Renegade: The Life and Times of Darcus Howe

RENEGADE

In memory of C. L. R. James

CONTENTS

Foreword by Adam Elliott-Cooper

Preface to the Updated Edition

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Authors’ Preface

Introduction – ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’

1 Son of a Preacher Man

2 ‘Dabbling with Revolution’: Black Power Comes to Britain

3 Know Yourself

4 Cause for Concern

5 ‘Darcus Howe is not a Comedian’

6 Revolution in Trinidad: ‘Seize Power and Send for James’

7 A Resting Place in Babylon: Frank Crichlow and the Mangrove

8 Demonstration

9 Clampdown

10 55 Days at the Old Bailey

11 Towards Racial Justice

12 Race Today: ‘Come What May we are Here to Stay’

13 Ten Years on Bail: ‘Darcus Outta Jail’

14 ‘Thirteen Dead and Nothing Said’

15 Insurrection

16 Carnival: Revolutionaries Don’t Wear Glitter

17 Playing Devil’s Advocate

18 Slave Nation

19 Fight to the Finish

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the authors

Plate Section

FOREWORD ADAM ELLIOTT-COOPER

Darcus Howe was a name which passed me by when I was a teenager — a name mentioned when uncles and aunts visited, over Saturday night drinks or Sunday lunch. Like many Caribbean households, these black histories of struggle, both in Britain and in our islands ‘back home’ were common conversations which youngers like myself only came to appreciate retrospectively. I only began to appreciate Darcus as a politics undergraduate — with no courses on racism, anti-racism or black politics or thought, Darcus’s column in the New Statesman jumped out at me, from an otherwise all too often white political magazine. Like my family, he was obsessed with the 1970s and early 80s, and his reference points were Brixton and Trinidad, uprisings and rebellions. His cutting indictment of the government, the police and the mainstream press was both brutal and incisive — he was furious, and I was captivated.

Over a decade later, and Black Britain is as angry about racism as it has ever been. As I write, it is impossible to ignore that the summer of 2020 has seen the largest anti-racist protests in British history. Hundreds of thou-sands demonstrated in over 260 towns and cities across the country, initiated by solidarity with protests against racist police violence in the US, but defined by a clear message: the UK is not innocent. This new generation of activists have lived through Obama’s empty promise for change, and a Brexit Britain that promises nothing but national-ism and imperial nostalgia. Climate breakdown, economic crisis and a bloated police, prison and border system are dangerously normal. In a political arena in which Parliament and Presidency are dead ends, where do we turn for the radical change which feels more urgent than ever? The renegades of the 1960s and 70s, as the world was decolonising and the future of capitalism and imperialism seemed uncertain, offer vital insights and lessons. Darcus Howe, through his organising and protest, rhetoric and writing, film and thought is an indispensable piece of Britain’s Black power puzzle.

In the aftermath of the rebellions of the 1980s, Darcus decried the government response in the pages of Race Today, lamenting the ‘community policing [initiatives], liaison committees, an independent complaints system and other such trivialities’. Today, the trifling extends further — Nike and Amazon declare that ‘Black Lives Matter’, while racial capitalism defines these very entities via the exploitation of their workers from factory through to shop floor. Politicians of all persuasions and even the police themselves pay lip service to Black Lives Matter, while feeding a prison system which has nearly doubled in 30 years, and incarcerates Black people at the same rate as in the US. Corporations, government departments and NGOs desperately scramble for diversity drives, equality workshops and ‘unconscious bias training’. But these are simply liberal (often laughable) attempts to be seen addressing racial prejudice, while the exploitation, control and violence of racism itself continues unabashed. They are a wilful attempt to strip Black politics of its radicalism and of its confrontation with capitalism and imperialism; the engines of racial oppression.

