Lessons learned since murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence

Thirty years ago, this month, black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs in South East London. It became an international cause célèbre after, as founder of the Anti-Racist Alliance, I was able to introduce Nelson Mandela, former South African president and anti-apartheid activist, to Stephen’s parents Doreen and Neville Lawrence. Before that, political leaders had ignored a spate of murders of young black men in a part of London we dubbed “the racist murders capital of Britain”.

It took six more years before a new Labour government set up the Macpherson public inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence killing. It found the police to be riddled with institutional racism and proposed unprecedented reform of the Met. Then its chief accepted the institutionally racist label. Today, Met Commissioner Mark Rowley does not. Even after a damning report from eminent lawyer Louise Casey this year that found his force is also sexist, homophobic and corrupt.

In 1999, Sir William Macpherson, a retired high court judge and former soldier, concluded that institutional racism at least in part explained why Stephen’s killers had escaped justice. Police had been incompetent and committed fundamental errors, including:

• failing to give first aid when they reached the scene.

• failing to follow obvious leads during their investigation.

• failing to quickly arrest suspects.

Significantly, Stephen’s parents buried him in their homeland of Jamaica.

Macpherson found that recommendations of the Scarman report, after the 1981 Brixton, south London, uprising by black youth against police oppression, had been ignored. The Macpherson report’s recommendations for reform included changes to the civil service, local government, the National Health Service, schools, and the judicial system, to deal with institutional racism.

Fast-forward to January, 2012, when Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty of the murder of Stephen Lawrence after new evidence came to light. But their accomplices Luke Knight, and brothers Jamie and Neil Acourt escaped prosecution for the part they played.

NATIONAL SCANDAL

In a dramatic turnaround this month, Doreen Lawrence has claimed her long-time ally the Daily Mail hired private investigators to hack her phone and get information on her murdered son, potentially disrupting the police investigation into the racially motivated murder.

Baroness Lawrence, who was put in the House of Lords by the Labour Party, now believes she “failed her murdered son” by trusting the Daily Mail (from which she received thousands of pounds, including for the serialisation of her book about the case) during the 1990s. She now claims the newspaper only campaigned for justice on behalf of Stephen Lawrence in a cynical bid to sell more newspapers.

Despite partial successes on many fronts, race relations in Britain have not improved. The high number of deaths in police, prison and hospital custody of black people is a national scandal.

Young black men are still disproportionately stopped and searched by police. There is shocking racism in the education system, with, for instance, black students disproportionately subjected to humiliating strip searches in schools. Combined with unemployment and poverty, these factors have been cited as fuelling the several inner-city riots many of us in the black community call uprisings.

It’s alarming that migrants are being scapegoated as an “invasion” by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, herself the child of migrants from the Global South, who peddles hate-fuelled rhetoric to win the votes of racists. It’s a continuation of the ruling Conservative’s “hostile environment” that wrongly classed thousands of people who arrived in Britain from 1948 onwards, mainly Jamaicans, as illegal immigrants in what became known as the Windrush scandal.

A clampdown on racism throughout British society has slowed since the Macpherson report and must be kick-started back into action. That’s why trade unionists and community activists, including me, have set up The Liberation Movement, as a much-needed black-led anti-racists initiative.

Have lessons been learned over the last three decades?

I’m speaking at an online Zoom at 7pm on Tuesday, April 25, titled Remembering Stephen Lawrence – The legacy and way forward https:// www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/remembering-stephen-lawrence-the-legacy-and-way-f...

It will give participants the opportunity to hear from and debate with both myself and others including; veteran anti-racist campaigner Suresh Grover, who also helped Stephen’s parents run their justice campaign, leading family and police justice champions, Janet Alder, of the United Families and Friends Campaign, Emmanuelle Andrews, Liberty’s policy and campaigns manager and the prominent scholar and community activist Professor Gus John.

The moderator will be Deborah Hobson, a leading Unite the Union black activist.

Marc Wadsworth is co-founder of The Liberation Movement and helped the parents of Stephen Lawrence set up their Justice campaign.