--- title: "Darcus Howe (1943–2017)" date: "2026-09-24T16:08:44+01:00" modified: "2026-09-24T16:42:14+01:00" url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/darcus-howe/" post_id: 14444 categories: ["Atheism", "Human Rights", "Politics", "Social Reform"] tags: ["Activism", "Racial equality", "Social welfare"] --- # Darcus Howe (1943–2017) > That was the moment when I entered the world of reason. Before that, it was all God, but as I grappled with that sentence, God began to retreat. And now I am an atheist. > > Darcus Howe, interview with Simon Jones, *High Profiles* (2004) Darcus Howe was a broadcaster, writer, and campaigner who became one of the most recognisable voices of black Britain. For five decades he challenged police racism, political complacency, and what he saw as the shallowness of British public life. ### **Life** > I have left \[religion\] behind, but I have brought with me the liberal notions that it gave me. My God was not vindictive but was only generous. And my radicalism is the radicalism of Christ. > > Darcus Howe, interview with Simon Jones, *High Profiles* (2004) Darcus Howe was born Leighton Rhett Radford Howe in Moruga, Trinidad, in 1943. His mother taught at the village school where his father, Cipriani Howe, was headmaster and a church deacon. Howe grew up immersed in Dickens, Shakespeare, and the Book of Common Prayer. He later recalled that his entire childhood was Christian, and that his father’s burial services, with their promise of resurrection, ‘used to hit me like dynamite’. Yet his father also gave him a love of reason. His biographers note that this combination eventually led Howe to reject the metaphysical foundations of religion, and to ‘ruthlessly question the injustices and myths of race, class and religion itself.’ Howe, in an interview in 2004, recalled being around eight when rain put paid to a planned cricket game on the school playground. Not knowing his father was listening, he asked a schoolmate what sin they had committed to bring this on. The next day, his father explained that it was nothing to do with sin, even stating that ‘There is an over-preponderance of God when science is not available.’ Howe recalled: ‘That was the moment when I entered the world of reason. Before that, it was all God, but as I grappled with that sentence, God began to retreat. And now I am an atheist.’ Robin Bunce and Paul Field, in their biography of Howe, tie this lightbulb moment to a life of questioning: > This was a revelation which had both a devastating and liberating effect on Howe’s way of looking at the world; it was as if when he pulled at one thread of his religious belief system, the whole thing began to unravel and ‘reason became non-negotiable. In a similar fashion, Howe began to chip away at all the old legends and superstitions which surrounded him in a village permeated with folklore disguised as truth. Here in its embryonic form were the first stirrings of what Linton Kwesi Johnson would, decades later, come to describe as the ‘merciless realism’ which characterized Howe’s analysis of the world. In time, Howe would use the same uncompromising intellectual framework to directly challenge the more poisonous myths on which institutionalized hierarchies of race and class were based in Trinidad, the United States and Britain. > > Robin Bunce and Paul Field, *Darcus Howe: A Political Biography* (2014) Howe came to Britain in 1961, where he studied law at the Middle Temple, before turning instead to journalism and activism. At the Dialectics of Liberation conference at Camden’s Roundhouse in July 1967, Howe saw his childhood friend and leading black radical Stokely Carmichael speak. The following year, he became involved in the burgeoning British Black Power Movement. In 1970 he was among the ‘Mangrove Nine’, tried after protesting against repeated police raids on the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill. Howe defended himself at the Old Bailey. The defendants were acquitted of the most serious charges, and the judge acknowledged evidence of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police. Over the following decade, Howe remained under Special Branch surveillance, was prosecuted six times, acquitted five, and served a week in prison before being released on appeal in the sixth instance. In 1973 Howe became editor of *Race Today*, working from Railton Road in Brixton alongside Linton Kwesi Johnson and his relative, C.L.R. James, whom he called ‘Uncle Nello’. After the New Cross house fire of January 1981, in which 13 young black people died, he and the Race Today Collective organised the Black People’s Day of Action. Thousands of people marched through London to protest at the police response and media indifference. He went on to present the documentary and current affairs series *The Bandung File* with Tariq Ali, and *Devil’s Advocate* on Channel 4, and wrote columns for the *New Statesman* and *The Voice*. Howe’s non-religious outlook was characteristically direct, but never evangelical. Asked in 2004 whether faith and reason could be reconciled, he said he found faith ‘completely unreasonable’ but did not seek to convince anyone else. He still sang the hymns of his childhood ‘lustily’ at church funerals ,and the poetic language and sense of justice he took from his father’s Christianity stayed with him, while the belief itself did not. Darcus Howe died in Streatham in April 2017. ### **Influence** Howe’s influence lies in his insistence that black Britons were citizens with rights, not guests on sufferance, and in his readiness to put that case in any courtroom, newspaper, or television studio. Howe himself wrote: ‘although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign “Motherland” of my parents’ vision’. The Mangrove trial and the 1981 Day of Action shaped a generation of campaigners against police racism, and his outlook on religion, which rejected faith on grounds of reason while defending other people’s freedom to hold it, is an example of the thread of non-religious conviction that has quietly run through black British political life. Asked in 2004 whether he remained ‘optimistic that a happier, more liberal and more creative society is going to emerge?’, Howe said: > Oh yeah. I’m not going to give up, because that’s vision! I’m not frustrated because it might not happen in my lifetime. But I hope that what I do now contributes to that kind of society. ### **Read more** Robin Bunce and Paul Field, *Darcus Howe: A Political Biography* (Bloomsbury, 2014) [‘Let’s Be Reasonable’: Simon Joseph Jones interview with Darcus Howe](https://highprofiles.info/interview/darcus-howe/) | High Profiles --- Main image: Darcus Howe in a still from *Trouble in Paradise* (Channel 4 / Diverse, Michael Waldman, 2000)