The movements of resistance detailed in this book don’t simply recall a vital history. From the Black Panther Movement and the Mangrove to Race Today and the Black People’s Day of Action, these histories are a corrective to the attempts by policy makers and profit seekers, to co-opt the twenty-first century’s Black political movement. Darcus’s life is a story of Black Power struggles: from colony to mother country, from the streets to the courts, from grassroots organising to broadcast media. These movements did not permit powerful institutions to take Black liberation and turn it into something palatable, commercial, individualising and ineffective. Activists like Darcus exploited the weaknesses and identified opportunities in these institutions to push forward the message of Black liberation. This could only be done by maintaining strong links with radical grassroots struggles against racism, capitalism and imperialism locally, nationally and across the world. The people are the priority, and I hope this book inspires every reader to not only look more deeply into the politics and history of Black Power, but to use these political histories to shape a future in which radical Black thought and action is as urgent as ever.

– January 2021

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a writer and researcher based in the Department of Sociology, University of Greenwich. He works with The Monitoring Group which campaigns against racist state violence. He is author of Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester University Press).

PREFACE TO THE UPDATED EDITION

This new edition of Renegade comes at the end of several years of political tumult¹. The book was originally conceived after Barack Obama’s first inauguration, at a time when many pundits in Britain and the US were proclaiming a new era of post-racial politics. The last few years have been proof, if proof was needed, that race is still a defining issue in the politics of the anglophone West. In 2016, Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign both played on racial prejudice and Islamophobia. In the wake of the Brexit vote, hate crime rose in Britain. Similarly, Trump’s presidency emboldened the so-called ‘alt-right’ and violent grass-roots white nationalist activity. More recently, the 2020 presidential election campaign has witnessed armed white vigilantes taking to the streets to ‘defend property’, as Black activists and their allies protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by white police, and the killing of George Floyd by white police. Blake and Floyd are the latest victims of ongoing police violence against Black people in the US.

Since 2016 there have been revivals in radical politics in Britain and the US. Inspired by the movement in South Africa, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has forced Oriel College in Oxford to agree to remove the statue celebrating arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Indeed, the struggle gained renewed momentum after direct action from protestors consigned the statue of slave trader Edward Colston to a watery grave in Bristol’s docks. More than that, the Rhodes Must Fall movement put forward a compelling case that Britain must re-examine its colonial past and address the ongoing consequences of Empire. Similarly, Black Lives Matter has emerged as an important campaign in the UK. It has drawn inspiration from the mass movement in the US which has confronted and challenged the frequently lethal violence used by the police against people of colour.

In the current climate, Howe’s analysis of the intersection of race and class, his work as an organizer for racial and social justice, the struggles of the movements he was closely associated with and his public life are as relevant as ever. While this is a work of history, the message is current. Indeed, it is no surprise that in recent years there has been increasing interest in the Black Power movement in Britain. In 2017 the TV drama Guerrilla explored police racism and the secret state’s campaign against Black Power in Britain. Although the story was fictional, the context was real. At the end of last year, Steve McQueen’s Small Axe arrived on the small screen and in cinemas, beginning with the story of the Mangrove Nine. The focus on Black Power in Britain and on the Mangrove campaign reflects both a push for greater diversity in the media, and a desire to reckon with the reality of racism in Britain.

* * *

Since the publication of the first edition, the authors have been busy examining Home Office, Police and Law Office files, uncovering details of the state’s secret war against Black activism. There remains an urgent political need to uncover the extent to which Special Branch has worked to undermine and victimize Black activists, justice campaigners and trade unionists since the late sixties. The authors are pleased to be working with Suresh Grover and Stafford Scott of The Monitoring Project in their vital work holding the forces of ‘law and order’ to account, and seeking justice for victims of political persecution.

We have also uncovered material which sheds new light on the last years of the Panther movement in Britain. Although we have not changed the account given in Chapter 11 significantly, this new material presents a very different picture of the events within the Panthers in 1973. Michael L. Clemons, Associate Professor of Political Science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia and Charles E. Jones, Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati shared a series of letters and other documents written by Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Eddie LeCointe, Lloyd Vidale and Reginald ‘Tshaka’ Beckles. Circulated on 29 November 1973, they relate to ‘recent events in the Black Workers Movement, formerly Black Panther Movement’ (Jones-LeCointe et al. 1973: 1). In June 1973 the Black Panther Movement became the Black Workers Movement (BWM). This change of name reflected ideological disagreements among the members about the extent to which the group should focus on class, race or gender as their defining issue. Between June and September 1973, a series of disagreements led to the break-up of the BWM. The BWM, like the Panthers, had no formal leader. Nonetheless, as Neil Kenlock puts it, ‘Altheia never called herself the leader, but she led us’ (Kenlock 2016). Jones-LeCointe’s commitment to class politics led to criticism that the BWM was becoming too close to white radicals (Wild 2005: 104). There were also other ideological tensions. Apparently, there were tensions with Olive Morris over the creation of a ‘Women’s Collective’ (Jones-LeCointe et al. 1973: 6). This disagreement led to the expulsion of Eddie LeCointe from the movement.

