Black Power: A British Story of Resistance TV - The Justice Gap online -
Black power: the words that can send shivers down the spine of the nervous white man. While the white man struggles with his nightmare, the black man struggles with his dream. Black Power: A British Story of Resistance, original commentary of march, BBC 2021
West London 1970: a group of protesters march against harassment by the police of a black-owned restaurant called The Mangrove. Black power had arrived in Britain. Young black people were fighting back against a hostile environment. They stood up to the state and they defied the brutality of the police. It was a conflict that reached the highest courts in the land. ibid.
The migrants played a key role in rebuilding Britain. ibid.
Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, was stabbed to death by a white gang one night near Notting Hill. The police denied that the killing was racially motivated and nobody was prosecuted. ibid.
Even at school children were not safe from institutional racism. ibid.
Stokely Carmichael’s visit had the Labour government so concerned that Special Branch ordered him to leave the country and he was banned from re-entering. Soon afterwards the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, set up a secret police department specifically to monitor radical black groups in Britain. ibid.
On Sunday 9th August 1970 a crowd of over 100 people gathered outside the Mangrove restaurant to show their support … ‘They [Conservatives] wanted to justify the Immigration Bill’ … For the 9 people arrested following the Mangrove Demonstration, it seemed that the whole machinery of the state was now set against them, and the idea of Black Power in Britain was being unfairly demonised. ibid. activist
Oval 4: When a BBC journalist started investigating Winston’s case, it was revealed that Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell’s testimony was directly contradicted by eye-witnesses … ‘The only [mugging] witnesses were the anti-mugging squad themselves’ … The media’s account of Winston’s case helped him appeal and his sentence was reduced, but the judge did not overturn the criminal conviction. ibid.
The final member of the ‘Oval Four’ – four young black men who were ‘fitted up’ by a corrupt police officer nearly 50 years ago – has finally had his conviction overturned. Just before Christmas the Oval Four’s convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal after a 47-year struggle …
Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell, the officer who framed the four has long since been discredited. Winston Trew, Sterling Christie, George Griffiths and Constantine ‘Omar’ Boucher – then aged between 19 and 23 – were arrested at Oval Underground station in 1972 by a police unit known as ‘the mugging squad’, who accused them of stealing handbags …
Trew, Christie and Griffiths had their convictions quashed at the end of last year. Yesterday, Lord Justice Fulford – sitting with Mrs Justice Carr and Mr Justice Goss – quashed Boucher’s conviction, saying that the safety of the conviction was ‘fundamentally undermined’ by the ‘apparent lack of integrity’ of Ridgewell and his team.
According to a report by the Press Association, the hearing with the barristers representing Boucher and the prosecution dialling in by telephone because of the lockdown in the courts as a result of coronavirus. While it is, of course, happy news that Mr Boucher’s conviction has been quashed, the fact that it has taken nearly so long is very concerning,’ Boucher’s solicitor Jenny Wiltshire, head of serious and general crime at Hickman & Rose, told PA. ‘The British Transport Police and the Home Office have known about this officer’s corruption for decades. Yet they have done little to right his wrongs.’
‘DS Ridgewell was first denounced as corrupt in 1973. He was imprisoned in 1980. The BTP could have re-examined his cases then. But they didn’t. They instead left it to his victims to try and work out for themselves exactly how they had been set up, and to gather the evidence they needed to prove their innocence. In my view, the BTP should now conduct a wholesale review of all this officer’s cases. It seems to me very likely that there may be many other victims of his corruption.’ The Justice Gap online article