This is a political and intellectual biography of an important and controversial figure in British race politics. In recent years, Darcus Howe has been a high-profile (and not uncontroversial) television journalist, but he also has a long history as a grass-roots activist.

He moved to America from Trinidad in the 1960s where he was active in student committees fighting racial segregation. On arrival in Britain in the early 70s he joined the British Black Panthers - the first Black Panther organization outside the US. Here he attracted the attention of Special Branch, was arrested and had to defend himself at the Old Bailey. Over the next decade he was a member of a number of high profile campaigns that took on the National Front and police racism - campaigns which led to a seismic shift in British attitudes to race and culture more generally.

The book uses Howe's dramatic personal history as a lens through which to explore the British civil rights movement in the defining years of the 1970s and 80s. It also links the struggle for racial justice in Britain with the fight for black emancipation in the USA and the anti-colonial movement in the Caribbean. Howe has a unique intellectual position forged through his personal experience and through his interaction with leading black thinkers such as C. L. R. James (his great uncle) and Kwame Ture.

Robin Bunce is Director of Studies for Politics at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK, and a Bye-Fellow in History at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He is the author of a study of Thomas Hobbes for Continuum's Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series (2009) and he has published several books on civil rights in America for the schools market. He is also an editor of Twentieth Century History Review. Paul Field worked as a journalist for many years specializing in issues of policing, asylum and institutional racism, before becoming a lawyer specializing in the fields of discrimination and employment.