From one president to another

Early in the morning of 5 December 1956, hundreds of policemen throughout South Africa descended on the homes of the leaders of the struggle against the racist apartheid regime. One hundred and fifty-six people were charged with high treason, a capital offence, in what has simply come to be known as ‘The Treason Trial’.

Those arrested were Africans, Whites, Indians and Coloureds, from all walks of life: doctors, lawyers, trade unionists, journalists religious leaders, made up a diversity that was the exemplification of the broad and democratic nature of the alliance against the racist, colonialist regime in South Africa. While the case was remanded against most of the accused, 30 of them sat in court almost daily for four-and-a-half years, their normal lives disrupted.

The youngest of the defendants - aged 21 – was Lionel Morrison, a journalist, who later came to Britain and became the first black President of the NUJ.

In June this year his most prominent co-defendant, Nelson Mandela of course, presented Lionel Morrison with a plaque as part of the worldwide celebrations of the former South African President’s 90th birthday.

At a London reception Nelson Mandela said the trial was “the spark that would light of fire of the rising of the democratic nation and the consequent mass struggle which would see the end of Apartheid.”

For himself, Lionel Morrison said that during the trial he felt no fear until state prosecutor Percy Yutar called for the death penalty. “That did make me scared,” he recalled, with a smile. But the charges of treason were vigorously challenged and all the accused were acquitted. Nelson Mandela was jailed in a later trial.

As a teenager Lionel Morrison wanted to train as a lawyer and it was on the advice of Nelson Mandela that he went into journalism, joining a newly founded campaigning black newspaper, the Golden City Post, in 1955. In 1970 he came into exile in the UK and joined the NUJ as a freelance.

Here he was instrumental in moving the NUJ to giving strong support to the anti-apartheid struggle – a rare instance in the union’s history in which it took a clear political stand.

He was the union’s first black President in 1987-88 and is now Chair of its Black Members Council and of the trustees of the George Viner Memorial Fund, which provides funding for black journalism students to help them in their careers.

Claudia Jones is doubly honoured

THE MEDIA play an important role in confronting and exposing xenophobic attitudes and cultures, the UN’s top racism official said at an NUJ lecture in October.

Doudou Diène (right), who for the last six years was the UN’s special rapporteur on racism, recounted his experiences of witnessing first hand the destructive force of racism across the world hen he gave the seventh Claudia Jones memorial lecture, presented by the NUJ Black Members Council. It is part of London’s Black History Month celebrations.

The annual lecture is held in memory of the pioneering black journalist Claudia Jones, who was born in Trinidad and brought up in New York but came to London in 1955. She founded the first Black newspaper in Britain, the West Indian Gazette, and was a leading light in the launch of the Notting Hill Carnival in 1961.

Claudia Jones features in a set of six stamps featuring Women of Distinction, issued by the Royal Mail in October to commemorate the “courage and determination of six women whose revolutionary work challenged convention - and changed history”.

There is another journalIst in the series: Barbara Castle, who died in 2003, a Daily Mirror journalist and NUJ member before going into Parliament. Royal Mail says she “spent a lifetime fighting for social causes”.