Pocket Book - 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

1981 - BLACK LIVERPOOL PAST AND PRESENT JIMI JAGNE AND STEPHEN SMALL WITH A PREFACE BY PAWLET BROOKES

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1981 - BLACK LIVERPOOL PAST AND PRESENT Published by Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage Serendipity 21 Bowling Green Street Leicester LE1 6AS +44 (0) 116 482 1394 info@serendipity-uk.com www.serendipity-uk.com Serendipity Artists Movement Limited Company registration number in England and Wales 07248813 Charity registration number in England and Wales 1160035 Copyright © Serendipity Artists Movement Limited 2022 Design © The Unloved Text © Pawlet Brookes, Jimi Jagne and Stephen Small Photographers © Mike Abrahams, Liverpool Black Sisters, Getty Images, Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, Dorothy Kuya, David Sinclair Editor Pawlet Brookes MBE Additional Research © Amy Grain, Aderonke Omotosho, Georgina Payne, Heather Saunders, Ashly Stanly ISBN: 978-1-913862-10-7 A CIP record for this book is at the British Library Whilst every effort has been made to provide accurate information, Serendipity cannot accept responsibility for any inaccuracies contained within this publication. The views expressed in this book are those of the contributors alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of the publishers.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced except for purposes of research, criticism and reviews, without prior permission from the contributors and publishers.

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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6 PREFACE – PAWLET BROOKES 8 INTRODUCTION: RETRIEVING LIVERPOOL’S BLACK VOICES – JIMI JAGNE 12 CHARLES WOOTTON AND THE 1919 ANTI-BLACK RIOTS – STEPHEN SMALL 22 PASTOR DANIELS EKARTE AND THE AFRICAN CHURCHES MISSION – STEPHEN SMALL 28 DOROTHY KUYA – LIVERPOOL’S TIRELESS CHAMPION OF EQUALITY – STEPHEN SMALL 34 THE “OXFORD OUT!” MARCH AND MASS RALLY – JIMI JAGNE 40 THE LIVERPOOL BLACK CAUCUS – JIMI JAGNE 48 THE LIVERPOOL 8 RASTAFARIANS – JIMI JAGNE 56 THE LIVERPOOL BLACK SISTERS – JIMI JAGNE 64 FOOTNOTES 66 BIOGRAPHIES

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PAWLET BROOKES

PREFACE

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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JIMI JAGNE

INTRODUCTION: RETRIEVING LIVERPOOL’S BLACK VOICES 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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10 Introduction: Retrieving Liverpool’s Black Voices

Almost every aspect of life in this country depended wholesale on Britain’s thriving prospects as a slaveholding nation and colonial power. Society’s biggest stakeholders were also the most powerful. A great many of them lived here, in Liverpool, and were responsible for establishing the essential foundations of the great reputation the city enjoys today. In fact, the available evidence indicates that Liverpool was an overwhelmingly pro-slavery and imperialist city with no significant history of support for abolition or anti-colonialism. Plantation owners, shipping merchants, the burgeoning wave of new industrialists and bankers, politicians and city officials, all threw their full weight behind the promotion of social eugenics theory as the means to account for their despicably mutual enterprise. Its development was from the very start intended to present Black people in caricature and provided the premise for arguments supporting the insidious claims that we were a biologically, intellectually and socially inferior race. This pseudo-science fast became the means for the racist empire builders to legitimise notions of white supremacy and justify slavery, imperialist rule and colonial occupation.

The nature and severity of the racism perpetuated during that time remains the cruellest longstanding legacy of slavery and colonialism.

While the history of a glorious maritime heritage that established Liverpool as one of the world’s great seaport cities has been taught with enormous pride and zeal, racist notions and insinuations of a worthless and insubstantial Black history have also persisted and been told with no less a degree of determination and dismissal. Not many Liverpudlians today are even aware, let alone propose, that Liverpool was actually built on the back of a great injustice to humankind in becoming one of the world’s major slave trading and land-grabbing port cities. It may seem more than a little ironic that Liverpool’s own William Gladstone is celebrated as one of Britain’s great Prime Ministers yet he was also the son of one of the nation’s wealthiest slave-owners and fought tooth and nail to resist the abolition of slavery. The most devastating truth, from the standpoint of Black children, men and women, is that the significance of the historical exploits of many of our city’s most powerful men still fails to warrant even the least mention in local school classrooms today.

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12 Introduction: Retrieving Liverpool’s Black Voices

as an aspiring community. In fact, Black lives in Liverpool have always been most concerned with how best to assume control of and shape the future of our community justly in spite of the city’s consistent failure to hear, and respond more positively, to our collective voices.

I must, at this point, mention my dear, good friend, mentor and collaborator, Professor Stephen Small. Although Stephen was born and grew up in Liverpool he is now in his twenty-sixth year teaching in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, Stephen and I will present, in seven further instalments, just a sample of the many stories which form Liverpool’s contested Black history, during the twentieth century. We’ll reveal, despite the city’s prevailing reputation as a “cultural melting pot”, how Liverpool has a profoundly racist history. We’ll also demonstrate that Liverpool’s racist experiences were felt, mostly, by those making up a uniquely racial demographic; formed by generations of a largely African and Liverpool-born Black population, spanning the length and breadth of the entire century.

