What is contained within the image of Stephen Lawrence? Clive Chijioke Nwonka reflects on the multiple meanings, from the tragedy of a talented 18-year-old Black man, brutally murdered on 22 April 1993, to the layers of institutional racism embedded in the official reactions and inquiries stretching out across decades. It’s an image which speaks to the role for direct citizen action and investigative journalism in the quest for truth and accountability regarding matters of racial justice. In these and other ways, it’s an image which poses questions – still unresolved – for both society and the new Labour government particularly, around what it means to live and achieve justice in a multiracial United Kingdom.

In 1997, less than two months after the New Labour government came into power, the newly appointed Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ordered a public enquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence by a group of white youths – after years of campaigning by the Lawrence family and many false dawns. Straw would later describe the Inquiry as “the single most important decision I made as Home Secretary”. The inquiry’s findings, published in 1999, came to be known as the Macpherson Report and would indeed come to be seen as a landmark moment that placed institutional racism at the centre of the public arena in unprecedented and transformative ways.

Like so many, I remember clearly the moment when I first encountered this image of a Black male youth on BBC London News when returning home from school one Friday evening in April 1993. This was an image that would in the days, weeks and months to follow become firmly anchored within the collective consciousness of my family and those around us within the dense Black community of Neasden, Harlesden and Stonebridge, an area that was once described as the UK’s Blackest Borough.

As a result, Stephen’s image would go on to shape my nascent and developing understanding of Black identity, of anti-Black racism, of Southeast London, of Britain. Despite this, the image had a powerful positive dimension and influence. 31 years later, the Stephen Lawrence case, and the Stephen Lawrence image, is central to everything I do as an academic, both in terms of my research on Black identity, anti-Blackness and racial injustice within cultural production, but also in terms of questioning the political and cultural legacy of the Macpherson Report, in which anti-racism came to be replaced with the easy idea of diversity and inclusion.

An image that reaches across time and place

The image of Stephen Lawrence carries with it so much beyond the image of a talented 18-year-old Black man, his future ahead of him, who was so violently taken away from his family in Eltham on 22 April 1993. It’s an image of both the past and the present. The image is a collective symbol for the many other young men murdered in racial attacks in and around Southeast London throughout the period: Rolan Adams, Orville Blair and Rohit Duggal, and later in the decade, Manish Patel, Lahkvinder ‘Ricky’ Reel, Sheldon Bobb and many more. It’s an image that recollects that public enquiry of 1999, and how London’s Black community descended upon Elephant and Castle in collective support for racial justice. It’s an image for the protracted public campaign for justice that brought two of Stephen’s killers to justice in 2012, and carries with it the collective work of the Lawrence family, Imran Khan KC, DCI Clive Driscoll, and many others in this endeavour. It’s an image that speaks to the aspirations, hopes and experiences of an integrated multi-racial society.

It’s an image which invokes the dangers faced by young Black men and boys in communities across the UK. But equally, it’s an image that invokes the labour, resilience and suffering of an identity that has long been invisible within our social, political and cultural life – that of Black women.

It’s an image which invokes the dangers faced by young Black men and boys in communities across the UK. Equally, though, it’s an image that invokes the labour, resilience and suffering of an identity that has long been invisible within our social, political and cultural life, that of Black women. It holds the struggles of Baroness Doreen Lawrence and the many other Black women who stood resolute as our Black communities came under violent siege. The Black Feminist activist Stella Dadzie declared that “Black women have been, and we continue to be, strong, resilient and courageous, despite the fact that we are the most oppressed group in any society we live in”. As Audrey Adams and Doreen Lawrence, two of many trailblazers for racial equality, searched for answers in relation to the racist murder of their sons, they were subjected to continuous contempt, suspicion, surveillance and attack in their pursuit of justice and accountability.

Just as the Stephen Lawrence case reaches across Black British communities, so it extends across time. Black people who talk publicly about the idea of intergenerational trauma – what this means and how it manifests – are routinely met with derision and contempt. Doubt is cast upon our testimonies of how the structural racism and cumulative trauma experienced by previous generations carries forward to collective trauma, illness and depression in the present generation. This is transmitted through families but also through the racial structures, systems, institutions, discourses, narratives and images that underpin contemporary society’s continued oppression of Black communities. Thus, the image of Stephen Lawrence speaks to the propagation of Black trauma across generations through the failings of the Metropolitan Police, evolving forms of institutional racism and the denial of truth, accountability and justice for Black people within every sphere of public life.

