best response was to overwhelm them with sheer weight of personnel, hoping that their numbers would spark a conflict, giving the officers the right to arrest, charge and prosecute the demonstrators. A brief struggle at Portnall Road provided the police all the justification they needed, with Howe later writing that they descended on the protesters with ‘pure, unadulterated, unlicensed brutality’, releasing their pent up rage and frustration at the thought of black people challenging their authority.
The then home secretary, Reginald Maudling, who alongside Special Branch, had been paying particular attention to the preparations against the protest, demanded an immediate report on the individuals behind the movement, alongside a presentation of the legal options he had before him to quash it and punish the radicals. Within the report on the ‘Battle of Portnall Road’, Maudling was given options including deporting Crichlow, Howe and other radicals, or charging them with inciting racial hatred. Given the circumstances, these options were rejected because Maudling feared that they would arouse public sympathy for the protesters, sympathies that currently lay with the police and the government. Instead, the home secretary instructed the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge them with incitement to riot.
It was after the first prosecution was dismissed by the magistrate, before, exceptionally, being reissued by the DPP and added as a separate count to the indictment for trial at the Old Bailey, that Macdonald became involved. He already had a reputation as an activist barrister, albeit being, as he later acknowledged, ‘relatively inexperienced at the time’. He was approached by the Barbara Beese, a member of the Black Panthers, asking him to represent her and to advise Howe and Lecointe-Jones in the running of their defence.
Rather than all be represented by lawyers, the activists decided to part represent themselves, with Ian Macdonald the crucial liaison between them and the other defence counsel. Not only did this serve to counter the prejudice of much of the country, who thought that the ‘idea of black people actually defending themselves was quite extraordinary’, according to Beese, but freed some of the trial from legal niceties, allowing them to more effectively expose the prejudice and politics that underpinned the prosecution.
Howe and the others used the trial to excite political support, the prosecution a metaphor for state sanctioned oppression. They had already built up a groundswell of public support before the trial, speaking at rallies and meetings throughout London and the rest of the country. Howe wrote that they were given ‘a terrific send off on the day before … the Old Bailey’, support that was mobilised at the trial with protesters massing in their hundreds outside court.
Howe had studied the past prosecutions of black activists in the UK and the USA, and was determined to not follow their failures, where they were unable to reveal the political underpinnings to the prosecutions, constrained by the formalities of criminal trial procedure. Macdonald applied for an all black jury arguing that the accused were entitled to a ‘jury of their peers’ under Magna Carta following the example of American trials where the Black Panthers sought to rely on the 14th Amendment. As with all claims based on the great charter.
Anticipating the application’s failure, Macdonald, Howe and Lecointe-Jones turned their attention to the jury selection procedure. They used a line of questioning that focused on the jurors’ politics to strike out 63. Not only did this ensure that there were two black jurors on the panel, it emphasised that the Mangrove Nine, and Macdonald, were not intending to sit back and defer to the court and its restrictive procedures.
The cross-examination of the officers by Macdonald, Howe and Lecointe-Jones relentlessly peeled back the thin veneer of legal legitimacy which lay over the case. They exposed the prejudice which motivated it, the prosecution entirely rooted in the desire to suppress the politics of the black radicals. Howe, in particular, tied the police witnesses up in knots with Beese later recalling that the prosecution witnesses were ‘going down like nine-pins, faced with their contradictions’. Crucially, Howe spotted that four individual officers claimed to see the defendants inciting the police from a surveillance van, yet the viewing panel in the van meant this was simply impossible. Told by one constable that each had an eye to the slit, Howe asked each ‘where was your face’ – a simple question that highlighted the absurdity of the claim.
Summing up, Macdonald told the jury that they were not in Russia, and the Old Bailey was not a ‘Star Chamber’, where the state could persecute dissidents at will. He turned his fire on Judge Clarke, claiming that he had acted with ‘naked judicial tyranny’, and telling the jury that the true authority in the courtroom lay not with Clarke, but with them. Such a statement was extraordinary at a time of great deference towards the judiciary, who held near absolute authority in their courtroom.
The jury took a mere eight hours to return their verdict, after a trial that had lasted 55 days. They acquitted all the defendants on the charge of incitement to riot, and acquitted Howe and Lecointe-Jones of all charges. The most astonishing consequence was Judge Clarke’s volte-face. He acknowledged that the case had revealed ‘evidence of racial hatred’ existing within the Metropolitan Police. This was a groundbreaking moment, met with astonishment amongst the establishment, with Maudley beseeching Clarke to withdraw his comments. He refused.
