The Right Honourable Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE*
(born: 24 October 1952)
Doreen Delceita Lawrence is a British Jamaican campaigner and the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a black British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. She promoted reforms of the police service and founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.
On the first national Stephen Lawrence Day on 22 April 2019, she described how she had worked for 26 years hoping for "an inclusive society for everyone to live their best life, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, religion, disability or background." In the aftermath of the inquiry, she continued to campaign for justice for her son as well as for other victims of racist crime. She has worked to secure further reforms of the police service. In 2003, she was awarded the OBE for services to community relations. Lawrence has been selected to sit on panels within the Home Office and the police, and she is a member of both the board and the council of Liberty, the human rights organisation, as well as being a patron of hate crime charity Stop Hate UK. In 1998, she worked with the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Marco Goldschmied Foundation to establish the Stephen Lawrence Prize, an annual prize and bursary for younger architects.
In October 2012, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 14th Pride of Britain Awards. In April 2014, she was named as Britain's most influential woman in the BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour Power List 2014. In May 2014, she was awarded the Grassroot Diplomat Initiative Award under the Social Driver category for her extensive work with the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. In April 2020, she was appointed as race relations advisor to the Labour Party.
She was elevated to the peerage as a life peer on 6 September 2013, as Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon in the Commonwealth Realm of Jamaica and sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords as a working peer.
She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Cambridge, the Open University and the University of West London. She serviced as Chancellor of De Montfort University, Leicester from 2016 to 2020.
*Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire