Someone you may not have any awareness of in this list of women and equality throughout history is British councillor Mavis Best.
Best led a group of black women activists from Lewisham who successfully petitioned for the recall of 'Sus' Law, the colloquial term for section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which allowed arrest based solely on suspicion of a crime. Police used this periodically to stop, search, arrest, detain and assault young black men.
Whilst also a single mother Best’s leadership of the Scrap Sus campaign was singularly successful, and her personal involvement in protest unprecedented. She has received little awareness for her efforts however and remains largely in obscurity.
Best moved from Jamaica to the UK in her early 20s in 1961, joining her brothers and sister in Peckham. Best was immediately aware of the restrictions placed against her, finding difficulties in employment opportunities, housing, policing and general hostility from the wider population. She would later tell an interviewer in a radio appearance that “We didn’t have the language to speak about racism in those days. That comes later. But we knew they didn’t like us.” This awareness allowed for further enlightenment to ongoing Black Rights movements across the country, in the 1970s she studied community development at Goldsmiths College, where she met Basil Manning, who pushed for her involvement in the growing ‘Scrap Sus’ campaign, burgeoning in Lewisham. Best would go on to lead the fight for the repeal of this act whilst also raising her three children as a single mother.
'Sus' Law is a colloquial term for section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act. This entitled the police to stop and search, and arrest anyone in a public space if there was suspicion that they intended to commit an offence. Although it was slightly more complex to bring such cases to trial, there was still a good chance that the arresting force could provide proof of suspicion. Within a fundamentally racist society, this law was typically and increasingly used against young black men in Metropolitan areas. Often young men and boys were simply looking into a shop window or walking down a street. The treatment they would then receive was something more reminiscent of 1930s Germany. They were detained for days, with no notice given to families, physically assaulted in police vans and stations, and later wrongly accused of criminal activities such as theft or conspiracy, only 10% of 'Sus' convictions had supplementary evidence to police testimony. It was the subject of protest among other causes in the 1980 and 1981 Race Riots around England before Best became involved and it is telling of the institutionalised racism in the British Police force that when questioned on the law in 1980, then Met commissioner Sir David McNee argued that there was such a high proportion of black people incarcerated thanks to the law because they were “over-represented in offences of robbery and other violent theft.”
Best’s leadership of the “Scrap Sus” Campaign was arguably fundamental to its quick repeal once protests had begun, quickly enlisting co-campaigner Paul Boateng, Best is described to have been almost obsessive in the organisation of the campaign, immediately taking to leadership and organising protests in days and being so involved in them that she was often dragged away by the very police she was protesting; they produced leaflets, and flyers to hand out at public events, personally marshalled families and communities to attend hearings, drumming up support and witnesses for any and all cases she could, pushing the effort with her group that the only way to win was to directly challenge the authority, call them what they were, liars.
Boateng described how she was singularly committed to the campaign, calling him “at all times of the day and night and on the weekends, and say: ‘X, Y or Z is happening. You need to get down here. And I did.” Perhaps the most notable action of Best and her ‘Scrap Sus’ Protestors was their direct challenge of arrests. Best herself would refuse to leave stations until arrested men were released into her care, explaining later that this step was necessary for her and the communities affected because “by then their parents were so debilitated by the whole thing that they couldn’t do anything.” 1981 is described as one of the worst years for British Race Relations: National Front Protests had closed and opened 1980 and 1981 on a sour note, this was followed in January with the New Cross House which Fire saw thirteen young black people die. Could the fire have been started thanks to an arson attack as part of the aforementioned fascist protests? The suspicion was ironically never addressed. Mass protests in the following months were met with indignant racism and violence and in April the violence arguably reached a climax with ‘Operation Swamp 81’ in Brixton.
Operation Swamp, named for Thatcher’s statement that Britain was “swamped” with other cultures saw 1000 people stopped and 150 arrested, actions which saw an uprising in the following days and continual uneasiness and readiness to protest in the following months throughout all of London.
Protesting lasted three years, with both Conservative and Labour Governments ignoring the community’s complaints and efforts until 1981 when a Home Affairs committee was eventually formed to address the issue. The law was repealed in August but most agreed it was too late to repair the damage that had already been done throughout the year.
Mavis Best is not a single success story, she continued to fight for Black rights throughout her career over the following three decades, working for Camden Social Services, and working with several grassroots community projects in the 80s and 90s. Throughout it all, Best would lead the movements, speaking up when others couldn’t or were too afraid to. For example, Best pushed for support for young people from their local churches, worked with the Anti-Racist Alliance in the early 90s, and continued to campaign specifically for black individuals mistreated by the law, such as Stephen Lawrence and was part of a panel to review the implementation of the Macpherson Report, which had concluded that there was ‘institutionalised racism’ in the UK police forces. Additionally, she helped start and support two efforts to provide aid to African and African-Caribbean people: the Saturday Achievement Project and the Simba Family Project.
Almost 20 years after her involvement with “Scrap Sus”, in 1998, Best was elected Labour Councillor in Greenwich, her long time colleague, Paul Boateng, this year had become a minister at the Home Office, and it was Boateng who appointed Best to the committee which oversaw community development trusts. In 2002 she established the Greenwich African Caribbean Organisation. Throughout the 00s her activism continued, setting up a commemoration for the black and enslaved people of Greenwich centred around a grace of an unknown Black Person, who saw that a ceremonial juneberry tree was planted at Charlton House to commemorate the black people of the borough, the house had been partially built on the proceeds of slavery. Furthermore, her activism wasn’t solely restricted to London; on a holiday to Jamaica, she became so enraptured with a local campaign concerning employment that she stayed to assist them for several months.
Unfortunately, acknowledging the problem does not entirely solve it and institutionalised racism is arguably as prevalent in today’s society as it was in the 1970s, it’s just got to be more creative in its discrimination. Still, Best’s contribution, and that of the women she led and inspired throughout her activism and political career shouldn’t have faded into obscurity as it has, it was her leadership and fearlessness which helped bring about the end of a brutal and devastating technicality of the law, and it is with her continued legacy that we can work to address ongoing racism in our society.
Source
Rose, Steve, ‘“She was not a woman to back down@: the fearless Black campaigner who helped to scrap the UK’s ‘sus’ law’, The Guardian, (02/12/2022), < https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/29/she-was-not-a-woman-to-back-down-the-fearless-black-campaigner-who-helped-to-scrap-the-sus-law>, [03/03/2023]
‘Best, Mavis’, Hackney Museum, < https://museum-collection.hackney.gov.uk/names/AUTH4748>, [03/03/2023]
Maggs, Joseph, ‘Fighting Sus: then and now’ Race Relations, (04/04/2019), < https://irr.org.uk/article/fighting-sus-then-and-now/>, [03/03/2023]