Macdonald did not take star billing in the Mangrove Trial, that went to Howe and the other activists who demonstrated legal acumen and forensic examination skills that belied their experience. He did, however, play an integral and necessary role in the exposure and unravelling of systemic police racism, a role he continued to play throughout his career. The trial was crucial in the shift of public opinion, with the decision of the jury showing that white people were not universally prejudiced, whilst it provided momentum to the black power movement, revealing that not all challenges to the state had to be noble, yet lost causes, but could truly succeed.
Macdonald continued to work to counter racism throughout his career, acting for Duwayne Brooks in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, and leading an inquiry into racism and violence in Manchester schools in the 1980s. Whilst racism still lurks within public institutions, with ethnic minorities still disproportionately exposed to the worst instincts of some institutions, Macdonald has done much to redress the balance, as Professor Gus John writes.
Ian Macdonald’s work in exposing institutional racism forms only a small part of his enormous role in the development and protection of civil rights in the UK. Beyond this, he laid the foundations of immigration law, publishing Immigration Law and Practice in 1983, providing the blueprint for challenges to the operation of immigration law. He was a special advocate to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which heard immigration cases that went to matters of national security, resigning after the House of Lords’ decision in Belmarsh, where he felt that his role had become one which lent ‘false legitimacy’ to a law which was an ‘odious blot on our legal landscape’.
Macdonald’s legacy will live on, his work a permanent tribute to his indefatigable efforts to resist, challenge, and overcome discrimination and prejudice in society. Thejusticegap online article Nicholas Langen 29 November 2018, ‘Mangrove Nine: When Black Power took on the British Establishment’
Last summer the brutal killer of George Floyd ignited huge protests in the cause for change. Fifty years ago the Civil Rights Act brought the promise of equality for all. In America today, if you are black, you are five times more likely to go to prison than if you are white. And the average black family is eight time poorer than the average white family. This is the story of the key moments since the Civil Rights Act where there was a change to make America more equal in housing, education and justice, and why it didn’t happen. The Black American Fight for Freedom, BBC 2021
Dorothy’s case exposed how aldermen had repeatedly refused to allow public housing to be built in white neighbourhoods. ibid.
In 2017 black students were twice as likely to attend a high-poverty school than white students. ibid. caption
In 1980 the number of black men incarcerated was 143,000. In 2019 it had increased to 435,000. ibid.
In America the civil rights movement was reaching a climax. 1968: A Year of War, Turmoil and Beyond, Sky Arts 2018
De Gaulle’s complacency seems hard to believe 50 years on but he wasn’t alone: few imagined how momentous and tumultuous 1968 would turn out to be. So how did it happen within five months of that new year speech France was brought to a standstill and De Gaule’s government almost toppled by the worst rioting seen in Paris since the revolution – the earlier one? Vive la Revolution! Joan Bakewell on May 1968, BBC 2018
As the anti-war protests gathered strength they began to coincide with that other great movement that had been sweeping America since the 1950s – the Civil Rights movement. ibid.
Three months into 1968, on March 17th that year, London’s Grosvenor Square became a battleground. ibid.
Czechoslovakia: But for the time being the dreams were not fulfilled. After three months of dizzy optimism the Russian tanks rolled across to the border to suppress what had been a defiant challenge to the Soviet grip on eastern Europe. ibid.
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the great feminist writer, both came out in favour of the students. ibid.
On May 13th the trade unions announced a general strike … the workers had their own objectives … By May 22nd that figure had swollen to ten million. ibid.
The Utopian dream of May had not been realised. ibid.
It’s a banner that reads, I Oppose Genocide, I Support Palestine Action. Over the last year there have been over 2,500 arrests in the UK for supporting the group after the government officially banned them under the Terrorism Act. Palestine Action are radical activists who break into factories and military bases as a form of protest they call direct action. The group and the government’s decision to ban them have divided the country. Dispatches: Palestine Action: Truth Behind the Ban, Channel 4 2026
Was the government right to ban Palestine Action? ibid.
Meeting with someone from the group may be banned. ibid.
Many MPs across the House disagreed with the government’s decision to ban Palestine Action. ibid.