1. Doreen Lawrence

Doreen Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE, was born in Jamaica in 1952, she emigrated to England aged nine and completed her education in London before becoming a bank worker.

She is the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. She and Stephen’s father Neville Lawrence founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust in 1998 to promote a positive community legacy in their son’s name.

In 1999, after years of campaigning by the Lawrence family, a wide-ranging judicial inquiry was established to investigate the circumstances of Stephen’s death. It concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist, one of the primary causes of their failure to solve the Stephen Lawrence case.

In the aftermath of the inquiry, Doreen Lawrence continued to campaign for justice for her son as well as for other victims of racist crime.

In 2003 she was awarded the OBE for services to community relations, and was made a life peer in 2013. She has been selected to sit on panels within the Home Office and the Police Service and is a member of both the board and the council of the organisation Liberty and patron of hate crime charity, Stop Hate UK.