Image credit Black Lives Matter – We Won’t Be Silenced – London’s Oxford Circus – 8 July 2016 by alisdare1.  Reproduced under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 2.0 licence.

No Black History Month blog post series would be complete without a (desperately incomplete) rundown of Black British heroes from the last era of extreme racial tension - the 1960s and 70s.

 

Kath Locke

Born in Manchester in 1928, Locke was an active member of Moss Side community politics, campaigning for Black history to be taught in schools, and persuading Manchester City Council to commemorate the 1945 Pan-African Congress with a plaque on the wall of Chorlton Town Hall. She also campaigned against the poll tax, which had a disproportionate impact on the incomes of poorer people, and fought to end the circulation of educational materials that stereotyped and disenfranchised Black people.  In 1980, Kath Locke and Elouise Edwards launched the Abasindi Co-operative, a self-help women’s organisation for Black women in Manchester. Within a few years, this co-operative was leading a variety of community projects out of the Moss Side People’s Centre, ranging from health support, youth engagement and supplementary education.

 

Gerlin Beane

Born in Jamaica, Gerlin Bean moved to London in 1960. She was one of the earliest members of The Black Unity and Freedom Party, founded in 1970. The BUFP was one of the first to argue for the equal value of women in the Black liberation movement.  In 1970, she was one of only two Black women at the National Women’s Liberation Conference at Oxford University. During the conference, she noticed the glaring differences between the issues facing Black and white women. Soon after, Gerlin launched the Black Women’s Action Committee and opened the Black Women’s Centre in Brixton, which served as both a supportive and safe space for women.

 

Olive Morris

Olive Morris was just 27 when she died, but she is widely commemorated as a powerful campaigner for racial and gender equality, squatters’ rights and housing. The Jamaican-born community activist co-founded the Brixton Black Women’s Group in 1973, campaigning fiercely for Black and Women‘s rights from age 17 until her early death from cancer. She was instrumental in organising the Black Women’s Movement, cofounding the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent in London, and later at university the Manchester Black Women’s Co-operative.

Having begun to squat buildings in Brixton on account of housing need in the 1970s, Morris came to see the occupation of property as a means to establish political projects. Squatting provided a way for the Brixton Black Women’s Group to remain autonomous from the broader women’s liberal on movement in England. In 1973, Morris squatted 121 Railton Road with Liz Obi. The 121 squat later became an anarchist self-managed social centre known as the 121 Centre, which existed until 1999.

As a co-founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, Morris also worked tirelessly to overcome the struggles endured by Black women. As part of her work, Morris travelled all over the world, including to Morocco, Algeria, Spain and China. A communist and radical Black feminist, Morris committed herself to resisting racial, class and sexual oppression before she died from cancer in 1979.

 

Mavis Best

Mavis Best worked with a group of Black women from Lewisham (SE London) to do away with the infamous ‘Sus law’: powers granted to the police under the 1824 Vagrancy Act to stop and search “suspected persons” that was being manipulated by police officers to stop, search, arrest, detain and assault young Black people. Before Best and her campaign group’s Scrap Sus campaign secured a complete repeal of the unfair law, Best worked with other Black women to rescue children from police stations by demanding their release.

 

Dr Louis Mahoney

Mahoney changed from a promising career in medicine to acting, later becoming an antiracism activist and campaigner for racial equality in the acting profession. He was one of the first Black actors to join the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared on popular television shows from Doctor Who to Miss Marple and Fawlty Towers, enjoying an unusually successful career for a Black actor at the time.  Mahoney volunteered his time to help disadvantaged young Black people and co-created the Black Theatre Workshop. He helped found Performers Against Racism in protest at apartheid in South Africa and represented African and Asian members of the actor’s guild, Equity, as its vice-president from 1994-1996.

 

Jocelyn Barrow

While working full-time as a teacher, Jocelyn Barrow was also a founding member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) and a leading member of the North London West Indian Association (NLWIA). Barrow pioneered multi-cultural education, highlighting the limitations of a one-size-fits-all education system, raising awareness of the subtly different educational needs of different ethnic groups.  The first Black woman appointed as a BBC Governor in the 1980s, Barrow founded and served as deputy chair for the Broadcasting Standards Council, the precursor to Ofcom. She was also involved in establishing and overseeing museums and was the first patron of the Black Cultural Archives.