The purchase of the house in Tollington Park, detailed in Chapter 11, seems to have exacerbated tensions. By early 1973 the Panthers had two bases: a squat on Shakespeare Road in Brixton, and the house in Tollington Park in Finsbury Park. These two bases became centres around which different tendencies within the Panthers organized. Morris and Howe were associated with the squat in Shakespeare Road, while Jones-LeCointe, Eddie LeCointe, Vidale and Beckles were based in Tollington Park. Equally, there were ongoing issues related to paying the mortgage on the house in Tollington Park. Jones LeCointe and LeCointe favoured keeping the house and ‘appealing to the community for financial support.’ Dhondy and Mala Sen wanted to sell the house, which was in their name (Ibid: 11). Howe’s involvement in the internal politics of the BWM appears to have been mini-mal. Indeed, in one of the documents, Jones-LeCointe, LeCointe, Vidale and Beckles claim that by early 1973 he had effectively withdrawn from the Movement in order to focus on Race Today (Ibid: 13). Nonetheless, ideological division within the movement and practical issues around paying the mortgage on the Tollington Park house, appear to have led to Jones-LeCointe’s resignation from the BWM in September 1973. The documents contain a wealth of material concerning the Panther Movement and the BWM in Britain, and we hope to publish more on their contents in due course.

* * *

Prostate cancer had a significant impact on Howe’s last years. Although the treatment was successful, the condition had a long-term impact on his health. Nevertheless, supported by his children Tamara, Darcus, Rap, Taipha, Clare, Amiri, Zoe as well as his six grandchildren, he remained politically active. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader led Howe to join the Labour Party. Howe, who had eschewed party politics for most of his life, believed that a Labour Party led by Corbyn stood a chance of bringing about radical change. However, since he found constituency meetings extremely bureaucratic, Howe took little part in Labour politics. Following this book’s initial publication, Howe participated in meetings around the country alongside his wife, and comrade, Leila Howe and the book’s authors, helping to bring the history of Black radical politics and the fight against racism in the UK to a new generation.

Howe died suddenly in his sleep on 1 April 2017 from a heart attack. Obituaries appeared on television, radio and in print, celebrating his life and his many achievements. A memorial event organized at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton on 9 April, ‘Tribute to Darcus, Man Free’, drew hundreds. Those unable to fit into the BCA’s courtyard spilled out into Windrush Square outside to listen to speeches and catch a glimpse of the excerpts from Howe’s films and documentaries projected onto the side of its building. On 20 April hundreds more joined the procession that accompanied Darcus’s funeral cortege as it made the eight-mile journey from the former offices of Race Today in Railton Road, Brixton to its destination at All Saint’s Church in Notting Hill.

These two locations were symbolic of Howe’s political life. The Brixton squat-turned-office was the political head-quarters from which Howe edited Race Today and helped coordinate the Race Today Collective as it campaigned for equality and racial justice. Notting Hill was Howe’s first home in Britain and where, 47 years earlier, he had initiated the Mangrove march. Together, they represented Howe’s spiritual homes in the UK. It was fitting then that the speeches and tributes to Howe, during the decidedly secular and non-religious service, were intercut with beautiful calypsos from the Mangrove Steelband, which Howe had helped set up and which he joined every year to celebrate Carnival on the streets of Notting Hill.

