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Unless there are miraculous, advances, in medicine to triple life expectancy in humans, I will not be alive to see an ethnically diverse Metropolitan police force. This is because, according to the Mets H R department, it will take a century before ethnic parity is achieved between the Force and the community it serves. Diversifying the Met was one of the major recommendations of The Macpherson Report, published, twenty years ago this week. The report investigated the killing of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and the institutional failure which, initially, led to the dropping of charges against two of the suspects. The report made landmark recommendations to promote a zero-tolerance approach to racism in the police, and the wider society. While there have significant improvements in policing and combatting racism since the publication, the relentless Islamophobia, rise in anti-Semitism and xenophobia suggests there is still some way to go to reach the zero-tolerance society Macpherson envisaged. But should we have to wait a whole century for the Met to look like its constituency? Challenging the pace of change for racial justice is played-out in one of the great struggles in British, West Indian church history. In the early 18th Century, Christians clashed over the pace, of the abolition of slavery. Almost everyone in civil society agreed that slavery was morally wrong, but there were disagreements on the pace of change. On one side was the Oxford educated Anglican priest, George Wilson Bridges and on the other, the Jamaican slave preacher, Sam Sharpe. The Rev Bridges believed that abolition if granted at all, should be a gradual process. And he established an organisation in Jamaica, to slow down the pace of change. In contrast, the enslaved Sam Sharpe demanded, immediate abolition, with no conditions whatsoever. To speed up the march towards freedom, he organised a mass strike of thousands of slaves. Sharpe won the argument. Within a few years of his protest, emancipation was granted. As a constant reminder that the pace of racial justice is always in the hands of the people, rather than those in power, the history books of the Caribbean speak of, the slaves who abolished slavery. We the people also have a role in speeding up the pace of inclusion in the Met and other institutions which fail to reflect the rich, and diverse cultural histories of the United Kingdom. Surely, a concerted effort by all of us will make these bodies look very different in less than a hundred years from now.