The notorious 1970 prosecution that exposed police harassment of black Britons is brilliantly evoked as part of the director’s Small Axe project
Vivid, immediate and impassioned, this new movie episode in Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s five-part film series for the BBC, is about the Mangrove Nine case in 1970. A group of black British campaigners were tried on charges including incitement to riot after demonstrating against police harassment of the Mangrove in London’s Notting Hill, a restaurant that had become a meeting point for activists.
After not-guilty verdicts were returned in most cases, the peppery trial judge, Edward Clarke (played here by Alex Jennings), clearly irritated by the transparently untruthful police testimony as much as by the defendants’ rebellious behaviour in court, remarked that there had been “racial hatred on both sides”. He naturally intended that as a rebuke to the leftists, a moral equivalence whose purpose was to annul the whole question of official racism (not a million miles, perhaps, from Donald Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment). But it was a spectacular and unprecedented judicial admission that there was, in fact, racial prejudice in the Metropolitan police, and the case made history.
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