1 Renegade was originally published under the title Darcus Howe: A Political Biography in 2014.

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

The publication of Darcus Howe: A Political Biography in January 2014 helped prompt a long overdue discussion about why the history of grassroots black struggle against racism in Britain had, for the most part, been neglected by mainstream historians and commentators. Why is it that so many British schools teach the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, but so few teach the history of Black Power in Britain? The book’s original publication coincided with a wave of public interest in Britain in the history of black liberation movements in the United States and southern Africa which followed the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in August 1963 and the sad news of Nelson Mandela’s death. Amid the blitz of media coverage and debate over Mandela’s global legacy and the impact of Martin Luther King, the existence and role of a black movement in Britain was never discussed.

Writing for The Guardian, Mark Brown acknowledged Howe’s biography as the first detailed history of the Black Power movement in Britain. It quoted the author’s concern that the lack of formal recognition given to the Black Power movement in the United Kingdom meant that an important chapter of recent history was in danger of being forgotten (The Guardian, 27 December 2013). Establishment amnesia often serves a political purpose. In Britain’s case, forgetting the history of black resistance movements has helped the majority white population to forget unpalatable truths concerning the ubiquitous discrimination in housing, employment and education and the savage violence at the hands of police and freelance racists which these black movements confronted.¹

In addition to this positive political purpose, permitting the history of the Black Power movement to slip from the national consciousness has helped perpetuate serious misunderstandings about the nature of racism. Specifically, all too often, public discourse equates racism with segregation or separation, and equality with integration. What is more, there is a tendency to conflate integration with assimilation. Both of these misunderstandings are problematic. First, integration should not be equated with equality because there are ways of including people in society that are demeaning. Put another way, integration can be demanded on racially subordinating terms. Secondly, demanding that minority communities assimilate, or making ‘British identity’ and ‘British values’ a ‘litmus test’ of loyalty is a demeaning exercise; it is a sort of political equivalent to the Tebbit test where second-generation Britons of West Indian and South Asian heritage were required to cheer for the English cricket team to prove their allegiance to their country of birth. Setting aside the problem that the notion of ‘British values’ is nebulous in the extreme, the demand for assimilation privileges one set of cultural norms above others. In so doing, it gives the majority an instructional role, while assigning the role of a subordinate apprentice or probationer to members of immigrant communities. In this sense, demands that immigrants in general, or black people specifically, assimilate is a modern-day version of the ‘civilising mission’, for it gives white British people the same duty of ‘elevation of their subject races’ that British imperialists claimed in the early part of the nineteenth century (Deane 2014: 14). Moreover, the insistence on assimilation denies members of immigrant communities the right to self-definition. The mainstream of the British Black Power movement recognized the problematic nature of this sort of integration. Consequently, Howe advocated and continues to advocate ‘integration on our terms’, rejecting both token integration and integration as second-class citizens. Studying Black Power in Britain would force a new generation to engage with these arguments. The absence of awareness about the claims of radical black intellectuals allows us to ignore these difficulties and focus squarely on assimilation with the ultimate goal of ‘community cohesion’.

That the authors decided to tell a wider history through the life of one man may seem surprising to some. For us it was a natural choice. As Diane Abbott MP wrote in a review of the book in The New Statesman, in fact, ‘there can be no other person more appropriate to build the story around – because Darcus Howe is one of the standout activists and public intellectuals of his generation.’ (NS, 9 May 2014). Howe’s biography is bound up with the struggle for racial justice in Britain. By telling his story we were also constructing the recent history of key parts of the British black movement and setting them in a personal and political context.

The historian Dr Evan Smith noted in response to the book’s publication that one explanation for the lack of scholarship on the history of radical black activism is probably due to the scarcity of resources available to historians (Smith 2013). It is true that in Britain we do not have the benefit of extensive files containing transcripts of phone calls between civil rights leaders and black power activists like those that exist in the United States, thanks largely to the often illegal tapping of telephone lines by the FBI. Yet as Smith himself acknowledges, there are important and growing numbers of resources, collections and archives such as those at Black Cultural Archives in Lambeth, the Institute of Race Relations Library in Kings Cross, the George Padmore Institute in Finsbury Park, and the Sivanandan collection at Warwick University Library. Furthermore, crucial sources for this book’s authors, just as in all histories of grass-roots movements, were the participants themselves. Mark Perryman, among others, has noted how the biography ‘via personal testimony revisits a history of migration, self-organisation and resistance which exists largely outside of traditional Left politics’ (Perryman 2014). There is no magic formula to finding and interviewing veteran activists, and the fellow travellers and opponents of their movements. If a small photo gallery, such as Photfusion in Brixton, can set up a local youth project, Organised Youth, for the purpose of constructing an oral history of the Brixton-based British Black Panther Movement, which it did so well in November 2013, there is no good reason for professional historians with access to research grants and other institutional resources to neglect this vital task.

