The world wide Black Lives Matters campaign following the murder of George Floyd, the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol and the Oriel College decision to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue, and the ongoing Windrush Scandal, have ensured that multiple aspects of British Black History are high on the agenda along with the debate about how to deal with Britain’s colonial, slavery and Empire past. This is about ensuring that the real nature of British history is told not the whitewashed version. Blog reader Martin Spafford, co-author for OCR Migration GCSE programme, has drawn my attention to seven simple things Runnymede Trust suggests to help embed histories of migration, Black British history and empire in the history curriculum
The Guardian newspaper is playing an increasingly important role in publishing relevant material and debate including
Letter from Marika Sherwood 15 June
Letter from me as a follow-up to Marika’s 17 June
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/tackling-racial-injustice-through-education
(Interestingly this has been copied onto the website of Glouctershire Health Living and Learning.)
www.ghll.org.uk/news/items/tackling_racial_injustice_through_education__letters-2020-06-16
George Monbiot on Empire atrocities
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
John Harris on racists and British history
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/15/racists-england-diverse-multiracial
Afua Hircsh on the Tories plan to tackle racism
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/17/boris-johnson-racism-woke-tories
including the role of banks in slavery explicity drawing on the work of the British Slave-ownership project at UCL.
The work starting on Parliament’s statues and paintings of MPs connected with the slavery business.
A discussion between Bernardine Evastino and Amelia Gentleman on their books in The Review printed section today.
Yesterday’s commemoration of Emancipation in the United States reminds us of the support in Britain for the cause from the late 1830s, and ensuring that the then Government did not ally with the Confederacy. Then on Monday (22 June) there is the annual Windrush Commemoration Day.
Thoughts on Sadiq Khan’s Commission and the Dilemmas of History
I have posted three discussion pieces about London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s setting up a Commission to review statues etc in London, and whether he should be doing more. The other two are about the dilemmas thrown up in history about Baden-Powell and how we celebrate Black Rhodes and other scholars.
http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/what-more-should-sadiq-khan-be-doing.html
http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/history-is-shades-of-grey-dilemma-over.html
http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-dilemma-of-rhodes-scholarships.html
Web Resources
The Africanist Resource
The African Stories in Hull and East Yorkshire project, which explores and documents the stories of people of African descent in the Hull and East Yorkshire area, has set up an excellent resource The Africanist website which is a one-stop shop for a wealth of sites and other resources dealing with Black History.
www.africansinyorkshireproject.com
Jeffrey Green’s Website Gets British Library Recognition
Jeff’s website has been taken on by the British Library as part of the national UK Web Archive. The open UK Web Archive can be seen at www.webarchive.org.uk, and is accessible at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Wales, Edinburgh and the British Library, and via The Africanist website. Recent additions to Jeff; site are guest postings by Rainer Lotz on the entertainer Josephine Morcashani, and Kathy Chater on the Audains, as well as Jeff on the underreserached history of black people’s participation in English social life in Victorian times.
The Audains
Kathy Chater has had a precis of the life of Ida Audain, a harpist, at the end of the 19thC published in the Dictionary of National Biography. Ida, her sister and her sister’s husband did occasional charity concerts organised by a black women called Julie Pelletier who lived in Brixton. Kathy is unable to find out much her about her as she was in Britain for only a few years between censuses. Any help would be appreciated.
From Windrush to 1990s Brixton Hip-Hop
Windrush Day 2020 BCA events
https://blackculturalarchives.org/ww20?mc_cid=91d4d9eeb0&mc_eid=355aaf01fc
‘70 Objeks & Tings’ Celebrating 70 Years of Caribbeans in the UK
Museumand, the Nottingham based Black History Museum Launching of the first instalment of a new book on Windrush Day 2020 to help everyone learn about Caribbean history, heritage and culture – and to tell the stories of members of the Windrush Generation around the UK and the amazing contributions they have made to life in Britain using everyday objects, to enable people to explore ‘aspects of their heritage and culture they may not have discovered before in a fun, intergenerational way, while giving those who lived it a chance to reminisce and retell their stories, keeping our tangible and intangible history alive and at the forefront of our minds.’
