Darcus Howe

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Darcus Howe: a Political Biography examines the struggle for racial justice in Britain, through the lens of one of Britain’s most prominent and controversial black journalists and campaigners. Born in Trinidad during the dying days of British colonialism, Howe has become an uncompromising champion of racial justice. The book examines how Howe’s unique political outlook was inspired by the example of his friend and mentor C.L.R. James, and forged in the heat of the American civil rights movement, as well as Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution. The book sheds new light on Howe’s leading role in the defining struggles in Britain against institutional racism in the police, the courts and the media. It focuses on his part as a defendant in the trial of the Mangrove Nine, the high point of Black Power in Britain; his role in conceiving and organizing the Black People’s Day of Action, the largest ever demonstration by the black community in Britain; and his later work as one of a prominent journalist and political commentator.

Darcus Howe has had a somewhat dramatic personal and political life, both of which are sewn together seamlessly in the forthcoming book Darcus Howe: A Political Biography., An obvious candidate [for the Orwell Prize] from this year’s nominees is Robin Bunce and Paul Field’s “political biography” of the activist and journalist Darcus Howe. The book is political in far more than its content: as the authors rightly say, Britain’s Black Power movement is in danger of being written out of history., The first detailed history of black power in Britain . . . Bunce and Paul Field have published a political biography of Darcus Howe – one of the most significant black activists in Britain – using him as a framework for a history of the black power movement in Britain., This new book, co-authored by the Haldane Society’s Paul Field, is passionately conceived, thoroughly researched, and very well written. It is thoroughly recommended ... I can also vouch for the authors’ accuracy and objectivity, and the skill with which they bring key events of the last forty plus years to life ... Howe was never an organiser, nor a leader. But he has played a very considerable role in the movement for a distinctive Black British identity. This new book brings the man and forty years of tumultuous history to life, and never forgets the role of the political analysis which Howe learnt from C. L. R. James., This is a long overdue and badly needed biographical portrait of the black Trinidadian political radical and broadcaster Darcus Howe, who as one of the leading ideological agitators of the British Black Power Movement made a critical contribution to the shaping of modern multiracial and multicultural ‘postcolonial’ Britain...The pioneering efforts of Bunce and Field, undertaken in close collaboration with Howe himself and his partner, Leila Hassan, mean that for the first time the essential facts of Howe’s life and work are presented in one volume, complete with some remarkable photographs. At least some aspects of the fascinating, gripping, and often inspiring record of activism and campaigning that emerges will doubtless be new to the vast majority of readers, and the authors are to be commended for making this such an accessible and readable narrative that illuminates the wider civil rights and black liberation struggle in Britain.

Robin Bunce is Director of Studies for Politics at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK, and a Bye-Fellow in History at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He is also an editor of Twentieth Century History Review.Paul Field worked as a journalist for many years specializing in issues of policing, asylum and institutional racism, before becoming a lawyer specializing in the fields of discrimination and employment.