On 9 August 1970, 150 black protesters marched peacefully on the police station in Notting Hill to demonstrate against racial harassment by the police. They were met by 500 officers, whose heavy handed policing was designed to antagonise them. Nine protesters were charged with incitement to riot.
The resulting 55-day trial of the Mangrove Nine, which took place at London’s Old Bailey, was a landmark in British legal history: it saw black power take on the might of the British state and win. After eight hours, the jury acquitted all defendants of the main charge, and the trial brought the first judicial acknowledgment of evidence of racial hatred in the Metropolitan police.
The trial is now the subject of a film, Mangrove, directed by Steve McQueen, which opened October’s London film festival and will be screened by the BBC later this month.
The protest was sparked by police raids on the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, owned by Frank Crichlow, a Trinidadian-born entrepreneur and prominent civil rights campaigner. The all-night cafe, which opened in 1968, was a regular meeting place for many activists from the Caribbean community, as well as a fashionable haunt for celebrities: Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, Christine Keeler and John Profumo had been among its patrons.
But in the space of 18 months, the police raided the Mangrove on 12 occasions on the pretext of searching for drugs, although they never found any.
After the protest, the Conservative home secretary, Reginald Maudling, instructed the director of public prosecutions to charge the nine – Crichlow, Darcus Howe, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Barbara Beese, Rupert Boyce, Rhodan Gordon, Anthony Innis, Rothwell Kentish and Godfrey Millett – with incitement to riot. The charge was rejected by the magistrates court, but reinstated by the DPP.
Beese, who was 24 at the time, says: “Such interference from the DPP was most unusual and, as far as we were concerned, reflected a determination to paint us as criminals rather than as citizens exercising our legitimate right to demonstrate against the repeated police harassment of the Mangrove.”
Rather than being heard at the local crown court, the case was sent to the Old Bailey, which traditionally hears the most serious violent offences like rape and murder, and which Beese says was “an intimidating place”.
As part of their legal strategy, two of the nine defendants, Jones-LeCointe and Howe, represented themselves. The late Ian Macdonald QC, a barrister who represented some of the others, applied unsuccessfully to have an all-black jury on the basis that the Magna Carta enshrined the right to trial by one’s peers.
Back then, defendants had a right to challenge without cause members of the jury. The defence asked potential jurors what they understood by the term “black power” and based on their answers rejected 63. Two of the final twelve were black.
Beese remembers the “humiliation meted out” by Jones-Lecointe, Howe and Macdonald, who represented her, in “exposing and demolishing police lies and deceit behind the prosecution”.
“Altheia and Darcus were able to directly address the jury and, importantly, to cross-examine the police and other prosecution witnesses. It was highly effective because the jury were enabled to assess their credibility against the incredibility of the police witnesses in the case,” she adds.
Beese also recalls the public support throughout the trial, with the public gallery filled each day and demonstrations outside the court.
Throughout the trial, Beese, who had an eight-month-old son, Darcus – now the head of Island Records – was “in constant fear that had the jury found me guilty, I would receive a prison sentence and be separated from him”. She was elated by the verdict, having “been in no doubt that, had the decision gone against us, we would have received vindictive and punitive prison sentences”.
Following the verdict, the judge conceded there had been evidence demonstrating that the behaviour of the police had been motivated by racial hatred. Despite a plea from the home secretary for him to withdraw the remark, the judge did not.
Fifty years on, Beese says: “I am very proud indeed to have been one of the Mangrove Nine.
“The case was groundbreaking and a defining moment for black people because it gave real meaning to the term ‘black power’. We were doing it for ourselves, taking on the establishment and winning, exposing its racism and hypocrisy.”
She believes the case “provided an effective template for collective organisation”, with a direct link running through from the black power movement of the 1970s to the Black Lives Matter movement today.
Five decades on, she laments the continued need to fight against racism: “We know the police continue to disproportionally police and criminalise black youths, that the number of black boys excluded from schools is disproportionate, and that Britain’s true colonial legacy is absent from the school curriculum.”
Barrister Leslie Thomas QC, meanwhile, notes: “It was the first time that there had been a real push back by lawyers representing young black men in raising self-defence and defence of their community – something that would be followed by the Bradford 12 [in 1981].”
Thomas adds: “It also enabled young black men to know there were lawyers out there prepared to fight and not just cop a deal with the police, which was a common complaint from people from African-Caribbean communities.”
David Offenbach, a solicitor who acted for some of the nine, explains the trial took place in the context of a “general flowering of rights” – the Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalised homosexual acts, the Equal Pay Act prohibited less favourable treatment for women, and there had been two Race Relations Acts to outlaw discrimination.
But, he says, there was still prejudice by the police and general dismay about the discriminatory treatment of black people in Notting Hill. “People were being stopped on the street under the ‘sus’ laws [which allowed the police to stop and search people on suspicion of being in breach of the Vagrancy Act 1824] because of the colour of their skin, not because there were reasonable grounds to think they had committed a crime.”
In the end, he says, the judge got it right. “But it’s ludicrous that people at a peaceful demonstration should have been subjected to this trial. The lesson we learn is there’s still so much to do. A lot has changed, but not enough. In many areas, we are still at square one.”