Darcus Howe

Front matter

A Political Biography

Robin Bunce and Paul Field

Praise for Darcus Howe: A Political Biography

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition Authors’ Preface

1 Son ofa Preacher Man 2 ‘Dabbling with Revolution’: Black Power Comes to Britain 3 Know Yourself 4 Cause for Concern 5 ‘Darcus Howe is not a Comedian 6 Revolution in Trinidad: ‘Seize Power and Send for James’ 7 A Resting Place in Babylon: Frank Crichlow and the Mangrove 8 Demonstration 9 Clampdown viii

111 119

Preface to the Paperback Edition

The publication of Darcus Howe: A Political Biography in January 2014 helped prompt a long overdue discussion about why the history of grassroots black struggle against racism in Britain had, for the most part, been neglected by mainstream historians and commentators. Why is it that so many British schools teach the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, but so few teach the history of Black Power in Britain? The book’s publication coincided with a wave of public interest in Britain in the history of black liberation movements in the United States and southern Africa which followed the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in August 1963 and the sad news of Nelson Mandela's death. Amid the blitz of media coverage and debate over Mandelas global legacy and the impact of Martin Luther King, the existence and role of a black movement in Britain was never discussed.

Writing for The Guardian, Mark Brown acknowledged Howe's biography as the first detailed history of the Black Power movement in Britain. It quoted the author’s concern that the lack of formal recognition given to the Black Power movement in the United Kingdom meant that an important chapter of recent history was in danger of being forgotten (The Guardian, 27 December 2013). Establishment amnesia often serves a political purpose. In Britain’s case, forgetting the history of black resistance movements has helped the majority white population to forget unpalatable truths concerning the ubiquitous discrimination in housing, employment and education and the savage violence at the hands of police and freelance racists which these black movements confronted.’

In addition to this positive political purpose, permitting the history of the Black Power movement to slip from the national consciousness has helped perpetuate serious misunderstandings about the nature of racism. Specifically, all too often, public discourse equates racism with segregation or separation, and equality with integration. What is more, there is a tendency to conflate integration with assimilation. Both of these misunderstandings are problematic. First, integration should not be equated with equality because there are ways of

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix including people in society that are demeaning. Put another way, integration can be demanded on racially subordinating terms. Secondly, demanding that minority communities assimilate, or making ‘British identity’ and ‘British values’ a ‘litmus test’ of loyalty is a demeaning exercise; it is a sort of political equivalent to the Tebbit test where second-generation Britons of West Indian and South Asian heritage were required to cheer for the English cricket team to prove their allegiance to their country of birth. Setting aside the problem that the notion of ‘British values’ is nebulous in the extreme, the demand for assimilation privileges one set of cultural norms above others. In so doing, it gives the majority an instructional role, while assigning the role of a subordinate apprentice or probationer to members of immigrant communities. In this sense, demands that immigrants in general, or black people specifically, assimilate is a modern-day version of the ‘civilising mission, for it gives white British people the same duty of ‘elevation of their subject races’ that British imperialists claimed in the early part of the nineteenth century (Deane 2014: 14). Moreover, the insistence on assimilation denies members of immigrant communities the right to self-definition. The mainstream of the British Black Power movement recognized the problematic nature of this sort of integration. Consequently, Howe advocated and continues to advocate ‘integration on our terms, rejecting both token integration and integration as second-class citizens. Studying Black Power in Britain would force a new generation to engage with these arguments. The absence of awareness about the claims of radical black intellectuals allows us to ignore these difficulties and focus squarely on assimilation with the ultimate goal of ‘community cohesion:

That the authors decided to tell a wider history through the life of one man may seem surprising to some. For us it was a natural choice. As Diane Abbott MP wrote in a review of the book in The New Statesman, in fact, ‘there can be no other person more appropriate to build the story around - because Darcus Howe is one of the standout activists and public intellectuals of his generation’ (NS, 9 May 2014). Howe's biography is bound up with the struggle for racial justice in Britain. By telling his story we were also constructing the recent history of key parts of the British black movement and setting them in a personal and political context.

