Darcus Howe

Leighton Rhett Radford "Darcus" Howe was born on the twenty-sixth of February 1943 in Moruga, Trinidad, into a household of learning; his father was a schoolteacher and Anglican priest, and the boy won a place at the island's elite Queen's Royal College. In 1961, at eighteen, he emigrated to London intending to train as a barrister at Middle Temple. He left the law after two years, drawn instead toward journalism and the radical political tradition carried by his elder kinsman and mentor, the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James — a relative long described as his uncle, though the family record shows the two were in fact first cousins once removed.

Howe rose to prominence in the ferment of Black Power in Britain. In 1970 he was among the Mangrove Nine, tried at the Old Bailey after a protest against repeated police raids on the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill. Choosing to represent himself, he helped secure acquittals in a landmark case that drew the first judicial acknowledgement of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police.

In 1973 he founded the Race Today Collective and edited its influential magazine, giving voice to grassroots struggles across Britain and the wider diaspora. He became a formidable broadcaster and columnist, presenting Bandung File, Black on Black, and Devil's Advocate, and writing for the New Statesman, The Voice, and beyond — an unyielding chronicler of Black British life for half a century.

Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007, he turned even his illness into advocacy, urging men to be tested. He died on the first of April 2017 in Streatham, London, at seventy-four. May the Mighty Lion of Black Britain be honored — his courage in the dock and his voice on the page endure.