The Black Parents Movement: Organising for Children, Families and Justice

In April 1975, the arrest and assault of seventeen-year-old Cliff McDaniel in Hornsey prompted parents and teachers to organise his defence. Many knew him through the George Padmore Supplementary School. Their response became the Black Parents Movement, usually known as the BPM. Its successful work alongside young campaigners in McDaniel’s case opened onto a much larger undertaking: helping families challenge school exclusions, police treatment, unemployment and deportation. Problems that could leave an individual household feeling isolated became matters for collective action. ¹

How a campaign began in Hornsey

The immediate incident occurred on 17 April, during a lunch break at Stationers’ Company’s School. McDaniel was with two friends when police intervened. The George Padmore Institute’s account describes an assault followed by false accusations against him. The people who rallied around included publisher and activist John La Rose, supplementary-school teachers Roxy Harris and Albertina Sylvester, and educator Gus John. They brought different skills to a shared purpose: preventing the treatment of one young person from passing unchallenged. ²

That response drew on years of work around education and publishing. New Beacon Books, founded by John La Rose and Sarah White in 1966, connected readers with writing from Africa, the Caribbean and their diasporas. Its history places supplementary schools, the parents’ movement and youth organising within the same network. Books offered knowledge that families could carry between generations, including histories of the Caribbean and wider Black world. A bookshop could also connect people who were dealing with similar difficulties and introduce them to others with experience of organising. ³

This connection between cultural work and practical support helps explain why the new movement could take shape quickly. The people around New Beacon had already been building relationships through teaching, reading and publishing. Over the longer life of the shop, its work involved Sarah White and Janice Durham as well as John and Michael La Rose, with help from volunteers. Maintaining such an institution was part of the less visible labour behind public campaigns. ³

Parents and young people working together

Young people organised in their own right. Michael and Keith La Rose were among those involved in establishing the Black Students Movement, which worked alongside the parents’ organisation while remaining independent. It later became the Black Youth Movement. This relationship gave the campaign more than one centre of initiative. Adults could contribute experience and contacts; young people could organise around encounters with schools and police that shaped their own lives. The movement’s structure recognised that children’s interests could not simply be spoken for by adults. ⁴

Wider cooperation brought the BPM together with the youth movement, the Race Today Collective and the Bradford Black Collective. Their Alliance connected campaigns across local boundaries. This offered an alternative to a family having to begin again, without contacts or guidance, whenever a problem arose. Experience gained in one struggle could become useful elsewhere. ¹

Roxy Harris later recalled a revealing feature of meetings: John La Rose welcomed children, even when discussions were urgent. If they became persistently restless, he could take that as a reason to finish. It was a modest accommodation with substantial implications. A movement organised around families had to make room for family life. Participation could otherwise depend on finding childcare or leaving the very people whose futures were being discussed outside the meeting. ²

Learning the skills of a campaign

Michael La Rose’s account of the parents’ and youth movements describes an approach designed to spread competence. Experienced organisers did not always chair meetings: others took turns and learnt by doing. Members also learnt how to take witness statements suitable for use in court. They paid attention to their own responsibilities as witnesses, understanding that a public protest and a carefully recorded account of an incident could contribute differently to the same campaign. Organising required the ability to handle detail as well as to speak forcefully. ⁵

The relationship with an accused person’s family mattered just as much. La Rose recalled working alongside families and agreeing a strategy that combined activity inside and outside court. Campaigners could not carry people into confrontations they did not want. He identified the Mangrove Nine campaign as an important source of lessons about the relationship between defendants, supporters and lawyers. The practical aim was to help people understand their position and influence their defence, with legal expertise serving a strategy they had helped shape. ⁵

Bradford and Manchester

The BPM developed particularly substantial sections in Bradford and Manchester, alongside groups across London. Its regional growth brought it into contact with campaigns shaped by each place’s institutions and community relationships. ²

In Bradford, the magazine Bradford Black: Voice of the Black Community made local struggles visible. Published from July 1977 to March 1979 by the Bradford Black Collective Association, it covered policing, courts and racist attacks alongside community activities. Courtney Hay edited it with contributors including Ingrid Serrant, Andy Clarke and Audrey Willock. Its political use of Black encompassed Caribbean, African and Asian communities, reflecting an effort to build cooperation around experiences of racism. ⁶

The magazine’s range was part of its strength. It could discuss a football team, bus workers resisting service cuts and the campaign to free George Lindo. These were different expressions of people organising in the same city. Alongside national political developments, its pages followed Caribbean independence movements. A local publication gave readers a way to connect a court case or workplace dispute with wider questions about power and the treatment of Black people. ⁶

Lindo’s case became a major example of sustained campaigning against a wrongful conviction. Accused of robbing a betting shop, he had a strong alibi, but a supposed confession was used against him. Garden Court Chambers’ history of the case records the work of the Bradford Black Collective and Race Today in challenging the conviction. It also explains the significance of information about a detective’s conduct in another investigation, which had been withheld. The conviction was overturned in 1979; barrister Marguerite Russell was involved in the case. Public campaigning kept attention on Lindo while legal work exposed the weaknesses of the prosecution. The outcome demonstrated why supporters needed both persistence beyond the courtroom and close examination of what had happened within it. ⁷

In Manchester, Gus John described families facing pressures that extended well beyond an individual arrest. Recalling his work in Moss Side in a 2011 interview, he discussed unemployment among school leavers and the disruption caused when families were rehoused away from established neighbourhoods. He had helped establish a hostel in 1972 for young people who returned to Moss Side and lacked somewhere secure to sleep. He also remembered how some parents initially treated police contact as a disgrace, before experience taught them that an officer arriving at the door did not prove their child had done wrong. ⁸