The historian Dr Evan Smith noted in response to the book’s publication that one explanation for the lack of scholarship on the history of radical black activism is probably due to the scarcity of resources available to historians (Smith 2013). It is true that in Britain we do not have the benefit of extensive files containing x Preface to the Paperback Edition transcripts of phone calls between civil rights leaders and black power activists like those that exist in the United States, thanks largely to the often illegal tapping of telephone lines by the FBI. Yet as Smith himself acknowledges, there are important and growing numbers of resources, collections and archives such as those at Black Cultural Archives in Lambeth, the Institute of Race Relations Library in Kings Cross, the George Padmore Institute in Finsbury Park, and the Sivanandan collection at Warwick University Library. Furthermore, crucial sources for this book’s authors, just as in all histories of grass-roots movements, were the participants themselves. Mark Perryman, among others, has noted how the biography ‘via personal testimony revisits a history of migration, self-organisation and resistance which exists largely outside of traditional Left politics’ (Perryman 2014). There is no magic formula to finding and interviewing veteran activists, and the fellow travellers and opponents of their movements. If a small photo gallery, such as Photfusion in Brixton, can set up a local youth project, Organised Youth, for the purpose of constructing an oral history of the Brixtonbased British Black Panther Movement, which it did so well in November 2013, there is no good reason for professional historians with access to research grants and other institutional resources to neglect this vital task.

There is a further political reason why, in our view, the mainstream media and popular arts have avoided making and broadcasting documentaries and dramas about the history of militant black activism in Britain. The struggles that Howe was associated with against police violence and harassment directed towards immigrant communities, and indiscriminate police stop-and-search of young black people, are far from won. Howe's claim that the 2011 summer riots should be understood in the context of the killing of Mark Duggan was treated with condescension by BBC interviewers. The BBC interviews demonstrate that the space available to conduct serious discussion of police racism has, if anything, narrowed from when Howe first appeared as a commentator on television screens in the mid-1980s. The double-edged nature of the modern media is picked up in Andrew Smiths review of this work (Smith 2014). Smith wondered whether Howe's move into media work could be justified as a decision made in the spirit of C. L. R. James as the authors suggest. As Smith pointed out, while James did consider that the modern mass popular culture tended to reflect ‘the desire for liberty and self-organisation, he was also acutely aware of the effects of the political economy of media production on the content of programmes and films. In particular, C. L. R. James highlighted how the economic crisis in America following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the real contraction of free expression

Preface to the Paperback Edition xi and democracy which followed became a dead hand on artistic creativity itself. In the case of Howe, Dhondy and Tariq Ali, their move into the mainstream media was directly linked to the launch of Channel Four under the directorship of Jeremy Isaacs as a platform for new ideas and creative self-expression. Initially, the exploration of grand narratives about history and politics was encouraged. The political economy of media production has changed radically since. As Brenton and Cohen have argued, the TV format wars of the 1990s saw the rise of a ‘post-documentary culture’ in which the success of low-cost reality TV formats such as Survivor and Big Brother led to a degradation of the documentary form and the values that had underpinned it (Brenton and Cohen 2003: 44-81). In this transformed cultural and economic setting, there has been a gradual erosion of distinctions between public and private sphere, documentary and entertainment. The commercial success of these formats was rooted in their appearance when the spread of digital TV meant more schedules needed filling and filling at the lowest possible cost. Yet, not all developments in the media have been retrograde. The ‘new media has created a space where radical voices can speak directly to millions around the world. Howe's brilliantly dignified and scathing response to the BBC’s Fiona Armstrong in the summer of 2011 might have been quickly forgotten if it had not been uploaded to YouTube, and public outrage at his treatment might have been more easily denied if it had not been for Twitter. A news item which attracted an initial audience in the hundreds of thousands has to date been viewed by more than 5.5 million people via YouTube alone, bringing Howe’ politics to the attention of a new generation.

Note

1 David Macey’s recent Franz Fanon: A Biography (London: Verso, 2012, xviii) notes a similar process in France, and concludes that Fanon translator Richard Philcox is surely right that one of the reasons why Fanon is studied more in the English-speaking world than in France or the French Caribbean is ‘that the skeletons of the

Algerian war, and the colour hierarchy, respectively, are too close for comfort’

Authors’ Preface

Writing this book has involved many wonderful experiences. Hours in archives are, of course, the historian’s delight, and we thank the staff at the National Archives, the Institute of Race Relations, the George Padmore Institute, the British Library, the Colindale Newspaper Archive, Warwick University Library, Cambridge University Library, the Butler Library at the Columbia University and the archives of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, to name but a few. We have spent many hours being entertained by our interviewees. Early on in the project, we had the good fortune to spend an afternoon with Farrukh Dhondy. ‘I expect you want me to tell you all the scandal, was his opener. We earnestly assured him that we were writing a serious political piece, adding that we couldn't believe that there would be enough scandal to fill a single page. “Theres enough to fill seven volumes!’ he retorted.

