Notting Hill: Black Activism and the Mangrove
Black Activism in Notting Hill, 1958–1971
By 1958 Caribbean Notting Hill had a tightly clustered community on Powis Square, Portobello Road and All Saints Road, a parallel economy of cafes, shebeens, grocers and pardner schemes, and a population of working-age migrants who had come to a country that had pulled them in but did not yet welcome them. The August 1958 riots and the May 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane forced a question: how would Caribbean Notting Hill respond, politically, to the violence around it? The answer, across the next twelve years, was the building of a Black activist tradition rooted in newspapers, carnivals, restaurants and finally a courtroom — a tradition that produced, in 1971, the first judicial acknowledgement of racial hatred inside the Metropolitan Police.
Black activism in Notting Hill grew across four overlapping strands between 1958 and 1971: Claudia Jones’s West Indian Gazette (founded 1958), the indoor Caribbean Carnival of 1959, the Mangrove Restaurant from 1968 under Frank Crichlow, and the British Black Panthers and the Mangrove Nine trial of 1971. Each strand was a response to a specific local pressure and built directly on the ones before it.
Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette (1958)
Claudia Jones was a Trinidadian-born journalist who had been deported from the United States in 1955 for her communist activism and arrived in London later the same year. In March 1958 — six months before the riots — she founded the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, the first major Black newspaper in Britain. The paper covered Caribbean politics, the colour bar in housing and employment, and anti-colonial movements across Africa and Asia. Jones used the Gazette to mobilise the Caribbean response to the 1958 riots and the 1959 Cochrane murder, channelling Caribbean readers towards political organisation rather than retreat. The paper became a network as much as a newspaper, connecting activists, writers and lawyers across Britain and across the Caribbean diaspora until Jones’s sudden death from heart failure on Christmas Eve 1964.
The 1959 Caribbean Carnival
In January 1959, four months after the Notting Hill riots, Claudia Jones organised the first Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall. The carnival was indoor and ticketed, designed as a defiant Caribbean cultural celebration in the immediate aftermath of the violence. Steel bands played, calypso singers performed, dancers wore Caribbean dress, and the BBC televised highlights for a national audience. Claudia Jones described the event in the Gazette as a response to the riots: ‘A people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.’ The 1959 St Pancras carnival is rightly seen as the seed of the much larger open-air Notting Hill Carnival that grew during the late 1960s out of Rhaune Laslett’s 1966 local festival on Tavistock Road and became Europe’s largest street carnival.
A common simplification is to date the Notting Hill Carnival from Rhaune Laslett’s 1966 local festival on Tavistock Road. The street form did emerge in 1966, but the political and cultural source was Claudia Jones’s indoor Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959. That earlier event was a deliberate response to the August 1958 riots, was televised by the BBC, and set the model of Caribbean cultural defiance that the later street carnival inherited. Strong answers trace the carnival’s development from Jones (1959) through Laslett (1966) to the 1970s street form — not from 1966 alone.
Frank Crichlow and the Mangrove Restaurant (1968)
Frank Crichlow, the Trinidadian who had run the El Rio cafe on Westbourne Park Road through the late 1950s, opened the Mangrove Restaurant at 8 All Saints Road in 1968. The Mangrove was a Caribbean restaurant on the surface but quickly became a community hub. Customers in the late 1960s included the writer Sam Selvon, the cricketer Garfield Sobers, the singer Diana Ross, the activist Darcus Howe and the radical lawyer Ian Macdonald. The restaurant was where Caribbean political organising met Caribbean cultural life over rice and peas. From 1969, however, the Mangrove was repeatedly raided by the Metropolitan Police on drugs warrants — nine raids in eighteen months, by Crichlow’s own count — with no drugs found. Each raid was officially routine, but the cumulative pattern was understood by Caribbean Notting Hill, and by Crichlow himself, as targeted harassment. By the summer of 1970, Crichlow and his customers had had enough.
The 1970 Protest March and the British Black Panthers
On 9 August 1970, Crichlow, Darcus Howe, Althea Jones-LeCointe and other organisers led a march of around 150 people from Notting Hill to the local police stations at Notting Hill Gate, Notting Dale and Harrow Road. The marchers carried banners reading ‘Hands off our Black community’ and demanded an end to the raids on the Mangrove. The Met deployed around 700 officers. The march remained peaceful for most of its route, but at Harrow Road police station scuffles broke out and nine of the organisers were arrested and charged with riot, affray and assaulting police officers. The British Black Panthers — a London-based movement founded in 1968 in Brixton, distinct from the better-known American party of the same name — provided organisational support and, in Althea Jones-LeCointe, one of the eventual defendants.
The Mangrove Nine Trial (1971)
The trial of the Mangrove Nine opened at the Old Bailey on 5 October 1971. Two of the defendants — Howe and Jones-LeCointe — defended themselves and used the trial to put the Met on trial alongside their own actions. The defence demanded an all-Black jury and was refused, but it then challenged 63 potential jurors over their understanding of ‘black power’, which left two Black jurors on the panel of twelve. It also called Caribbean witnesses and forced the disclosure of internal Met documents. After fifty-five days — making it one of the longest trials in British legal history — the jury acquitted all nine of the most serious charge of incitement to riot. Five were acquitted on all counts; the other four were convicted of lesser offences such as affray and assaulting police officers and received suspended sentences. Crucially, in his summing up, Judge Edward Clarke acknowledged on the record that there was ‘evidence of racial hatred’ on both sides — the first time a senior British judge had publicly recognised racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police. The force tried to have the remark withdrawn and failed. The verdict transformed Black political organisation across London and is now recognised by the National Archives as a turning point in British civil rights history.
A common error is to describe the Mangrove Nine as a defeat — nine Caribbean activists charged with riot and put through a fifty-five-day Old Bailey trial. The verdict tells a different story. All nine were acquitted of the most serious charge of incitement to riot. The judge’s summing up acknowledged on the record that there was ‘evidence of racial hatred’ on both sides, including within the Metropolitan Police — the first such judicial acknowledgement in British legal history. The force asked for the remark to be withdrawn and was refused. Robin Bunce and Paul Field’s biography of Darcus Howe, and the National Archives’ classroom resource on the Mangrove Nine, both treat the trial as a turning point. Strong answers describe it as a victory rather than a loss, and explain why.
The 1971 Mangrove Nine trial — built on a decade of Black activism in Notting Hill from Claudia Jones’s 1958 Gazette, the 1959 Caribbean Carnival, the 1968 opening of the Mangrove Restaurant, and the 1970 protest march — produced the first judicial acknowledgement of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police. The verdict transformed Black political organisation across London and reframed Notting Hill from a site of white violence into a site of Black political agency.