Black and White

These are the opening lyrics to Three Dog Night’s Black and White from their Seven Separate Fools album. The song was written in 1956, in response to the desegregation of public schools in the United States, following the Brown v Board of Education decision of 1954.

This week I’m writing about the Stephen Lawrence case. Most people won’t know about this case back home, but in the history of England, this is one of the most important. Stephen Lawrence was the son of two Jamaican immigrants and was killed on the 22nd of April back in 1992. He was 18 years old. Lawrence, a black A’ Level student who had wanted to become an architect, was killed by a group of white boys as he and his friend were waiting for a bus. Several witnesses saw the attack but later claimed to be unable to identify any of the attackers.

What followed after this was a exposure of a culture of racism not only in the police force but society at large.

His friend — also black—tried flagging down cars to get help. None stopped. A white couple who had been walking did eventually stop to help. The woman bent down and whispered in his ear, “You are loved. You are loved.” Those were the last words he heard.

He had been attacked at 10.30 pm. By eleven he was dead. “We’ve got a young lad in there.” A police inspector told his parents when they got to the hospital that night. “He’s dead, we don’t know who he is, but we’d like to clarify that point. If it’s not your son, then all well and good, but we need to know.”

An off duty policeman who had arrived at the scene had covered Stephen with a blanket but did not administer first aid and did not check his wounds. No one, in fact, checked his wounds. No record was made of what happened.

Everyone thought someone else was doing it. No searches were made of the houses that witnesses said the boys had run into. The police thought it was too late to wake people up. In the days that followed, police received over three dozen tip offs that all said the same five boys were his murderers.

They were arrested more than two weeks after. Charges that were laid against the youths were dropped because the Crown Prosecution service determined that there was insufficient evidence to continue with the prosecution. Throughout the investigation, however, the police constantly enquired about Stephen’s character and background, as though trying to find evidence to support the theory that the attack had been provoked or perhaps that he had “asked for it.” In 1997 a public inquiry was launched into the now infamous Stephen Lawrence case. The inquiry determined that there was insufficient evidence to convict the boys but that this was the fault of the police. They accused the investigating officers of destroying the case “by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism, and a failure of leadership by senior officers.”

The inquiry concluded that “Stephen Lawrence’s murder was simply, solely and unequivocally motivated by racism. It was the deepest tragedy for his family. It was an affront to society, and especially to the local black community in Greenwich. Nobody has been convicted of this crime. That is also an affront both to the Lawrence family and the community at large.”

I write about this case because a BBC programme that aired last week claimed that one of the investigating officers had accepted bribes from the father of one of the boys to not only apprise him of developments but to mess up the investigation. Blood soaked evidence was ignored when the boys’ homes were finally searched. A secretly filmed tape showed the boys making racists comments and pretending to kill black men. The programme also gave substantial evidence that the boys’ alibis were fabricated.

England is not the only country to have racially motivated crime, nor is it the first whose police force has turned out to be a racialist institution. This case led to a number of reforms, plus, significantly, a public apology from Sir Paul Condon, then chief of police, to Stephen’s parents. But none of the reforms called for by Stephen’s mother were put in place, including her call for the school curriculum to change to not only address the idea of racism, but also to include teaching about the contributions made by all ethnicities to English society.

So although children of all races can now learn to read and write together, it is not always a beautiful sight.

Comments? Please write

suszanna@hotmail.com