One of the stranger experiences, only obliquely related to the project, was an Equality and Diversity training session that one of us was compelled to attend in the summer of 2011. Two trainers explained the workings of the Single Equality Act aided by Post-it notes, highlighters and a hundred PowerPoint slides. The tenor of the event is best illustrated by the following exchange. One of the delegates, clearly concerned to get everything right, queried, ‘I was born in New Zealand and my husband's half Indian, so Pm never sure which box to tick for our son when I’m filling out forms? One of the trainers took up the question. “Your son, she asked, ‘does he tan easily?’ “Yes, replied the bemused delegate. “Then he can tick the box that says “Lucky?” This book is not written in that spirit.

Of the many people who have helped and supported us in this project, the following deserve a special mention:

Ian Macdonald QC, Michael Mansfield QC, Baroness Ross Howells, Alan Hayling, Bill Bowring, John Howe, Lenin Woolford, David Abdullah, David Waddell, Deryck Murray, Liz Davies, Sami Savonius-Wroth, Susie Hart, Katherine Butler Schofield, Mike Marqusee, Paul Alcala, Raffique Shah, Tariq Ali, Russell Proffitt, staff at the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, especially Nicki Johnson and Maurisa Gordon-Thomas, Selma James, Knowlton

Authors’ Preface xiii

Crichlow, Amandla Crichlow, Barbara Beese, A. Sivanandan, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Max Farrar, Linda Bellos, Margaret Busby, Clare Short, Dotun Adebayo, Sarah White, Farrukh Dhondy, Nirpal Dhaliwal, Trevor Phillips, Narinder Minhas, Marques Toliver, Barry Cox, Caroline Coon, Harry Goulbourne, Lincoln Crawford and especially Darcus Howe, who spent many hours discussing his life with us. Thank you also to Robert Hill, Richard Small, Joe Street, Anne-Marie Angelo, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Anthony Gifford, Dr Vince Hines, Derek Humphry, James Whitfield, Winston Trew, Simon Woolley, Kimberly Springer, David Austin and Krishnendu Majumdar. We also thank the master and fellows of St Edmund’s College Cambridge and the president and fellows of Homerton College Cambridge for their support during this project.

We owe a great debt to the expertise of Michael Ryan and Alix Ross at the University of Columbia's Butler Library as well as Jenny Bourne at the Institute of Race Relations Archive and Sarah Garrod at the George Padmore Institute. Thank you to Harry Carr for his editorial work, to Laura Williams, Barry Hart, Grishma Fredric and Farzad Zadeh for their comments on the manuscript and to Mark Richardson and Caroline Wintersgill at Bloomsbury.

We are particularly indebted to Leila Hassan and Priyamvada Gopal. Leila’s vivid memory and insights into events over a 40-year period have been invaluable to us, as has her support, friendship and encouragement in writing the book. Priya Gopal took time out of her own teaching, writing and research schedule to generously read and wisely comment on the whole manuscript for which we are extremely grateful. Finally, we would like to thank our respective partners, Lucy and Maggie, and our children, India, Max and Mia. Without their love, support and patience, we could not have written this book.

xiv

C. L. R. James, a man who will appear again and again in these pages, once stated: “Darcus is a West Indian’? The comment was an attempt to elucidate Howe’s character for the benefit of Leila Hassan, deputy editor of Race Today, a woman who would later become Howe's wife. So saying, James situated Howe within a specific culture as well as pointing to some fundamental aspects of his personality. James famously argued that West Indians ‘have been the most rebellious people in history’ (James 1980: 177). This rebelliousness was rooted in a deeply felt love of freedom, a love that sprang from enslavement and the experience of regimented labour on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

But when we made the Middle Passage and came to the Caribbean we went straight into a modern industry — the sugar plantation - and there we saw that to be a slave was the result of being black. A white man was not a slave. The West Indian slave was not accustomed to that kind of slavery in Africa; and there in the history of the West Indies there is one dominant fact and that is the desire, sometimes expressed, sometimes unexpressed, but always there, the desire for liberty; the ridding oneself of the particular burden which is the special inherence of black skin. If you don’t know that about West Indian people you know nothing about them.

