In October, for Black History Month 2021, EQUAL along with Black Training and Enterprise Group's projects Moving on Up and Routes2Sucess, put the spotlight on influential and inspiring role models and changemakers whose legacy we are indebted to and building upon. EQUAL Vice-Chair and BTEG's CEO, Jeremy Crook stated:
Black History Month has been poignant this year as it coincides with BTEG's 30th anniversary. We salute Black people that set up voluntary, community and self-help organisations to provide services and fight for racial justice.
If you missed it, we’ve collated our top change-makers for criminal justice and civil liberties reform in British history below!
Baroness Lola Young
Baroness Lola Young is a Member of the House of Lords, a campaigner against modern-day slavery, a cultural critic, and Chancellor of The University of Nottingham.
She has an extensive career in the arts (including Chair of the 2017 Man Booker Prize judges!). In 2004, Lola was raised to the peerage as Baroness Young of Hornsey, in the London Borough of Haringey and is currently an Independent Cross Bench peer.She has addressed racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system with EQUAL (formerly the Young Review Independent Advisory Group) and is heavily involved in campaigns criminalising and combating modern forms
Download the Young Review: Improving outcomes for young black and/or Muslim men in the Criminal Justice System here.
Dr Leroy Logan MBE
Dr Leroy Logan MBE is a former superintendent in the Metropolitan police. He retired in 2013 after 30 years' of distinguished service having been involved in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the inquiry into the killing of Damilola Taylor, and the organisation of the London 2012 Olympics.
Leroy is the chair and founding member of the Black Police Association, the founder of social justice charity Voyage Youth, and an adviser on knife crime. The Guardian described him as “the man who risked everything to fight racism in the police force – from within.”. His life was recently depicted by John Boyega in Steve McQueen's Small Axe series.
Read more about Leroy's work and legacy on the Guardian and discover his new book 'Closing Ranks' here.
Find out about his charity Voyage Youth.
David Lammy MP
The Right Honorable David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham, his home constituency - a position he has held since 2000.
David has a background in law, having studied at the School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and at Harvard University where he became the first black Briton to study a Masters at Harvard Law School.
A prominent voice in the Labour party, David has led a campaign to give recognition to Windrush British citizens.
In 2017, he also led an independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in our criminal justice system. The Lammy Review included 35 pivotal policy recommendations for Government and the criminal justice sector.
Read more about the Lammy Review and its recommendations here.
Stafford Scott
Stafford Scott is a community activist and reformer. He co-founded the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign in 1985 to address wider issues of injustice and police-community relations, following the mass arrest of 369 people during the Broadwater Farm Estate disturbances on October 6th 1985.
Since then Stafford has gone on to lead a number of campaigns including Tottenham Rights, a project launched in 2012 on the anti-racist charity, The Monitoring Group. Now it is an independent organisation run and managed by local people from Tottenham.
More recently, to mark ten years since the shooting of Mark Duggan and the riots this sparked, Stafford co-curated an exhibition at the ICA called War Inna Babylon. It shone a light on the range of collective actions and grassroots activism undertaken by Black communities across the U.K to resist seven decades of institutional racism.
Find out more about Tottenham Rights here.
Read about Stafford's work on highlighting disproportionality in the Metropolitan Police's Gangs Matrix.
Imran Khan QC
Imran Khan has been a practicing solicitor since 1991. He came to fame for his representation of the family of Stephen Lawrence during the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993.
He is the Head of the Criminal Defence, Actions Against the Police and Public Law Departments (Inquests, Judicial Reviews and Public Inquiries), and has significant expertise in terrorism charges and homicide cases. Imran was awarded the rank of Queen's Counsel in 2018.
In a Guardian interview he stated: "My objective is to make sure that the state is held accountable."
John La-Rose
John was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher, and the founder of New Beacon Books (1966) - the first Caribbean publishing house, bookshop and international book service set up in Britain.
In 1975, after a black schoolboy was assaulted outside his school by police in Haringey, John, together with concerned parents, founded the Black Parents Movement to combat the brutalisation and criminalisation of young black boys. The Movement went on to ally with the Race Today Collective and the Black Youth Movement: an allyship that helped form the New Cross Massacre Action Committee to seek justice in response to the New Cross fire of 1981.
In 1992, John became the Chairman of the George Padmore Institute - a library, archive and educational research centre focussed on the life experiences of Caribbean, African and Asian communities in Britain.
Dr Harold Moody
Harold Moody was born in Jamaica in 1882. which was then a colony of the British Empire. He moved to London in 1904 to study medicine at King’s College. Despite his academic success, Harold faced discrimination in finding employment as a practitioner within existing hospitals and surgeries. Unswayed, he set up his own surgery in Peckham, South London.
Alongside his medical career, Harold dedicated his time to race equality. In the 1920s and 1930s, Harold's home on Queens Road became a popular meeting place for famous Black people such as Trinidadian historian and novelist C.L.R. James; Kwame Nkrumah, who later became president of Ghana; Jomo Kenyatta, who later became the founding president of the Republic of Kenya; and the popular cricketer Learie Constantine, also from Trinidad.
In 1931, he founded the ‘League of Coloured Peoples’ and as President he worked tirelessly lobbying politicians, the civil service and trade unions seeking to build and strengthen race relations and challenge injustices. He remained its President until his death.