The British artist and film director, Steve McQueen, has made a film about the Mangrove 9…You can watch the film, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08vy19b/small-axe-series-1-mangrove

The Mangrove Restaurant was in All Saints Rd, Notting Hill, London. The Mangrove was a community restaurant established by Frank Crichlow and, by virtue of its location and style, had attracted a celebrity following. Perhaps because of this, the restaurant had suffered a long sequence of police harassment. So much so, that the Mangrove community mobilised to protest against unfair policing. The Nine, identified as ring-leaders were arrested and brought to trial at the Old Bailey.

The trial of the Mangrove 9 was not a miscarriage of justice in the traditional sense. No lengthy custodial sentences were passed. Indeed, the 9 were found not guilty of all the major charges brought against them. The trial was a victory for the civil rights movement in the UK, and revealed the systemic bias and brutality within the policing of the black British community.

This film, and its story, is important to watch…

The significance of the Mangrove as a community restaurant should not be underestimated. It provided a space (not as safe as it should have been) for people to meet and share experiences. It was exactly the kind of empathetic and community building intervention required at the time. Frank Crichlow deserves enormous credit for taking on this responsibility and continuing the project in the face of un-provoked and continuous police harassment.

Secondly, the story is important for revealing the significance of the structural analysis of the systemic bias within the institutions of the British state apparatus. This analysis had been pioneered, in the USA, by the Black Panthers, and was applied to the UK by the British Black Panther Movement. The role of activist lawyers, Ian MacDonald especially, was instrumental in helping the Mangrove 9 understand how to resist and subvert the established process of criminal justice in the UK. There’s an important scene in which the systemic and implicit blame attaching to the status of victim is revealed…This applies equally to gender discrimination etc.

Back then, the British public were mostly unfamiliar with the workings of criminal justice system and were complacent in their belief in the neutrality and even-handedness of the police and their belief in the integrity of the legal system. The public were regularly reassured, through the press, that the British police and the legal system were the best in the world…The acquittal of the Mangrove 9 played out against the background of trumped-up charges, fabricated evidence and the bias of the system, began to reveal this myth.

The radical law project was able to show that the systemic bias, revealed in the Mangrove 9 case, was applied through the workings of the state to all minorities through the processes of division, exclusion and enclosure. The alignment of civil-rights, gender-equality, and class-struggle through the shared experience of a consistent and wide-ranging pattern of discrimination should have ushered-in a period of wider and closer left solidarity…the promise and potential of this broad popular-front was brutally dismantled by Margaret Thatcher’s government at the end of the 1970s.

NB The work of designer, David King, for the Anti-Nazi League through the mid to late 1970s provided for an exemplary form of design activism. See, for example

The subsequent miscarriages of justice throughout the 1970s and to the present and often directed at Irish and Black British minorities has simply revealed the deep roots of this malpractice. The Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6 were wrongly convicted of terrorist bombings in the UK. The brutal and public murder of Stephen Lawrence and revealed the institutionalised racism of the Metropolitan Police. Now, we are discovering to the disproportionate and duplicitous undercover policing directed at marginal political activism…

The Small Axe title is derived from the Bob Marley lyric about big trees and small axes.