(Ibid.)

Significantly, West Indian slaves experienced conditions akin to those of the modern proletariat. On Caribbean plantations, slaves worked within stratified systems of collective toil, using industrial technology at the cutting edge of the age, disciplined by the clock, producing a single product. The result was riches and industrial development for the West, and for the West Indies, a population characterized by the will to rebel. Howe puts it like this: ‘we fought from day one and that fight culminated in Toussaint LOuverture in Haiti and Paul Bogle in Jamaica’ In this sense, James was right: Darcus Howe is a West Indian.

Howe would later modify James’ aphorism. Today, when he tells the story, he adds a coda: “Darcus Howe is a West Indian and he lives in Britain’

That, for Howe, is a fuller description, and a description of some political importance. For the past 50 years, he has made Britain his home, fighting all the while for immigrants to enjoy the full rights of citizenship without having to renounce their history or identity: to integrate on their own terms. For Howe, it is a struggle in the best traditions of English radicalism and part of the ongoing struggle of the British working class. Writing in 1998, Howe described his mission thus:

... although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign “Motherland” of my parent's vision.

(UC DHP 9/2)

Thirty years earlier, while editing the Black Eagle, the newsletter of a small London-based Black Power group, he set out his mission in a similar way. With playful irony he wrote in terms of a civilizing mission; the British had travelled the globe to civilize Africa, India and the Caribbean, now it was time to return the favour (GPI JOU 35/4). Howe and the Black Power Movement would civilize Britain by challenging the state-licensed barbarism of the Metropolitan Police (Met), by teaching Britain to become a harmonious multiracial society, by bringing ‘reason to race’ (Howe 201 1b).

There is nothing cryptic about our title. Darcus Howe: A Political Biography is just that. The outlines of Howe’s story are simple enough: born in Trinidad, he immigrated to Britain where he became the country’s best-known campaigner for black' rights. Initially, he campaigned on the streets, latterly in the mainstream press, on radio and on television.

The biography is political in two senses. First, it is political in that it concerns Howe's work in the public sphere. Our focus then is on Howe the campaigner, the intellectual, the writer and broadcaster, rather than on Howe's private life. Thus, the biography is neither an intimate portrait nor a psychological one. This may seem to be a denial of the celebrated truth that the personal is also the political. It is not. It is merely a recognition that there is a limit to what can be achieved in a single book. It is political in a second sense too. The book is an intervention, at least obliquely, in a series of debates concerning the extent to which the West has entered a post-racial age, the extent to which racism is and has been an issue in British society and the best ways of advancing racial justice.

Turning to methodological issues, our approach is primarily historical. By this we mean that when dealing with historical actors, we aim ‘simply to use the ordinary techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way’ (Skinner 2002: vii). In short, we attempt to understand Howe in his own terms.

A number of themes unite this book. The first relates to Howe's consistent focus on the progressive potential of the black underclass. This intuition was clear from an early age. Living in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, in a house looking out on the home of the Casablanca steel band, Howe was part of a community that included the working class and street hustlers. One of his first battles was against his parent's desire to move into a more middle-class area. After winning a scholarship to Queen's Royal College, Howe continued to associate with ‘barflies and hustlers, shifting his allegiance from Casablanca to Renegades, the street gang which coalesced around it (Howe 2011c). He admits suffering ‘demons of doubt’ about the potential of the black underclass of itinerants and unemployed, particularly after a run-in with hustler-turned-faux-radical Michael X. Howe credits James with keeping ‘his eye on the ball, by repeatedly demonstrating that the black working class and the black underclass were a progressive historical force (BBC 2002). As a member of the Black Panther Movement, as editor of Race Today in the 1970s and 1980s and throughout the summer riots of 2011, Howe continued to believe that radical politics should grow from the ranks of the black working class, black youth and the black unemployed. Howe's faith in the black underclass is based on his view that radicalism is the natural response of immigrants, particularly second-generation immigrants, who refuse to tolerate brutal policing, poor housing, third-rate jobs and social discrimination reserved for them. In this sense, he argues, the economic and social position of the black underclass meant that they had the potential to play an explosive and insurrectionary role in British politics, and to ignite and play a leading role in a wider rebellion of white youth and urban poor.

