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Death in The Family Ron Phillips - A personal recollection by Hal Austin The death of Ron Phillips in October 1998, in Wilmington, Delaware, has robbed black Britain of one of its most committed and articulate activists.
Ron - unlike his brothers Trevor, the television personality and, to a certain extent, Mike, the novelist - was deeply involved in the struggles of the black British community, and moreso the people in Manchester, in the 1960s and 70s, a period when the white British establishment, and in particular the criminal justice system, felt free to victimise young black people with impunity.
Caption : Ron Philips Ron, educated at the prestigious Queens College, came to Britain from his native British Guiana(now called Guyana) in 1952 to join his parents, who had settled two years earlier in Islington, North London, where his father worked as a postman. Shortly after he enlisted in the army and was posted to the north, where he remained on discharge. He studied civil engineering at Sheffield University and, later, politics at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. It was the time he spent in Moscow which gave his politics focus. On his return to Britain he settled in Moss Side, where the vast majority of black people in the city lived and which became a virtual hunting ground for local police. As the community grew, Manchester City Council, taking its cue from the Wilson Labour Government, came up with a number of inventive ways of dispersing the black community (taking its lead from Holland), a policy that has now gone full circle with the present Blair Government proposing dispersing so-called refugees. Along with the educationist Gus John, then a youth worker, his partner Ada Lock, Berry Edwards and supporters in London such as Cecil Gutzmore, Ron was one of the driving forces behind the setting up of the Hideaway youth club in the early 1970s, a much needed drop-in centre for the growing number of unemployed, restless and, often, homeless young men and women in Moss Side. Ron was also instrumental in setting up George Jackson House, a half-way home for homeless boys, most of whom had refused to be relocated with their parents on the bleak and isolated estates on which the city council had decided to quarantine black families. On reflection, it does not seem like much. But at the time it was a lifeline for these young men, who found themselves in the frontline of police racism. Ron was also a powerful and clear sighted intellectual. His Marxist-Leninist perspective may be somewhat dated in these post-communist times, but his was a perceptive and coherent analysis which gave meaning to the black predicament.
Caption : Mike and Trevor Phillips Ron would have deserved a rightful place in the post-war history of black Britain if only for the part he played in the bringing to justice the two officers involved in the brutal killing of Nigerian David Oluwale in Leeds in the early 1970s - that is, over and above his involvement, commitment, leadership and militancy in the vanguard of the black struggle against an undeniably hostile and unrepentantly racist society. Leeds Assizes were told how the two convicted officers urinated on and brutalised Oluwale, yet cleared them of his manslaughter. At a time when the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and its fall-out is preoccupying the black British community, this amnesia is unforgiveable. Ivor Ronald Phillips, civil engineer and community activist,: born Georgetown, Guyana, 26 October, 1935; died Wilmington, Delaware, USA, 31 October, 1998. Copyright: Hal Austin Back to the Archive
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It is interesting that at a time when the black British community is 'celebrating' the 50th anniversary of the Windrush Experience - the arrival of the first large-scale group of West Indian immigrants on the trooper carrier, SS Windrush - nothing at all about Ron Phillips and his role in Moss Side has been mentioned.