John’s later account of the Moss Side Defence Committee described another insistence on keeping defendants involved in their own cases. Supporters helped obtain representation, took statements and attended court. Such work placed the family’s immediate difficulty within a community response, while still requiring attention to the circumstances of each person. ⁸

Defending community bookshops

The places that supported this political and educational life also needed protection. During the 1970s, Black, community and socialist bookshops suffered attacks. Bookshop Joint Action formed in October 1977, with Jessica Huntley and Bogle-L’Ouverture playing an active role. New Beacon was among the shops targeted that year. The committee brought different booksellers into a common response, organised a defence fund, publicised the attacks and took complaints to the Home Office. It challenged attempts to make these businesses and meeting places too vulnerable to continue. ⁹

One response was especially practical: volunteers travelled to damaged shops to carry out repairs and help them reopen. The campaign’s surviving records include witness statements, photographs of damage, correspondence and messages of support from Britain and overseas. Repairing a shop and recording an attack served related purposes. One restored a resource people used; the other created evidence that could be shared and acted upon. Community defence included the work required to keep a door open after someone had tried to close it through intimidation. ⁹

New Cross and a national day of action

The New Cross fire brought these networks into a much larger mobilisation. Thirteen young people died in the fire at a birthday party on 18 January 1981. Its cause remained unresolved, while families and campaigners challenged the police response and the treatment of the tragedy by the press and government. The New Cross Massacre Action Committee formed on 20 January with John La Rose as chair. Its work included gathering accounts from survivors and bereaved relatives through a fact-finding commission, as well as organising a national demonstration. ^{10, 14}

On Monday 2 March, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people joined the Black People’s Day of Action. The march travelled from New Cross through central London, including the City and Fleet Street, to Hyde Park. Holding it on a working day gave the protest a presence beyond the familiar weekend demonstration. Organisers took their demand for a serious response into the commercial and newspaper districts, making grief and anger visible in places where decisions about Black communities were made. ¹⁰

Support for bereaved families also required work away from the procession. The committee included Roxy Harris, Leila Hassan, Darcus Howe, Alex Pascall and Irma La Rose. Psychiatrist Aggrey Burke played an important part in establishing counselling. The combination of campaigning and support acknowledged different needs: families sought answers, but they were also living with loss and its immediate consequences. A national demonstration could express solidarity on an exceptional scale; sustained care depended on people remaining available afterwards. The parents’ movement and its allies brought relationships and organising experience to this response, while the families’ experiences remained central to the campaign. ¹¹

Connections across borders

The BPM’s outlook connected local defence, including the protection of bookshops, with struggles overseas. Members supported Maurice Bishop’s government in Grenada during 1979–83 and participated in the Committee Against Repression in Guyana. Anti-apartheid activity also brought international politics onto familiar streets. A photograph preserved by the George Padmore Institute shows Michael La Rose and Roxy Harris outside a Stroud Green supermarket in December 1985, urging a boycott of South African goods. The same neighbourhood networks that supported families in Britain could carry news of repression elsewhere and ask neighbours to respond. ⁴

Keeping the movement’s history

The Alliance also published an account of its work. In 1984, the Black Parents Movement, Black Youth Movement and Race Today Collective issued The New Cross Massacre Story, bringing together interviews with John La Rose originally published in Socialist Challenge and Archipelago. A later edition appeared in 2011, with a prologue by Linton Kwesi Johnson and an epilogue by Gus John. Publishing these reflections gave the organisers a means to explain decisions and preserve a campaign’s political arguments. The history was being recorded by people who had taken part, alongside the reports and judgements produced by outside institutions. ¹²

That commitment to preserving knowledge gained a permanent base when people connected with New Beacon established the George Padmore Institute in 1991. Its purpose brought archives together with education, research, events and publishing. Locating this work above the bookshop joined the preservation of a movement’s records to a place already involved in circulating its ideas. The arrangement expressed a long-standing concern: experience accumulated by one generation needed to remain available to another. ¹³

The BPM’s history is valuable because it makes the everyday work of a movement visible. Behind a banner stood people willing to attend meetings, learn unfamiliar procedures, support another family and return when a case was still unresolved. Preserving the evidence of that work allows later readers to examine how campaigns were organised, including the decisions and relationships that a photograph of a march cannot show. It gives Black British civil rights history the depth of an organised community’s own record. ¹³

Sources

1. George Padmore Institute — Black Parents Movement (1975–1993).

2. George Padmore Institute — 50-Year Anniversary of the Black Parents Movement.

3. New Beacon Books — New Beacon Books: Our History.

4. George Padmore Institute — Black Parents Movement Archive Collection.

5. Afterall, Black Atlantic Museum — A luta continua: A Conversation with Michael La Rose.

6. Bradford and District Local Studies — 1970s Bradford.

7. Garden Court Chambers — 50 Cases, 50 Years: George Lindo.

8. Manchester’s Radical History — Gus John and the Moss Side Defence Committee: Interview by Andrew Bowman.

9. The London Archives, AIM25 — Bookshop Joint Action.

10. George Padmore Institute — New Cross Massacre Campaign Archive Collection.

11. George Padmore Institute — New Cross Massacre Committee Archives: 42 Years On.

12. George Padmore Institute — Two Booklets: New Cross Massacre Story and the Black People’s Day of Action.

13. New Beacon Books — The George Padmore Institute.

14. London Museum — The New Cross Fire.