Secondly, Howe has continually stressed black ‘self-organisation’ and ‘self-activity. The insistence that black people must shape their own destinies was Howe's rallying cry at the beginning of the Mangrove march and the foundation on which the Race Today Collective was built. His emphasis has changed over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s, Howe was critical of well-intentioned whites who wanted to lead the struggle for black rights. He also rejected the position of anti-racist campaigners who sought to characterize black people as helpless victims, incapable of formulating their own demands. More recently, Howe has questioned attempts to institutionalize the fight for black rights through government agencies. Howe's stance in recent years is evidence of the broader truth that he has eschewed incorporation into the establishment. Rather, Howe continues to identify with the grass roots, striving to articulate the grievances, experiences, goals and concerns of those who have experienced racism most acutely. It is for this reason that Howe often represents a lone voice, and why, at the age of 70, he is still a controversial figure.

Thirdly, Howe has consistently attempted to unite radicalism with reason. Howe describes himself as an instinctive egalitarian. Howe saw the idiocy of racism at school; fielding the best cricket team necessitated Africans and Indians working together on equal terms. Howe rejected colonialism as a young man too, supporting Eric Williams’ slogan “Massa Day Done’ (Channel 4 2006). On arrival in Britain, Howe quickly saw that the slogan applied as much to racism in Britain as it did to colonialism in the Caribbean. School, first with his father and later at Queens Royal College (QRC), drew Howe into the ‘world of reason. He recalls the atmosphere of QRC as ‘Christian morality, through the lenses of Descartes’; the school’s unofficial motto ‘I think therefore I am (Howe 2011a). Howe experienced various kinds of radicalism in Europe. In Britain, in the late 1960s, Howe witnessed the first wave of black militancy. As far as Howe could see, under the leadership of Obi B. Egbuna, Michael X and Roy Sawh, black radicalism was merely a superficial mix of mindless nationalist rhetoric and macho swagger. Howe travelled to Paris in mid-1968 and participated in the revolution. Here, radicalism comprised the esoteric philosophical discussions of students, wholly divorced from the workers’ movement. Neither flavour of radicalism appealed. In James, however, Howe found radicalism and reason in their proper proportion. Unlike Britain’s black nationalists, James located the black struggle in a universal movement for human emancipation and unlike the French students, James rejected grandiose philosophical abstraction, preferring to face reality (Howe 2011c).

Howe's desire to embrace reason was part of his rejection of black nationalism. Inspired by discussions with James, and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, Howe adopted a very English way of conducting politics. Howe's strategy from the Mangrove trial onwards was to appeal to the values of the English dissenting tradition to ground arguments for black rights within a tradition of radicalism that Howe had imbibed at QRC, and which represented the most progressive face of English culture. In this sense, Howe describes himself

Introduction - ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indiar 5 as ‘a natural black heir to the English radical dissenting tradition of Milton, Mill and Tom Paine (UC DHP 9/2), not so much a black Jacobin as a black Leveller. To some extent, the Englishness of Howe’s approach explains his success in the mainstream British media. Indeed, Howe's appeal to an English tradition, in part, explains why programmes like Devil’s Advocate and the Bandung Files entered the mainstream, quickly shaking off the label of ‘ethnic programming’ and why Howe found success as a columnist for the Evening Standard. Crucially, the freshness of Howe's political idiom, which eschewed the moribund rhetoric of the white left while synthesizing English and Caribbean radicalism, is part of the reason that his programmes and his print journalism attracted a loyal white following.

Howe's willingness to collaborate with the mainstream media predates his first appearances on Channel 4. Part of the strategy of Race Today, under his editorship, was to produce material that could be easily picked up by the mainstream. In this sense, Howe has played a significant role in recent years by bringing radical ideas into the mainstream. Trevor Phillips, former television executive and current chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, argues that Howe has used the media to popularize James’ ideas, playing the role of John the Baptist to James’ Christ (Phillips 2012). Television producer and Howe's long-term collaborator Narinder Minhas makes a similar point, claiming that Howe was the man who ‘brought intelligent discussions about race to primetime’ (Minhas 2012).

