When no one cares about another dead Black boy

 

By Nicole M. Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at The Ohio State University,

In the preface to her memoir And Still I Rise: Seeking Justice for Stephen, Doreen Lawrence said that on the night of April 22, 1993 when her son Stephen was murdered in South East London, two lives ended, her son’s and her own. The promise of 18 year old Stephen’s life was extinguished, while the world that Doreen and her husband, Neville (both Jamaican migrants to England) created with their three children disappeared. After the knock on the door from two concerned neighbors informing Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence that their son had been involved in a “stabbing incident”, Mrs. Lawrence said, “I was a different person.”^[1]

The events of that night and the almost two decades long fight to bring Stephen’s suspected murderers to justice has helped shape an entire generation of Black Britons, but has barely entered the popular consciousness Stateside.

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While waiting to catch a bus home with his friend Duwayne Brooks, Stephen was suddenly attacked by a group of White teenagers, alleged to have yelled “What, what nigger” before stabbing him twice in his chest, severing two arteries and collapsing one lung.

When the ambulance and police arrived Stephen was close to death and rushed to the local Brook Hospital, but no first aid was given. In fact, Mrs. Lawrence would lament that in all the commotion no one heard her son’s last words:

“Young people often pretend to be tough, but I know my own children and they are certainly not hardened or brutalized. So I am sure that in his last moments Stephen would have been asking for me. If only the police who came to him had been more attentive, they might have heard his last words. There is so much that is missing… and no one will ever be able to tell me what he was saying as he died.”^[2]

Stephen Lawrence’s murder was brutal, senseless and made even worse by the fact that to this day the five young men believed to have killed him, the same five people who were identified just one day after the murder, have never been brought to justice.

Doreen has asserted that she was not a political person before her son’s murder. It was only after she began to question the police handling of his case that her attitude changed. High on that list was that the police seemed unwilling, or unable, to see that her son’s murder was a racist incident. From the beginning of the investigation, police seemed unwilling to even look for the five White teenagers identified by Duwayne Brooks. In fact, the very night of the incident police had not followed information given by Duwayne about where the killers ran after the stabbing. And when questioned later by the family as to why, one senior detective’s response was “You can’t expect us to go knocking on doors so late at night.”^[3] And days alter the family was appalled to find that police were questioning Stephen’s friends and insinuating that Stephen had been out committing a robbery the night of his murder.

“What they were doing, as we knew from conversations that we had with Stephen’s friends, was questioning them, as though these young black men held the key to the mystery of his killing. It was as if they were building up a picture against us, against Stephen. The questions they asked his friends about him were unbelievable — what gang did he belong to, for example…”^[4]

Police were also ignoring the actual flood of information being given by local residents who identified Stephen’s killers as a local group of White youth known to terrorize the area and who had been involved in at least one serious stabbing just weeks before Stephen’s death.

One person even walked into the police station, gave the police five names (Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, Gary Dobson, Luke Knight and David Norris) and informed them that: “In fact you can only join their gang if you stab someone. They carry knives and weapons most days.”^[5] But when the Detective Inspector was presented with this statement it was initially ignored, and when the informant was later interviewed after some years, he said the detective was aggressive and skeptical. In hindsight it is not surprising, then, that this investigation did not yield any results.

In fact, the only people who seemed unsure about Stephen’s killers were the police. On February 14, 1997 the Daily Mail front page ran the headline: “MURDERERS: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us,” with pictures of the five suspects. To date the newspaper has never been sued by any of the accused most likely because to win in their suit they would have to prove that they were not involved in Stephen’s murder, and to this date none of the five men have been willing to speak publicly about their accusations. Doreen has said:

“I felt some small satisfaction when I saw the headline, knowing that unless they sued they would be tainted for the rest of their lives…Their silence is more eloquent than any denial.”^[6]

Eventually the Lawrence family became deeply distrustful of the London Metropolitan police, with Doreen Lawrence coming to the conclusion that only in asserting herself against police inaction could she hope to find out what happened to her son and see the people responsible for his death brought to justice.

