Darcus Howe, writer, broadcaster and civil rights campaigner, dies aged 74
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/02/darcus-howe-writer-broadcaster-and-civil-rights-campaigner-dies-aged-74Darcus Howe, the broadcaster, writer and civil liberties campaigner, has died aged 74.
His family announced his death in a statement released on Sunday that read: “Darcus died quietly and unexpectedly in his sleep on the evening of Saturday April 1. Our private grief is inseparable from our public pride.”
Howe, originally from Trinidad, lived in Brixton, south London, for 30 years and was well known for his Channel 4 series Black on Black and late-night current affairs programme The Devil’s Advocate.
In a hugely varied and influential journalistic career, he was also was a former editor of Race Today, wrote columns for both the New Statesman and the Voice, and was a former chair of the Notting Hill carnival.
His television work included the multicultural current affairs documentary The Bandung File, which he co-edited with Tariq Ali, and more recently White Tribe, a look at modern day Britain.
He was a member of the British Black Panther Movement and was one of the “Mangrove Nine”, who were arrested and charged after protesting against repeated police raids on the Caribbean restaurant Mangrove in Notting Hill, west London, in 1970. At the Old Bailey trial he successfully defended himself against charges of riot and affray.
In 1981, he organised a 20,000 strong “Black People’s March” in protest over the police handling of the investigation into the New Cross Fire in which 13 black teenagers died.
The son of an Anglican priest, Howe first came to the UK aged 18 and had planned to become a lawyer, but instead found his calling as a journalist and activist involved in the struggle for racial equality.
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Tributes were paid to Howe on Twitter. Bonnie Greer, the playwright and author, wrote: “RIP Darcus Howe. Truth teller and paladin for justice”
Farrukh Dhondy, a playwright, writer and a commissioning editor who worked with Howe in the British Black Panther movement and on Race Today, as well as on Channel 4, said he was deeply mourning the loss of a close friend of 45 years.
“He was one of the most important immigrant activists that Britain has known. And his great gift was that he was a practical agitator for the rights of black people, and not simply a theoretician. He was , to describe it colloquially, a street fighting man.
“It had powerful results. I am absolutely sure that the political parties and general political opinion shifted because of the agitation and stance that he, and others, took at the time in the Black Panther Movement and in magazines like Race Today.“
Dhondy added that one of Howe’s achievements was in the television programmes he fronted: “He gave a serious commentator profile, he wasn’t just a black actor ticking boxes for the BBC. He was a very good friend, and he would anything for his friends.”
Alex Pascall, broadcaster, journalist and oral historian, who presented Black Londoners on BBC Radio London and had known Howe since the late 1960s, described him as “undoubtedly, one of our leading social architects”.
“On politics of the Caribbean and the black movement in Britain, nobody can doubt that he has done his work,” Pascall said. “On the New Cross fire, that man did his work.
“With Darcus, you knew he was a man who could take a lead, and you could trust his leadership. Oh God, he was an intellectual. And fearless. The police hated him. He was great at debate, a tower of knowledge. We have really lost a dynamic person.”
Robin Bunce and Paul Field, whose biography Renegade, the Life and Times of Darcus Howe has just been republished, were informed of his death by family members on Sunday.
Field said Howe “was an outstanding public intellectual and politicial organiser and activist” as well as a “brilliant journalist and broadcaster”.
“It’s a huge loss to us and to all those who have been part of the movement for the rights of immigrant communities, and struggle for social justice more generally. His courage is the most striking thing. Darcus was brilliant, funny, defiant, against all the odds.”