All of this is indicative of how our institutions placed a different value system on the life of Stephen Laurence, resulting in the Metropolitan Police’s failure to conduct a fair, rigorous and objective investigation to bring Stephen’s killers to justice. It is the very same value system that is placed upon Black people in our experiences of the Criminal Justice System, the NHS, our education systems, our political representation and, of course, in academia and across our campuses. Is it any wonder that the conditions of existence for so many Black people in the UK – as experienced by Doreen and Neville Laurence, and so many others – are what they are, when these are the examples set by our highest public institutions?

The quest for justice, three decades on

The feeling I felt on the evening of 23 April 1993 when I first encountered the image of Stephen Lawrence was akin to the feeling I felt on 26 June 2023 when I saw a new headline about Stephen Lawrence on the BBC News website. Only this time, it was accompanied by a different image – that of the additional suspect in Stephen’s murder.

I was always aware that there remained unanswered questions regarding an additional, unnamed suspect: five prime suspects had become widely known after the murder, but the public inquiry had said there were “five or six” attackers. Thanks to the investigative work of the BBC journalist, Daniel De Simone, a full account of this “sixth suspect” was finally brought to light, three decades on.

The impact of De Simone’s investigative journalism and in particular his documentary, Stephen Lawrence: The Sixth Suspect, which aired on BBC One that same evening of 26 June 2023, speaks to the need for the preservation of public service broadcasting. Just as we have witnessed in the print reportage in The Guardian and the Independent the continuing injustice of the Windrush Scandal, so we see the societal and political value in broadcast investigations that get to the very marrow of the injustices, malpractice and corruptions that mar our public institutions. De Simone’s documentary is a rare example of current affairs programming that is committed to uncovering the deep-seated injustices at the heart of our highest institutions.

De Simone’s documentary is a rare example of current affairs programming that is committed to uncovering the deep-seated injustices at the heart of our highest institutions

Sadly, such investigative broadcasting is increasingly under threat. Yet I’m reminded of the Jamaican cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, who once stated that television is both the medium where we seek our identity, but also that which shapes our identity and reflects it back to us. In other words, who we think we are, who we believe others to be, and how we think society functions – all of these are decisively shaped by television, with profound social, psychological, cultural and political consequences. Academic research, print journalism and social media can all make important contributions to the exposing of racial injustice, but they cannot, and should not, completely replace investigative journalism through the lens of television which, as we saw in the unprecedented public response to De Simone’s work, possesses a very particular power and reach when communicated to by national broadcasters.

The recurring question: what happened that night and who was involved?

The image of Stephen Lawrence carries with it so much that has shaped the nation, but it also carries an important, 31-year-old question mark: what happened on the 22 April 1993, and who was involved? The recent decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute any of the Metropolitan Police detectives involved in the initial investigation for failings and incompetencies that led to at least three of his killers evading justice means that the image of Stephen Lawrence now also reminds us of the institutional racism that underpins the continuing struggle for answers.

This 31-year-old question bridges the Labour government of 1997 and Keir Starmer’s newly elected Labour Party of 2024

This 31-year-old question bridges the New Labour government of 1997 and Keir Starmer’s newly elected Labour Party of 2024. And a striking parallel between these two Labour governments should not go unnoticed: the immediate decision by New Labour to launch a public enquiry came after a 5-year public campaign by the Lawrences for accountability, while today Labour have come into power just as we await the outcome of the Metropolitan Police’s decision to allow an independent police force to consider the reopening of the dormant investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence based on the investigative work of Daniel De Simone and the relentless pursuit of justice by the Lawrence family.

This should concern anyone invested in the pursuit of truth, justice and accountability surrounding what happened that night, as well as racial equality in Britain more widely. The Labour Party also enters government today with an extra need to address the injustices faced by Black people given the findings of the 2022 Forde Report, where the Labour Party was found to have operated a “hierarchy of racism” with Black people occupying its lowest status.

Thus, it is the legacy of the previous Labour government’s interventions, together with a much-needed response to the case by the Labour government of 2024, that is now captured within Stephen’s image when looked at through the lens of Black Britain. And as with Jack Straw before her, how the new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, decides to intervene in this case and the broader injustices that continue to afflict Britain’s Black population may equally come to be a defining action of the new government’s first term in office. For as long as there are suspects who have not yet been brought to justice, and as long as there are unanswered questions about the actions and failings of the Metropolitan Police, there will always be something to be uncovered in that image, something that has yet to be resolved, about the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Watch Daniel de Simone and Clive Nwonka discuss some of the issues explored here from their event, “The sixth suspect: Stephen Lawrence, investigative journalism and racial inequality”. 

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credits: Image of Stephen Lawrence from Wikipedia.