“I have found that a lot of people in authority believe that because they are in a position of power you should be in a awe of them and not speak out. I was finding out that I am not of that persuasion.”^[7]

If, as Mrs. Lawrence has insinuated on multiple occasions, police unwillingness to protect and serve Black communities in England made it clear that Black people were unwelcome in the country, one can understand that the fight for justice for Stephen became a struggle for Black Britons, Caribbean and African migrants along with their British-born children, to lay claim to their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom.

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The five men accused of Stephen’s murder have all been arrested and indicted, although only three have ever actually been prosecuted. The failure of the investigation into Stephen’s murder and these trials has left an indelible mark on the British legal system.

In 1999, the British Home Secretary Jack Straw convened a public inquiry into the botched investigations. Most importantly the inquiry, also known as the Macpherson Report, concluded that the Metropolitan police’s institutional racism led them to distrust the Lawrence family and their supporters, deny the influence of racism in Stephen’s murder and generally allowed the perpetrators to get away with their crime.

This was an important development not least because twelve years before Stephen’s murder, in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton riots, Black activists had argued that police racism was a contributing factor in Black youth unrest. However, the resulting report refused out of hand the idea that the Metropolitan Police as an institution was racist, only willing to admit that some, young officers might have let their personal racism influence the way they treated Black youth. This failure to understand the ways in which White racism and xenophobia affected British policing at every level essentially ignored all of the anecdotal evidence, which had come to inform Black experiences in England. And while one cannot speculate how the investigation into Stephen’s murder might have been different, or could have changed the police response to the incidents perpetrated by the suspects in the months prior, one cannot help but make some connection.

The Macpherson report also recommended that British courts do away with double jeopardy in murder trials should new and compelling evidence arise. In 2003, the Criminal Justice Act made this recommendation a reality, thereby recognizing the severe problems in earlier investigations and trails of Stephen’s death and allowing for the possibility that his suspected murderers might be tried again.^[8]

In June of this year, Gary Dobson and David Norris pled not guilty to Stephen’s murder and are set to stand trial in November. Dobson is being prosecuted as a result of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, while Norris will stand trial for the first time. For many who have lived with the memory of Stephen personally or have empathized with the injustice done to his family, or even those who have believed that his death was connected to myriad other instances of racism perpetrated on Black British people, this trial is long overdue.

But for those who have never heard of Stephen Lawrence, the upcoming trial should be informative.

For too long most African Americans have understood England, and Europe generally as free of the kind of racism that has dominated American history. In various historical periods, England has been understood as a place of relative freedom and London has, in the past few decades, been considered a multi-cultural and interracial haven.

However, this perception marginalizes the United Kingdom’s colonial past and neo-colonial relations with its former colonies. Even though the British Empire began to crumble after World War II, as Caribbean, Asian and African subjects moved to the metropole they were confronted with an England more hostile to their settlement than welcoming of their fellow Commonwealth subjects.^[9] Rather than a respite from the racism and discontent that developed across the Atlantic, the history of Black people in Britain in the 1950s and onward is one of violence, segregation, and struggles over familiar topics: employment, education, housing. And Stephen Lawrence’s death, while shocking, was one in a long line of racist attacks on Black people on British streets wherein the police ultimately failed to serve Black residents, beginning at least as early as the Notting Hill riots in 1958-1959.

But most familiarly, and heart-wrenching in its simplicity, is the reality that Doreen and Neville Lawrence are but two examples of people of African descent politicized in the aftermath of a brutal kind of racism, which invaded their private lives, an all too familiar topic to African Diaspora communities globally. In Doreen’s own words:

“In the course of [the campaign for justice for Stephen] I had to get used to people always telling me how dignified I was, as though that were something unusual. There was an implication to my ears that other black people don’t behave like this, but I know that they do. There have been hundreds of thousands of people like me, women who have lost what was most precious to them in the world and who have had to go on with their lives. Some are still waiting for justice.”^[10]

 

Nicole M. Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at The Ohio State University. She is currently working on a dissertation on Black women’s community activism in the United States and England, 1975-1985.