The Voice- The Black life Britain chose not to remember

THERE ARE moments when a society tells the truth about itself not through what it celebrates, but through what it refuses to remember. Silence becomes confession. Absence becomes indictment. And in Britain, that silence has a pattern. Time and again, when Black lives have been taken by the state, Britain chose not to remember.

A story overlooked

Clinton McCurbin is one of those lives.

On February 20th 1987, in the bright public space of a Wolverhampton high street, a 23-year-old Black man was held down by police officers inside a glass-fronted shop where he died of asphyxia.

The alleged crime was an unproven accusation of credit card theft that quickly evaporated in the shadow of his murder. What remained was a body, a family shattered, a community stunned, and a country that would rather look away than look inward.

Almost forty years have passed. There has been no official apology. No public memorial. No permanent acknowledgment that Clinton McCurbin lived, that he mattered, that his death was not an accident but the result of power exercised without restraint and without consequence.

And this is where the lie begins.

What happened to Clinton in 1987 bears an eerie and unbearable resemblance to what the world watched in 2020. A Black man restrained. His breath stolen. His humanity debated after his death as though it were evidence in a trial he never consented to.

Yet memory in Britain is selective. Empire is remembered as exploration, not extraction. Policing as protection, not control. Diversity as decoration, not obligation.

And when Black people die in custody, those deaths are treated as unfortunate anomalies rather than symptoms of a deeper sickness.

Kebba Jobe. Dalian Atkinson. Joy Gardner. Say their names slowly, because they are not ghosts drifting at the edge of our conscience; they are lives that still press upon us, demanding more than silence, more than time, more than our convenient forgetting.

Only remembrance with teeth, public, permanent, and unflinching, can begin to honour what was taken and what we still refuse to repair.

Deaths in police custody and police impunity

According to Inquest, more than 3,000 deaths involving the police have been recorded in the UK since 1969. Four officers have been convicted. PC Benjamin Monk was convicted of manslaughter in 2021 for the death of former footballer Dalian Atkinson, who died after being tasered for 33 seconds and kicked in the head.

A blue plaque is not a sentimental gesture. It is a demand that the ordinary passerby be confronted with an uncomfortable truth: that a young Black man died here, in public, at the hands of the police, and that his death has never been answered for.

Prior to this, the most recent conviction for a death in custody was in 1986, when Merseyside police sergeant Alwyn Sawyer was found guilty of manslaughter. An earlier case from 1969 involved two Leeds police officers who were found guilty of assault (not murder or manslaughter) in the death of David Oluwale and sentenced to a few months in prison.

Despite thousands of deaths in or following police contact since records began, prosecutions of individual officers for murder or manslaughter have been rare, and most have resulted in acquittals.

In some cases, police forces have been found guilty of health and safety breaches, but no individual officers were convicted of the killings themselves.

*Esther McCurbin, pictured with a photo of her son Clinton as a young boy. She has carried the pain of his death for nearly four decades Pic: supplied)*

That truth does not represent justice; it represents immunity. A recent United Nations analysis examining racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder concluded that police across the world, including in the UK, continue to enjoy near-total impunity when Black lives are taken. Investigations are deficient. Structural racism is gaslit.

Accountability is deferred until our memory itself grows tired. But memory, when tended, can be dangerous to power.

Why commemoration is an act of resistance

This is why the campaign to commemorate Clinton matters so profoundly.

A blue plaque is not, as some will inevitably sneer, a sentimental gesture or a symbolic distraction. It is a refusal to erase.

It is a demand that the ordinary passerby be confronted with an uncomfortable truth: that a young Black man died here, in public, at the hands of the police, and that his death has never been answered for.

Professor Patrick Vernon, chair of the memorial committee and a veteran of the original McCurbin Defence Campaign, calls the plaque a beginning. He is right. Commemoration is not closure; it is confrontation. It asks a city, and a country, what kind of story it wants to tell about itself. Whether it believes history is something to be buried or something to be reckoned with.

Breaking a silence nearly forty years long

For Clinton McCurbin’s mother Esther, this campaign is not abstract. It is the breaking of a silence that has lasted nearly four decades.

“We have carried the pain in silence,” she says.

That sentence alone should shame us. Silence is not neutral. Silence is policy. Silence is how injustice survives long enough to call itself tradition.

*Daniella Maison says Britain’s failure to remember deaths in police custody such as Clinton McCurbin’s, has allowed injustice to become entrenched*

The timing of this remembrance is no coincidence. Britain today is once again sharpening its borders, hardening its language, and narrowing its definition of belonging.

Policies like Operation Raise the Flag have created an atmosphere in which Black and Brown people, citizens and asylum seekers alike, are made to feel suspect in their own streets.

The message is familiar: you are tolerated, but not trusted; visible, but not protected.

In such a climate, the past is not past. It is present tense.

To remember Clinton McCurbin now is to insist that the lives endangered by today’s policies are connected to the lives lost under yesterday’s policing. It is to say that justice delayed is not justice denied only if we act, now, loudly, and without apology. Otherwise, delay simply becomes another word for defeat.

Commemoration also forces us to confront another uncomfortable truth: who gets remembered in Britain, and who does not.

Only 2 to 4% of blue plaques put up in Britain commemorate Black lives. While recent efforts have begun to correct this imbalance, the landscape of public memory still overwhelmingly honours the powerful, the imperial, the untroubled. To place Clinton among them is not to lower the bar of history; it is to raise it.

Because history is not only made by those who ruled, but by those who resisted, sometimes simply by surviving, sometimes by dying in ways that expose the lie at the heart of the system.

The demand for justice

Let us be clear: remembering Clinton is not about vilifying individual officers or indulging in retrospective outrage. It is about naming a pattern.

It is about understanding that when the state exercises force without accountability, it teaches itself to do so again. And again. And again.

A plaque will not bring Clinton back. It will not erase his mother’s grief or heal the wound left in Wolverhampton. But it will do something essential: it will interrupt the national habit of forgetting.

It will stand there, quietly and stubbornly, reminding us that justice is not a mood, and equality is not a slogan. They are obligations.

If Britain truly wishes to distinguish itself from the injustices it so readily condemns elsewhere, it must begin by telling the truth about its own reflection.

The struggle against police brutality did not begin with George Floyd, and it does not end at America’s shores. It lives here. It has names here. Clinton McCurbin is one of them.

To remember him is not an act of nostalgia. It is an act of courage. And courage, as history teaches us, is the only thing that has ever made justice possible.

To support the campaign for a memorial to Clinton McCurbin please visit www.gofundme.com/f/remembering-clinton-mccurbin-a-call-for-justice