Striking evidence has been uncovered about Special Branch’s attempts to infiltrate UK Black Power groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Black Power is in the news this week, with the announcement that the conviction of former Fasimba members Winston Trew and Sterling Christie (two of the ‘Oval Four’) has been referred to the court of appeal. Forty-seven years since they were arrested on their way home from a political meeting in support of another Black Power activist facing trial, and accused of robbery and assaulting the police, they could now finally be cleared. Trew has always believed that the Fasimbas must have been under surveillance by Special Branch and that it was no coincidence that he and the other members of the ‘Oval Four’ were targeted by undercover officers that day.
Trew’s story is just one among many detailed in a recent investigation of Special Branch’s attempts to destroy Britain’s Black Power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Eveline Lubbers of the Undercover Research Group and former IRR staffer Rosie Wild.
One of the most ironic findings is that the racism that stopped the Metropolitan Police hiring a single black police officer before 1967 hamstrung it when it came to infiltrating Black Power groups. Unlike the leading white left-wing organisations of the era, which were often heavily infiltrated by uncover officers using assumed identities, Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Movement and Black Liberation Front could only be spied on from the outside or occasionally through the use of informants.
Special Branch’s orders came from the top with reports on Black Power in the UK being fed back to the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee and successive Home Secretaries. A dedicated Black Power Desk was even set up to coordinate the intelligence gathering. Tantalisingly mentioned in just a single document, the Desk was either part of Special Branch or MI5, and shows just how seriously the British state took the threat of Black Power.
To find out more about the case, read a review by Colin Prescod of Trew’s pathbreaking book, Black for a Cause … Not Just Because … The case of the ‘Oval 4’ and the story it tells of Black Power in 1970s Britain here.