By This Spring, as Black Lives Matter protests spread around the world following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Steve McQueen had already finished filming Red, White and Blue, a film that focuses on Leroy Logan, one of the first Black officers in the Metropolitan Police.
The film is part of his new BBC anthology series Small Axe, a collection of stories McQueen says are concerned with "a golden age of resistance". There is the story of The Mangrove Nine who were targeted by the Metropolitan Police, a Blues party offering a place of private Black joy, and in Leroy Logan a portrait of one man's determination and discipline to enact change.
"I knew that I wanted to do something about the police," McQueen told Esquire. "The whole idea of a Black person – not integrating into the police, but more, submerging himself into an institution in order to make change."
In Logan's recent memoir, Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop, he writes of his decision to join "an organisation I had no love for" and leaving his job as a forensic scientist doing laboratory work. Logan decided to join the police force after seeing his father assaulted by two policemen, hoping to change the racist attitudes prevalent in the police from within. It is a decision that puts him at odds with Jamaican father, as we see in Red, White and Blue.
As McQueen writes in the foreword to Logan's book: "For a West Indian man to join the police force in the early Eighties, at the time of the Brixton uprisings, and stick with it the way Leroy did, was unique. I was amazed and intrigued by the way he had stood his ground and progressed within the Metropolitan Police against so many obstacles: hostility, outright racism, and being repeatedly overlooked for promotion."
Logan is credited with being one of the people who changed the Met, helping to set up the Black Police Association: a group which aimed to offer a bridge between police officers and the Black community. As part of the BPA Logan was involved in the Stephen Lawrence inquiry which investigated the racially motivated killing of the teenager in 1993.
Logan writes in his memoir that his involvement in the inquiry meant that he had to acknowledge the expertise of others and downplay his own in order to not be seen as a threat by the people he was working with. The 1997 inquiry found that police officers had been incompetent in their handling of the case, from failing to give first aid when arriving on the scene to not arresting suspects.
The report also concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist, leading to sweeping reforms including abolishing the double jeopardy rule and criminalising racist statements made in private. Logan steadily rose through the ranks during his career before retiring as Superintendent after being awarded an MBE for his work in advancing policing.
In Red, White and Blue, Logan is played by John Boyega, the Star Wars actor who here gives an astonishing performance, capturing the resilience which Logan had to display in the instances of racism that he encountered so often for so many years.
That Boyega played Logan and then went on to give a fervent speech at the Black Lives Matter protest in London this summer lends the performance even more weight and resonance. "We are a physical representation of our support for George Floyd," Boyega said passionately into a megaphone at the time. "We are a physical representation of our support for Sandra Bland... for Stephen Lawrence, for Mark Duggan."
In an interview with Esquire, McQueen pointed out that the ideas he is exploring have always been there if you were looking for them. "These stories are as relevant now as they were then," he said. "It’s only now that people are waking up to the fact that there’s been injustices against Black people for decades in this country, and centuries elsewhere. It took a pandemic. It took a brutal killing. It took millions marching, for people to think, ‘Possibly I should think in a different way.’ And only possibly, it’s not actually done yet. Millions of people on the street before change can even be considered, before people can think that even possibly something could be wrong! The world is not a healthy place. If you really want change, if you are really serious about it then, hey, it starts from the beginning. Education."
In Red, White and Blue we bear witness to an injustice which feels so much bigger than one man, so pervasive that it cannot be stamped out. Yet just as the crimes against George Floyd earlier this year had a seismic impact across the world, Logan's willingness to act as a bridge between perpetrators and the victims did slowly but surely change things for those who came after him.
"I think a lot of Black people will see Red, White and Blue and understand it completely because it’s not just about the police," McQueen said at Esquire Townhouse in November. "It’s about other organisations you get into it and then that’s it, there’s no moving up or there’s a barrier."
While the film focuses on the early part of Logan's career, and doesn't give his father the satisfaction of seeing his attackers punished, there is a poetic justice in the fact that McQueen is eulogising Logan's life at the moment when the fight for racial equality is being fought with renewed passion.
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