Mavis Best seems to have done so much in her life that nobody can quite keep track of it all. Talking to colleagues and relatives, her career was a never-ending whirlwind of campaigns, protests, community groups, grassroots organisations, official and unofficial roles – most of them centred on improving the lives and civil rights of Black people. Best, who died on 14 November aged 83, was awarded an MBE in 2002 for her “services to the community”, but the full extent of those services, from the late 1960s onwards, seems almost beyond measure.
“She used to do social work by day and support people by night,” says Best’s granddaughter, Isha Dibua. “Growing up, my grandmother’s house was always a place to come to if you needed help. Any problem: go to Mavis. She was very strong and determined and not to be messed about. If something needed doing, and it was the right thing to do, she was not a woman to back down.”
Her husband Fabian agrees: “She never took no for an answer. If it was something she believed in, she would pursue it. She was involved in most of the things that happened to Black people in her area.” That area was south London, home to some of the darkest chapters of Black British life, from the New Cross house fire and the Brixton riots in 1981 to the racially motivated murders of Stephen Lawrence and others in the 1990s. Best was close to all of those events.
In particular, Best was instrumental in overturning the infamous “sus law”, one of the worst manifestations of British racism in modern history. Technically, the law was the Vagrancy Act of 1824, drafted to exert social control over homeless people after the Napoleonic wars. Section 4 gave police the right to apprehend people suspected (hence “sus”) of “intent to commit an arrestable offence”. As a result of a confected mugging scare in the early 1970s, police began to apply the law disproportionately and almost arbitrarily towards young Black people, especially in London.
“It was a very turbulent period in the history of Black people in Britain,” says Paul Boateng, now Lord Boateng, who worked alongside Best on the Scrap Sus campaign. “We were up against overt racism on the part of not only the police but the entire criminal justice system. There were two Black solicitors in London and I was one of them. There were hardly any Black magistrates. There were hardly any Black police officers. Racism was rampant, and to be found everywhere.”
Best had experienced this first-hand. Born to a farming family in rural Jamaica, she came to London in 1961, when she was in her early 20s, to join her two brothers and sister. Like many Caribbean immigrants, she had rose-tinted ideas of “the mother country” but settling in a crowded house in the Peckham area, she soon began to see how British society was stacked against Black people in terms of policing, employment opportunities, housing availability and hostility from some sectors of the white population. “We didn’t have the language to speak about racism in those days,” Best told a radio interviewer in 2011. “That comes later. But we knew they didn’t like us.”
Best’s first job was at a local onion factory, Dibua explains: “She worked there for about a week. And after coming home smelling of onions, she said: ‘You know what? This is not what I came here for.’” She was awakened to the Black Power movement and leftwing politics and by the mid-1970s Best was studying community development at Goldsmiths College in New Cross. She caught the eye of a visiting South African lecturer, Basil Manning, who thought she was just the person to spearhead what would become the Scrap Sus campaign, in the Lewisham area. “She was sharp and did not let you get away with anything in terms of racism,” Manning recalls. “She was not a very ‘educated’ person, but in terms of her feelings, especially on the issue of race, she was upfront and didn’t worry about whether it was right in your face or not: ‘This is not acceptable! This is not OK!’ And I think that that appealed to many people.”
Boateng became involved with Scrap Sus when Best called him up out of blue. “She just said: ‘Would you come to a meeting on Friday?’ I was 28 and a young community activist and lawyer, in flares and an afro. The community was extremely law-abiding, but the behaviour of the police and the misuse of the sus laws was such that that was beginning to change.”
He, too, was immediately impressed by Best: “She was committed, passionate, organised, brave, and she was somebody who you could rely on. She would ring me up 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.”
Under sus justifications, Black youths as young as 12 were routinely arrested for activities as innocuous as waiting for a bus or looking in a shop window. In many cases, these youths – predominantly male – were taken off the street and physically assaulted, either in the back of a police van or at the local station. Often they would be detained for days, without their families’ knowledge. And often they would be wrongly accused of a crime such as theft or conspiracy, in which case it became their word against the police’s. More than 90% of convictions in sus cases were on the strength of police testimony alone.