There is a further political reason why, in our view, the mainstream media and popular arts have avoided making and broadcasting documentaries and dramas about the history of militant black activism in Britain. The struggles that Howe was associated with against police violence and harassment directed towards immigrant communities, and indiscriminate police stop-and-search of young black people, are far from won. Howe’s claim that the 2011 summer riots should be understood in the context of the killing of Mark Duggan was treated with condescension by BBC interviewers. The BBC interviews demonstrate that the space available to conduct serious discussion of police racism has, if anything, narrowed from when Howe first appeared as a commentator on television screens in the mid-1980s. The double-edged nature of the modern media is picked up in Andrew Smith’s review of this work (Smith 2014). Smith wondered whether Howe’s move into media work could be justified as a decision made in the spirit of C. L. R. James as the authors suggest. As Smith pointed out, while James did consider that the modern mass popular culture tended to reflect ‘the desire for liberty and self-organisation’, he was also acutely aware of the effects of the political economy of media production on the content of programmes and films. In particular, C. L. R. James highlighted how the economic crisis in America following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the real contraction of free expression and democracy which followed became a dead hand on artistic creativity itself. In the case of Howe, Dhondy and Tariq Ali, their move into the mainstream media was directly linked to the launch of Channel Four under the directorship of Jeremy Isaacs as a platform for new ideas and creative self-expression. Initially, the exploration of grand narratives about history and politics was encouraged. The political economy of media production has changed radically since. As Brenton and Cohen have argued, the TV format wars of the 1990s saw the rise of a ‘post-documentary culture’ in which the success of low-cost reality TV formats such as Survivor and Big Brother led to a degradation of the documentary form and the values that had underpinned it (Brenton and Cohen 2003: 44–81). In this transformed cultural and economic setting, there has been a gradual erosion of distinctions between public and private sphere, documentary and entertainment. The commercial success of these formats was rooted in their appearance when the spread of digital TV meant more schedules needed filling and filling at the lowest possible cost. Yet, not all developments in the media have been retrograde. The ‘new media’ has created a space where radical voices can speak directly to millions around the world. Howe’s brilliantly dignified and scathing response to the BBC’s Fiona Armstrong in the summer of 2011 might have been quickly forgotten if it had not been uploaded to YouTube, and public outrage at his treatment might have been more easily denied if it had not been for Twitter. A news item which attracted an initial audience in the hundreds of thousands has to date been viewed by more than 5.5 million people via YouTube alone, bringing Howe’s politics to the attention of a new generation.

AUTHORS’ PREFACE

Writing this book has involved many wonderful experiences. Hours in archives are, of course, the historian’s delight, and we thank the staff at the National Archives, the Institute of Race Relations, the George Padmore Institute, the British Library, the Colindale Newspaper Archive, Warwick University Library, Cambridge University Library, the Butler Library at the Columbia University and the archives of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, to name but a few. We have spent many hours being entertained by our interviewees. Early on in the project, we had the good fortune to spend an afternoon with Farrukh Dhondy. ‘I expect you want me to tell you all the scandal,’ was his opener. We earnestly assured him that we were writing a serious political piece, adding that we couldn’t believe that there would be enough scandal to fill a single page. ‘There’s enough to fill seven volumes!’, he retorted.

