Remembering the Mangrove 9
Join us on 20th August 2020, at 7pm BST where a panel of esteemed activists including Ansel Wong, Leroy Logan and Ife Thompson will discuss why the case of the Mangrove 9 remains crucial to our understanding of and engagement with the British justice system and the future effectiveness of campaigning.
Response by Dr. Adam Elliott-Cooper, Research Associate, University of Greenwich, August 2020
In 1966, civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael delivered a rousing speech which pushed the movement against segregation forward: ‘What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!’ Carmichael refused to confine the black freedom struggle to the US; he understood that the oppression of black people in America was connected to the liberation of black and oppressed people globally. Racism is not a tool of prejudice and hatred, it is a system of exploitation, control and violence. Black Power thus became the call of anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements, activists and thinkers across the world. Black Power stood against racism, imperialism and capitalism, with black power movements internationally, including Britain, taking on this fateful triangle. Through community programmes, radical organising and mass protests, international networks of solidarity shared a revolutionary vision of a world free from racial violence, exploitation and control, making Black Power both a powerful slogan and a political necessity.
Dr. Cooper’s book Black Resistance to British Policing, will be published by Manchester University Press in Spring 2021. His recent articles include ‘“Defund the police” is not nonsense. Here's what it really means’ and ‘When did we come to Britain? You must be mistaken, Britain came to us’.
Response by Dr. Rob Waters, Lecturer in Modern British History, Queen Mary, University of London, August 2020
‘The trial at the Old Bailey on October 4th will take the struggle against Police Brutality into a new arena’, writes Ansel Wong in this report for the Black People’s Information Centre, published just days before the Mangrove Nine were due to stand trial. This was a struggle that had been conducted previously on the streets—as black activists intervened to question and try to prevent wrongful arrests and intimidation. It was a struggle conducted at police stations and magistrates’ courts, where defence advice was handed out, and lawyers drafted in. It was a struggle that had been conducted in the black press, where a growing catalogue of police racism was amassing. It was a struggle conducted, also, in appeals to local councils, to MPs and government ministers, to police chiefs. The repeated exposure of police racism and brutality, however, appeared to make little impact. It would surely feel like banging one’s head against a brick wall. The Home Secretary, as Wong notes, promised an inquiry to find out what had happened at the Mangrove demonstration. The inquiry, however, was into Black Power—not into police racism. ‘A cursory glance at his files’, Wong writes of the Home Secretary, would have revealed the ‘irrefutable evidence of police corruption in the Grove, lodged by thousands of individual black people’.
The Mangrove Nine trial was used to bring the struggles of black activists against police racism into the highest court in the country, in a highly public trial that gathered big media interest. The defendants played to the theatricality of the occasion, and they formed alliances with others who, in the polarizing time of the early 1970s, also found themselves the target of state discipline. For their efforts, they won a landmark success. Judge Edward Clarke, in his closing statement to the court, admitted that the police had demonstrated ‘evidence of racial bitterness’. It was the first such admission, and it made waves. It was to be a long time, however, before this racial bitterness was admitted to be endemic. And it is a problem that is yet to go away. The Mangrove trial marks an early, historic victory in the long struggle against police racism in Britain—one to be remembered.
Dr. Waters’ monograph Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985, was published in 2019 by the University of California Press.