When Black youths were taken into custody, Best and other local women took it upon themselves to get them back. “I used to go down to the police station and say: ‘Come on. I demand that you let these kids out. I want to take them home,’” Best once told an interviewer. “Because by then their parents were so debilitated by the whole thing that they couldn’t do anything.”
Best’s friend Zane Gray, who campaigned alongside her, remembers the time well: “There was no one to complain to,” she says. “The police was brutal. You’d go to the police station and you were terrified. When you tried to meet any authority, you were made to look very small. You were made to feel less of a person. It was basically ‘white right’.”
Under Best’s leadership, the Scrap Sus campaign also issued leaflets, ran stalls at public events, and drummed up support from the local press and other community members. They would scan the newspapers daily, and demand corrections to stories misrepresenting the Black community. She would organise and attend demonstrations, often being dragged away by the police herself.
Best also marshalled families and the community to attend court hearings en masse, to fight every case and to call as many witnesses as possible to contradict police evidence. “You have to cast your mind back to a time in which it was rare to challenge directly the evidence of the police,” says Boateng. “But a group of us came to the view that we had to be prepared to call them liars. We had to be ready to challenge them and bring home to magistrates that they themselves were being watched by the community.”
By this time, Best was also single-handedly raising her own three children, in relative hardship. “My children were left on their own a lot because of my marriage that was broken down,” Best told an interviewer in 2009. “A lot of having to fend for themselves because you’ve gone to meetings and you know that you need to be there … We didn’t have proper central heating and things like that. I’d come back, and they’d be cold and leaned up together and lighting the paraffin fire. I would say: ‘Don’t light that fire until I get back.’ So, it wasn’t easy.”
For three years, successive home secretaries, Conservative and Labour, failed to act on the Black community’s complaints, but the Scrap Sus campaign’s persistence finally paid off. A home affairs select committee was formed to address the issue, to which Best and Boateng gave evidence, and section 4 was finally repealed in August 1981. “It was an uphill struggle, but we believed in the justice of our cause, and we believed we would succeed,” says Boateng. “It began in a community hall in Lewisham, and by the end the campaign had the support of the churches, the trade unions, members of parliament, Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem.”
There was little cause for celebration at the time, though. The victory came too late to mitigate what had been one of the worst years in British race relations. In January 1981 there was the New Cross house fire, in which 13 young Black people lost their lives. It followed a spate of National Front protests. There had also been arson attacks in the area, although no one was ever charged with starting the fire. Best was part of the group set up by psychologist Aggrey Burke to provide counselling to the bereaved families. She also participated in the Black People’s Day of Action in March that year, protesting against the authorities’ and the media’s handling of the tragedy. Boateng recalls marching alongside her and 20,000 other people from New Cross to Fleet Street, where the march ended in more violence and protesters being spat at and taunted with racist chants.
Then in April, the Metropolitan police conducted its heavy-handed Operation Swamp 81 in the Brixton area (named after Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that Britain was being “swamped by people of a different culture”). The police stopped 1,000 people and arrested 150 of them. Tensions in the Black community spilled over into the Brixton uprising a few days later, followed by more unrest in cities across the country that summer. “The Black community was under the cosh at that time,” says Boateng, “And we didn’t, frankly, see the repeal of section 4 as being anything other than a step forward in the struggle.”
Best would continue that struggle for the next three decades. She carried on with her studies and worked for Camden Social Services. She met her second husband, Fabian, on a training course in the 1980s. “She came into the lecture where I was. I saw her and immediately fell in love with her,” he says. Through the 80s and 90s, Best was involved in all manner of grassroots community projects, mainly targeted at helping or strengthening the voices of Black people in Britain, and especially south-east London, where she continued to live.