One of the stranger experiences, only obliquely related to the project, was an Equality and Diversity training session that one of us was compelled to attend in the summer of 2011. Two trainers explained the workings of the Single Equality Act aided by Post-it notes, highlighters and a hundred PowerPoint slides. The tenor of the event is best illustrated by the following exchange. One of the delegates, clearly concerned to get everything right, queried, ‘I was born in New Zealand and my husband’s half Indian, so I’m never sure which box to tick for our son when I’m filling out forms.’ One of the trainers took up the question. ‘Your son’, she asked, ‘does he tan easily?’. ‘Yes’, replied the bemused delegate. ‘Then he can tick the box that says Lucky. ’ This book is not written in that spirit.

Of the many people who have helped and supported us in this project, the following deserve a special mention:

Ian Macdonald QC, Michael Mansfield QC, Baroness Ross Howells, Alan Hayling, Bill Bowring, John Howe, Lenin Woolford, David Abdullah, David Waddell, Deryck Murray, Liz Davies, Sami Savonius-Wroth, Susie Hart, Katherine Butler Schofield, Mike Marqusee, Paul Alcala, Raffique Shah, Tariq Ali, Russell Proffitt, staff at the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, especially Nicki Johnson and Maurisa Gordon-Thomas, Selma James, Knowlton Crichlow, Amandla Crichlow, Barbara Beese, A. Sivanandan, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Max Farrar, Linda Bellos, Margaret Busby, Clare Short, Dotun Adebayo, Sarah White, Farrukh Dhondy, Nirpal Dhaliwal, Trevor Phillips, Narinder Minhas, Marques Toliver, Barry Cox, Caroline Coon, Harry Goulbourne, Lincoln Crawford and especially Darcus Howe, who spent many hours discussing his life with us. Thank you also to Robert Hill, Richard Small, Joe Street, Anne-Marie Angelo, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Anthony Gifford, Dr Vince Hines, Derek Humphry, James Whitfield, Winston Trew, Simon Woolley, Kimberly Springer, David Austin and Krishnendu Majumdar. We also thank the master and fellows of St Edmund’s College Cambridge and the president and fellows of Homerton College Cambridge for their support during this project.

We owe a great debt to the expertise of Michael Ryan and Alix Ross at the University of Columbia’s Butler Library as well as Jenny Bourne at the Institute of Race Relations Archive and Sarah Garrod at the George Padmore Institute. Thank you to Harry Carr for his editorial work, to Brandon High, Barry Hart, Grishma Fredric and Farzad Zadeh for their comments on the manuscript and to Mark Richardson and Caroline Wintersgill at Bloomsbury.

We are particularly indebted to Leila Hassan and Priyamvada Gopal. Leila’s vivid memory and insights into events over a 40-year period have been invaluable to us, as has her support, friendship and encouragement in writing the book. Priya Gopal took time out of her own teaching, writing and research schedule to generously read and wisely comment on the whole manuscript for which we are extremely grateful. Finally, we would like to thank our respective partners, Lucy and Maggie, and our children, India, Max and Mia. Without their love, support and patience, we could not have written this book.

Introduction

‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’

C. L. R. James, a man who will appear again and again in these pages, once stated: ‘Darcus is a West Indian.’ The comment was an attempt to elucidate Howe’s character for the benefit of Leila Hassan, deputy editor of Race Today, a woman who would later become Howe’s wife. So saying, James situated Howe within a specific culture as well as pointing to some fundamental aspects of his personality. James famously argued that West Indians ‘have been the most rebellious people in history’ (James 1980: 177). This rebelliousness was rooted in a deeply felt love of freedom, a love that sprang from enslavement and the experience of regimented labour on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

But when we made the Middle Passage and came to the Caribbean we went straight into a modern industry – the sugar plantation – and there we saw that to be a slave was the result of being black. A white man was not a slave. The West Indian slave was not accustomed to that kind of slavery in Africa; and there in the history of the West Indies there is one dominant fact and that is the desire, sometimes expressed, sometimes unexpressed, but always there, the desire for liberty; the ridding oneself of the particular burden which is the special inherence of black skin. If you don’t know that about West Indian people you know nothing about them.

(Ibid.)