Howe is also significant as he has continually advocated black and white collaboration, with the proviso that when dealing with racism black people play the leading role. This political principle is rooted in personal experience. He spent his childhood rubbing shoulders with the grandchildren of Indian indentured labourers in rural Trinidad. His school days were enriched by white teachers at QRC, who Howe describes as ‘the most enlightened bourgeois’ of their generation, whose experiences of war prompted them to leave Europe for the classrooms of the Caribbean (Howe 2011c). In London too, Howe was at home in the late-1960s’ scene in clubs like the Flamingo and the Roaring Twenties, where Reggae, Ska and American R&B attracted whitebeats, Mods and the first skinheads as well as black clubbers from Brixton and Notting Hill. Throughout his life, Howe has counted people of all races and classes as his friends, comrades and collaborators. Howe's approach was crucial to securing white involvement in the Black People’s Day of Action, against the demands of nationalists who wished to keep the event exclusively black. It is paradoxical, then, that Howe, who has never been a nationalist, has been dubbed ‘race chief”

and ‘race agitator’ or ‘Britain's first professional black man’ as Howe has never embraced separatism or narrow identity politics.

In common with James, Howe saw an important connection between the struggles of the white working class and the fight for racial justice. In his first Race Today editorials, Howe set out his view that the treatment of black people in Britain brought the horrors of colonialism and the worst excesses of capitalism to the metropolis. Struggles against racism exposed these injustices and, consequently, had the potential to reawaken the spirit of discontent in the white working class. In this sense, while accepting that the black minority was too small to carry a revolution in Britain to its conclusion, Howe believed that it could play a crucial role in radicalizing the white working class. Howe's faith in the British working class was obvious as early as the Mangrove trial. Accused of inciting riot, faced with the combined forces of Special Branch, the Met, the Home Office and the British justice system, Howe advocated selecting white working-class jurors and making a direct appeal to their experience of police harassment. Significantly, whereas white liberals have tended to see the white working class as a reservoir of unenlightened racism, Howe sees the white working class in a more positive light: as a fluid group who have tended to absorb immigrants from around the world. The inclusive nature of Howe’s politics runs through his reports in The Vanguard, the newspaper of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, which vividly describe the unity between African and Asian workers engendered by Trinidad’s 1970 Black Power Revolution; his editorship of Race Today, which focused considerable attention on the position of women; to Who you calling a nigger? - Howe's 2004 documentary concerning inter-minority violence.

Howe's campaigning style has synthesized insights from the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom. James’ influence has already been noted. Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary, Modern Politics, Facing Reality and American Civilisation are among the works that Howe cites most frequently. This is only part of Howe's radical erudition. With James, he read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney, Karl Marx and E. P. Thompson. This list has some notable omissions. Dickens was Howe's first literary love; indeed, at an early age he identified with Philip Pirrip, the protagonist of Great Expectations. In Modern Politics and Facing Reality, Howe saw what he had already intuited from the lives of Caribbean people: that political leaders should play an extremely limited role in organizing and formulating the demands of working people. Specifically, Howe rejected the notion of the vanguard party, the political elite who thought, acted and made the revolution on behalf of the masses.

Rather, Howe embraced James’ notion of the ‘small organisation’ that grounded itself in the lives of ordinary people, educating and learning from the working class, recording their struggle and encouraging them to formulate their own demands (James et al. 1974: 118-19). In the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Howe saw a group that approximated the Jamesian organization. Howe's involvement with SNCC came by a circuitous route. Inspired by James, Howe travelled to Montreal to take part in the 1968 Congress of Black Writers. Black Power had emerged as an ideology and a movement in America in 1966; 2 years later, the Montreal conference served as a Black Power International. The Congress allowed Howe to renew acquaintance with Carmichael, his childhood friend, as well as introducing Howe to Rodney, the movement's rising star. Inspired by the Congress, Howe travelled to New York, where he worked with SNCC during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville education campaign. He played a small role, staying below the radar in order to evade the immigration authorities. Even so, he learnt from the best. The SNCC organizers distinguished themselves by facilitating self-organization, working at a grass-roots level and encouraging black high school students to take centre stage. During his stay in New York, Howe spent time with H. Rap Brown and participated in one of Black Power's defining campaigns which took the struggle for racial justice to the northern states, pitting black radicals against white liberals. Howe first attempted to build a small organization in the run-up to Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution. Later in the same year, he applied the lessons that he had learnt in New York and Port-of- Spain to the battle against police racism in Notting Hill. The Mangrove March of August 1970, which took mass protest to the symbolic centres of racism, was in essence a rerun of the strategy used by radicals at the beginning of the February Revolution in Trinidad. Equally, a decade later, Howe used campaigning techniques learnt from SNCC to organize the Black People’s Day of Action.