Invariably, she would be the one who initiated the projects, gathered the support, and extracted funding and commitments from local authorities. She was an instigator of the Saturday Achievement Project and a supporter and trustee of the Simba Family Project, both of which helped children and families of African and African-Caribbean heritage in the Greenwich area (offshoot the Simba Housing Association, which finds affordable accommodation for Black tenants, is still active). She was instrumental in pushing local churches to do more for young people. She was a school governor. She worked with the Anti-Racist Alliance. She was involved in campaigning for justice for those killed by racist attacks in the area in the early 1990s, including Rohit Duggal, Rolan Adams and Stephen Lawrence. She was later part of a panel set up to review the implementation of recommendations laid out in the Macpherson Report – which concluded that “institutional racism” existed in Britain’s police forces.
In 1998 Best was elected as a Labour councillor in Greenwich, the same year Boateng became a minister at the Home Office under the Tony Blair government. He appointed Best to the national committee overseeing community development trusts. In 2002 Best set up the Greenwich African Caribbean Organisation with fellow councillor Ann-Marie Cousins.
Best’s enthusiasm and tenacity tended to sweep others along, Cousins recalls. In the mid-00s, Best discovered a grave in a Greenwich churchyard dedicated to an unknown Black person. She then set about getting the borough to commemorate its history of Black and enslaved people. Best was also a friend of Charlton House, a Jacobean manor house in Greenwich, partly built on the proceeds of slavery. So she saw to it that Charlton House planted a ceremonial juneberry tree in their gardens in 2010, dedicated to the memory of African ancestors in the borough. Every August a ceremony is held at the tree to honour them.
Best was very connected to her African ancestry, says Dibua: “She really imparted in her children and grandchildren the importance of loving your Blackness, and understanding your African roots.” She often wore traditional African garments, including flamboyant head wraps, and she made several trips to Africa and to her family in Jamaica. Although characteristically, her husband Fabian recalls, on one occasion when they went to visit relatives in Jamaica for a holiday, she became involved in a local campaign over employment issues and ended up staying there for several months.
In 2014, Best had a stroke, which brought her activities to an unwelcome halt. She moved into a care home close to her family in Charlton, where she spent her final years. She never wanted to be there, says Gray, who visited her regularly. “She would want to be up and doing things. I don’t think she was ever a passive person.”
Clearly, there is still much work to be done. In June the Metropolitan police was placed in special measures over a litany of institutional failings, including mistreatment of offenders, victims and its own Black and Asian personnel. Incidents of the controversial police use of stop-and-search powers, again directed disproportionately towards young Black people, continue, such as the high-profile case of Olympic athlete Bianca Williams. Or the abusive strip-search of a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl known as Child Q, news of which sparked protests in Hackney this March, and brought to light the fact that out of 650 London children aged 10 to 17 strip-searched by the Met between 2018 and 2020, almost three out of five (58%) were Black. Statistics like this could give the impression little has changed since the 1970s.
“Is racism still an issue? Yes, of course it is,” says Boateng. “Is racial disadvantage still a fact of life? Yes, of course it is. We have to be vigilant and we have to continue to campaign and work against it.” But gains have undoubtedly been made, says Boateng. At the time of the Scrap Sus campaign, there were no minority ethnic MPs. Boateng was one of the first, elected in 1987 alongside Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz. Today there are 65 minority ethnic MPs, not to mention an minority ethnic prime minster. Boateng, who was also Britain’s first Black cabinet minister and ambassador, credits Best as one of the reasons he went into electoral politics. “My experience as being legal adviser to the Scrap Sus campaign, and the way the whole political system treated people like Mavis and that sort of campaign, convinced me of the need for change in the way people did politics,” he says.
“She was incredibly proud of what she had managed to achieve but was very much aware that there’s still so much to be done,” says Dibua. Best’s almost unbelievable courage was fuelled by her sense of injustice, Dibua adds: “That was the driving thing for her: ‘This is a bigger issue.’ ‘This is my community.’ ‘I’ve got all these children and grandchildren coming up. This is not what I want them to move into.’ I think that was instrumental in her being brave and putting herself forward. The importance of the change was more important than the risk that she was going to take.”