She chaired the 2005 Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage that produced the report Delivering Shared Heritage, the findings of which she claimed set out a code of values for delivering inclusive and healthy heritage management practice not just for African and Asian communities but for everyone.  Barrow was instrumental in the establishment of the North Atlantic Slavery Gallery and the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool. She was a Trustee of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside and a Governor of the British Film Institute, as well as the first patron of the Black Cultural Archives.  

Jocelyn Barrow received an OBE in 1972, was made the first Black Dame in 1992 in recognition of her broadcasting and contributions to the European Union while acting as the UK member of the Economic and Social Committee. She also received honorary doctorates from the University of Greenwich in 1993 and the University of York in 2007.

 

Darcus Howe

Another member of the Black Panthers and the Mangrove Nine, Howe established the Race Today Collective and chaired the Notting Hill Carnival Development Committee for many years. During his twelve years as editor of Race Today, the magazine supported several high profile campaigns including a strike over poor pay and conditions by female Asian workers at London’s Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory and drew attention to the suspected racist arson attack in New Cross that killed 13 young Black people, which had previously attracted worryingly little widespread attention.

Darcus Howe himself helped organise the largest all-Black demonstration in Britain to protest the government’s lack of concern about the incident, sadly only succeeding in provoking a racist government to expand stop and search powers in a bid to reassert control over London’s Black population. After the Brixton riots, Howe adopted a more militant stance, advocating direct resistance to white oppression for the rest of his life.

 

Altheia Jones-LeCointe

Trinidadian physician and research scientist, Altheia Jones-LeCointe led the British Black Panther Movement, recruiting thousands from the 1960s onwards, including the late broadcaster and campaigner, Darcus Howe, as well as giving talks in schools and teaching classes in anti-colonialism. A staunch defender of women’s as well as racial rights, she developed procedures within the Black Panthers to investigate and punish men suspected of the abuse or exploitation of women.

A member of The Mangrove Nine, she was repeatedly arrested and tried after demonstrations against police raids of The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill. The Mangrove had become a focus for London’s black community, attracting creatives,
campaigners and intellectuals. This in turn made it a natural target for regular ‘drug raids’ from the Metropolitan Police force as they attempted to intimidate the Black civil rights movement.  Representing herself at the trial, she used her closing speech to highlight the racism of the Metropolitan Police. Found not guilty of conspiracy to incite a riot, this landmark case marked a turning point in the fight to recognise and remedy systemic racism in British institutions.

 

Dr Paul Stephenson

In 1963, Stephenson organised a 60-day boycott of a Bristol bus company that refused to employ Black or Asian people, emulating Martin Luther King Jr’s civil disobedience approach in the USA. The boycott grabbed national press headlines. The company promptly removed its hiring ban.  He next attracted media attention when he was wrongly arrested and charged with refusal to leave licensed premises after refusing to leave a pub when ordered to do so by a bar manager on the grounds that he refused to serve Black people. After witnesses refuted spurious claims he had acted aggressively, the case was dismissed. Stephenson later joined the Commission for Racial Equality in London.

In 1975, while working for the Sports Council, he campaigned against sporting contact with apartheid South Africa.  In 1992, he set up the Bristol Black Archives partnership to “protect and promote” local African-Caribbean history.  It took until 2009 for Dr Stephenson to be awarded an OBE for his services to equal opportunities and community relations in Bristol. Dr Stephenson later received a Pride of Britain Award for Lifetime Achievement and Great Western Railway named a train in Stevenson’s honour. To what extent has society really moved on in those 36 years and to what extent are we still witnessing the Government and businesses honouring Black people to maintain an inclusive image as part of their public relations strategies?

 

Black History on film

Films and documentaries that truly resonate with us do more than just entertain. They inspire, enrich, challenge and open up new avenues of enquiry within us. Working in partnership with universities and libraries, Kanopy offers free streaming of films, documentaries and more to your smart device, all free from advertisements and with a collection that grows every month.

This Black History Month, why not explore these films and documentaries – just a few of the many available now on Kanopy?

Or click here to check out all the videos on African History.