Significantly, West Indian slaves experienced conditions akin to those of the modern proletariat. On Caribbean plantations, slaves worked within stratified systems of collective toil, using industrial technology at the cutting edge of the age, disciplined by the clock, producing a single product. The result was riches and industrial development for the West, and for the West Indies, a population characterized by the will to rebel. Howe puts it like this: ‘we fought from day one and that fight culminated in Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti and Paul Bogle in Jamaica’. In this sense, James was right: Darcus Howe is a West Indian.

Howe would later modify James’ aphorism. Today, when he tells the story, he adds a coda: ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian and he lives in Britain.’ That, for Howe, is a fuller description, and a description of some political importance. For the past 50 years, he has made Britain his home, fighting all the while for immigrants to enjoy the full rights of citizenship without having to renounce their history or identity: to integrate on their own terms. For Howe, it is a struggle in the best traditions of English radicalism and part of the ongoing struggle of the British working class. Writing in 1998, Howe described his mission thus:

… although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign Motherland of my parent’s vision.

(UC DHP 9/2)

Thirty years earlier, while editing the Black Eagle, the newsletter of a small London-based Black Power group, he set out his mission in a similar way. With playful irony he wrote in terms of a civilizing mission; the British had travelled the globe to civilize Africa, India and the Caribbean, now it was time to return the favour (GPI JOU 35/4). Howe and the Black Power Movement would civilize Britain by challenging the state-licensed barbarism of the Metropolitan Police (Met), by teaching Britain to become a harmonious multiracial society, by bringing ‘reason to race’ (Howe 2011b).

This book was originally entitled Darcus Howe: A Political Biography. The book is still just that. The outlines of Howe’s story are simple enough: born in Trinidad, he immigrated to Britain where he became the country’s best-known campaigner for black¹ rights. Initially, he campaigned on the streets, latterly in the mainstream press, on radio and on television.

The biography is political in two senses. First, it is political in that it concerns Howe’s work in the public sphere. Our focus then is on Howe the campaigner, the intellectual, the writer and broadcaster, rather than on Howe’s private life. Thus, the biography is neither an intimate portrait nor a psychological one. This may seem to be a denial of the celebrated truth that the personal is also the political. It is not. It is merely a recognition that there is a limit to what can be achieved in a single book. It is political in a second sense too. The book is an intervention, at least obliquely, in a series of debates concerning the extent to which the West has entered a post-racial age, the extent to which racism is and has been an issue in British society and the best ways of advancing racial justice.

Turning to methodological issues, our approach is primarily historical. By this we mean that when dealing with historical actors, we aim ‘simply to use the ordinary techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way’ (Skinner 2002: vii). In short, we attempt to understand Howe in his own terms.

A number of themes unite this book. The first relates to Howe’s consistent focus on the progressive potential of the black underclass. This intuition was clear from an early age. Living in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, in a house looking out on the home of the Casablanca steel band, Howe was part of a community that included the working class and street hustlers. One of his first battles was against his parent’s desire to move into a more middle-class area. After winning a scholarship to Queen’s Royal College, Howe continued to associate with ‘barflies and hustlers’, shifting his allegiance from Casablanca to Renegades, the street gang which coalesced around it (Howe 2011c). He admits suffering ‘demons of doubt’ about the potential of the black underclass of itinerants and unemployed, particularly after a run-in with hustler-turned-faux-radical Michael X. Howe credits James with keeping ‘his eye on the ball’, by repeatedly demonstrating that the black working class and the black underclass were a progressive historical force (BBC 2002). As a member of the Black Panther Movement, as editor of Race Today in the 1970s and 1980s and throughout the summer riots of 2011, Howe continued to believe that radical politics should grow from the ranks of the black working class, black youth and the black unemployed. Howe’s faith in the black underclass is based on his view that radicalism is the natural response of immigrants, particularly second-generation immigrants, who refuse to tolerate brutal policing, poor housing, third-rate jobs and social discrimination reserved for them. In this sense, he argues, the economic and social position of the black underclass meant that they had the potential to play an explosive and insurrectionary role in British politics, and to ignite and play a leading role in a wider rebellion of white youth and urban poor.

Secondly, Howe has continually stressed black ‘self-organisation’ and ‘self-activity’. The insistence that black people must shape their