Future sections will be published, and a printed versin will be available of the complete book next year.
The first section of the book is all about food and explores some of the ingredients, recipes, dishes and snacks familiar to Caribbean families in the UK. The book also includes a flavour of Caribbean sayings, riddles and songs – with plenty of fun and informative ‘Did You Knows’.
Patrick Vernon comments that “70 Objeks and Tings is a fantastic resource as we celebrate national Windrush Day and the legacy of the Windrush Generation since the docking of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. This book will provide fun and intergenerational dialogue with elders who have stories and narratives around these objects.”
You can read the first instalment of ’70 Objeks & Tings’ at http://museumand.org/objeksandtings
Windrush Stories at the British Library
Brixton Hip-Hop 1990s
Slavery and Black Atlantic Reading
www.academia.edu/40073757/Randy_M._Browne_Surviving_Slavery_in_the_British_Caribbean
www.academia.edu/41576459/What_the_Abolitionists_Were_Up_Against_Revisited (in the USA)
The Development of Black Cultural Archives
The role of Black Cultural Archives will hopefully be considerably boosted by the current debate, leading to donations and funding which will underpin its sustainability. The Trustees have adopted a ten year strategy. It plans to archive the Black Lives Movement.
BCA Statement: Black Lives Matter
Archiving Black Lives Matter
https://blackculturalarchives.org/blog/2020/6/8/document-black-lives-matter
BCA’s 10 Year Strategy
https://seancreighton1947.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/10be7-bca2030visionstrategyandoutcomes_v4.pdf
BCA Future Public Meeting Video
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjOGCgE2nuY&feature=youtu.be&mc_cid=91d4d9eeb0&mc_eid=355aaf01fc
of what work and workplaces were like in the post- war years.
https://blackculturalarchives.org/blog/2020/6/4/dame-jocelyn-barrow-1929-2020
Black Lives Matters and Anti-Racism
The Britain@Work London team is collecting articles about work during lockdown describing in detail working in retail, rail and Royal Mail.’ The project’s on-going work is on hold because of COVID. It states ‘Black Lives Matter has now given us all the opportunity to change the way history is taught and a springboard to the lives of working-class anti-racist struggles back into the frame. This is what Britain at Work London’s book All in a Day’s Work (2015) tried to do by including a record of those struggles in west London, reclaiming the past for the present generation.’
Slavery and Colonialism in India late 1830s/early 1840s
‘Beginning in the late 1830s, a coalition of non-conformists, abolitionists, free traders, and disenchanted East India Company proprietors began to vocally challenge the exploitative policies of the colonial state in British India. Led by lecturer George Thompson, these reformers pursued a rhetorical strategy of associating groups who were converted into ‘mere tools’ by the Company abroad and the aristocracy at home. These monopolistic entities degraded Indian peasant cultivators, the British working classes, and princely sovereigns alike through forms of ‘virtual slavery’ that persisted in the post-Emancipation empire. In staging these protests, reformers ran up against an adversarial Board of Control and Court of Directors who obstructed their efforts to mobilize public opinion. Probing their agitation reveals the existence of a particularly combative strain of liberal imperialist thought that defied the political status quo.’
This is a summary of the essay at
COVID Archiving
The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust is collecting material on COVID in Greater Manchester.
Jeff’s put my piece about the Audains on his website. I’m waiting for one of Cyril’s descendants to come over from New Zealand – her mum (old, not entirely with it) has photos that I need – but that’s not going to happen soon. I’m sorry the other descendant is so unco-operative. We could have done something jointly.
https://jeffreygreen.co.uk/251-a-victorian-middle-class-family-the-audains/
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