Details

This T-shirt was worn by Jane Henderson, who was involved in the Justice for the Cardiff Three campaign in the early 1990s.  The campaign fought for justice for three men who were wrongly convicted of murder.

Jane tells us:

“There was outrage in the local community, particularly in Butetown, because there wasn’t any sort of sense in the community that this was a very likely story. There was rumours abounding about the police’s witnesses and how they’d been, what had happened to them, and obviously there had been this TV programme where they had been looking for a white guy and to end up with ten black people in court and three black people in jail caused a great deal of unhappiness not unreasonably. So a campaign started in the Bay and there was public meetings in the community centre down in Butetown and people started a campaign and I went along to one of the public meetings.

“There was a few of us on the committee, the people who did most work was Yusef’s brother and Tony’s brother, so Lloyd Paris and Malik Abdullahi and both of their partners, their wives, and families did masses of campaigning and I was involved with a couple of friends of mine who I had known for a while, Des, Manny and Julian and we did a lot of things then with the campaign.

“For the Butetown carnival we got T-shirts made… I’m pretty sure that we sold all the T-shirts straight away and made another repeat order almost immediately afterwards but I think we bought as many T-shirts as we could get the money together for at the time.

The other big thing that went on which I didn’t do but was really quite influential was the graffiti. People sprayed ‘Free the Boys’ and  ‘Justice for the Cardiff Three’ over a lot of the walls of Butetown, and that was, it was very powerful, it was very unifying, it was like ‘this is what our community has to say’.”