Darcus Howe

Leighton Rhett Radford Howe was born in Moruga, Trinidad, on the twenty-sixth of February 1943. He emigrated to London in 1961, at eighteen, with the intention of training as a barrister at Middle Temple. He was the nephew of the Trinidadian-British historian C. L. R. James (also placed in this archive); the two were close throughout Howe's life, and James was a sustained intellectual presence on Howe's political work.

He joined the British Black Panthers in 1968 and the Mangrove Restaurant defense circle in 1970 — the campaign around the police harassment of Frank Crichlow's Caribbean restaurant on All Saints Road in Notting Hill. The 1970 Mangrove Nine Trial — at which Howe was a co-defendant, charged with riot, affray, and assault — produced his acquittal alongside the other defendants and the first formal judicial finding (by Judge Edward Clarke) of "evidence of racial hatred" within the Metropolitan Police.

He edited Race Today magazine from 1973 to 1988 — the principal Black British political journal of the period. He led the Race Today Collective alongside the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and the literary critic Farrukh Dhondy. He organized the New Cross Massacre Action Committee after the January 1981 fire that killed thirteen young Black people at a Deptford birthday party — the Action Committee's Black People's Day of March on the second of March 1981 brought twenty thousand demonstrators across central London and produced the political pressure that closed the Metropolitan Police's pattern of inadequate response to anti-Black arson.

He was a sustained broadcasting presence on British television from the late 1980s — Bandung File, Devil's Advocate, White Tribe, and the long-running Black on Black series — and produced over five hundred hours of television across his career.

He died of prostate cancer at his London home on the first of April 2017, age seventy-four.

He is honored here as the principal political voice of Black British radical politics across five decades.