Harsh lessons to be learnt from a suicide in Telford

The coroner went to the heart of the matter when he summed up at the end of the inquest into the death of Errol McGowan, a black doorman found hanged in Telford in 1999. "The lessons are clear," said Michael Gwynne. "The obscenity of racial abuse and harassment must be rooted out."

We welcome his plain-speaking and the fact that the concerns about Errol's death were, in the end, taken seriously. When The Independent first drew attention to the circumstances of his death, that was far from being the case. This paper always said that it was unclear how Errol had died; the jury yesterday returned a suicide verdict, on the basis of all the facts. The jury also heard from a senior police officer that there was "no doubt whatsoever" about the link between the racial harassment suffered by Errol and his death. This was a link which had originally been disastrously ignored. The court heard of how desperate Errol became at the police failure to act in response to his complaints of racist harassment. He told one colleague: "I have been to [the police] so many times. Do I have to wait until they do something to me or my family?"

It was depressing that, when The Independent first highlighted that lethal pattern of harassment, we were criticised for doing so. Some appeared to believe it would be more appropriate to draw a veil over what Errol had suffered – and over the circumstances of the death of Errol's nephew Jason, who was also found hanged, six months later, after asking persistent questions about his uncle's death. An inquest into his death is due in four months' time.

Silence benefits nobody: not the family, nor the community, nor the country. As the violence that has erupted elsewhere in Britain in recent weeks reminds us, the problems of racism are still close to the surface – despite a reluctance to confront that ugly truth. The murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the failure of the police inquiry, were a milestone marking the beginning of an attempt to eradicate the "institutional racism" identified by the Macpherson report.

Mr Gwynne said yesterday that, in Telford, "The learning curve will never be forgotten." We hope he is right – and that the lessons have now been learnt not just in Telford but nationwide. There is, after all, no evidence to suggest that such problems are worse in Telford than anywhere else in the country. On the contrary: these are problems that touch us all.