Concentrating on the theme of self-determination, we’ll also show, unequivocally, that we did not simply allow ourselves to fall victim to the prejudice, discrimination, separation and violence we faced. Quite the opposite! We asserted ourselves and actively confronted the racism of the time, in various attempts to take ownership and control of our own lives, our own families and our own neighbourhood streets. Some of those whose stories we’ll recall were born in Liverpool. Others, while born elsewhere, spent most of their lives living here as British citizens.

Others were brief visitors who, while having no previous connections with the city, nonetheless felt sufficiently moved to express themselves or act in ways which influenced our community’s determination to shape a destiny for itself.

Perhaps most importantly, we contend that Liverpool Blacks have withstood racism in a truly holistic sense. We’ll attempt to provide just a few examples as evidence that self-determination has not been the 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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Liverpool 8 Defence Committee (1981). Photographer David Sinclair.

14 Introduction: Retrieving Liverpool’s Black Voices

exclusive preserve of any one particular section of our community or group of people living here. Defiant resistance in Liverpool has been, at one time or another, situated at the heart of all Black concerns. Resistance has been taken up as the final resort of those in some of the most unlikely corners of the community and, occasionally, by those least recognised for having made their own particular contribution. We’ll spotlight the efforts of victim survivors, enterprising individuals, family collectives, committed activists and those of one particular radical cultural group, as well as the work of a band of ground-breaking feminists.

Above all else, the lesson we most seek to highlight here, as Stephen constantly likes to remind me, is that “we need to listen to more Black Voices and decolonise our minds!”

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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STEPHEN SMALL

CHARLES WOOTTON AND THE 1919 ANTIBLACK RIOTS 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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The first world war – nick-named “The Great War” - ended in 1918 and was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Black men from the West Indies, Africa and England (including Liverpool) played active roles in that war for Great Britain in the military and as merchant seamen. Obviously that war did not end all wars. It didn’t end racism either, especially in Liverpool. In fact, it made things worse. Great Britain had invaded Africa, transported millions of Africans into vicious slavery and developed ideas of white superiority and black inferiority to justify its political domination and economic exploitation. Racism was also about social superiority too, keeping whites in dominant positions and Black people subordinate, in housing and socialising, including sexual relationships. By the time of the Great War, racist ideas, beliefs and ideologies had been spread across Britain for centuries.

From the very start, Africans and our descendants defended their families and communities, working under horrific conditions of subordinate labour in Africa and enslaved labour in the West Indies. Finding work was one the main reasons Black men came to Liverpool in the first place. This was the context in which the race riots of 1919 in Liverpool happened.

At that time, Liverpool’s Black population had been resident at least 200 years; it increased during the war, as Black men were recruited or arrived in Liverpool from across the British empire to fill jobs left vacant by white men who had gone to fight in war. When white men returned to Liverpool after the war ended, they resented the Black presence and Black workers; and they resented relationships between Black men and white women.

Resentment increased if white men were unemployed, or poor, and when it seemed Black men had better jobs or income, and dressed fashionably.

Throughout 1919, massive hordes of white men roamed the streets of Liverpool on a rampage of violence, terrorising, attacking and maiming Black men at random, and killing some of them. They attacked Black individuals walking on the street, in places they lived, like the Elder Dempster Hostel, and venues where they socialised, like the Ethiopian Hall in Russell Street. The most well-known victim of this racism was Charles Wootton from the West Indies, then aged 24, who was ruthlessly chased

18 Charles Wootton And The 1919 Anti-Black Riots

by hundreds of white men to the Queens Dock. A lynch mob threw him in the water and bombarded him with stones, where he drowned. No one was ever arrested despite police officers being present. Another example of British justice in action. The Adult Education Centre in the Rialto Buildings was renamed the Charles Wootton Centre in 1974, in commemoration of him.

The police were mostly indifferent, and many police perpetrated violence themselves. When Black men defended themselves, or filed complaints, they were arrested by the police and the courts charged them as if they were instigators. As usual, the authorities got it back to front and were in favour of white people. But several attacks were so ferocious that even the police stepped in to protect hundreds of Black men. Black men and other men of colour (Asians, Yemenis) got the worst of the violence, but long-established xenophobia meant there was widespread anti-Jewish, anti-Irish, and anti-Chinese violence too.

Now these really were race riots - white men, often with support of the police, randomly attacking Black men who had done nothing wrong and nothing illegal. This is unlike the protests of 1981, still today misnamed race riots, in which Black and white people together fought on the streets of Liverpool 8 against police surveillance and brutality.

Back in 1919, the authorities did very little to help Black men. The Chief of police and Lord Mayor of the city blamed Black men for simply being in the city and wanted them removed. The Lord Mayor asked the Home Office for financial help to repatriate Black men, even though they were British citizens. Some Black men were encouraged, persuaded or coerced into going back home, though the cost of repatriation meant this was only a small number. The Home Office sympathised with the whites and offered a British style racist response - intentional, and bureaucratic, yet skirting the law. It responded to the Mayor:

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Charles Wootton in his Navy Uniform (C. 1910s)

20 Charles Wootton And The 1919 Anti-Black Riots

“…while it is not possible to deport compulsorily any coloured men who are British subjects it is considered desirable that so far as possible all unemployed coloured men should be induced to return to their own countries as quickly as possible.”

Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration1 The police were asked to compile a list of names, addresses and marital status of Black men and introduced a special repatriation scheme for “British coloureds” with funds to send them back. They capitulated by insisting that Black men with a white spouse should be excluded.

Black seaman defended themselves against the white mobs and helped one another where they could. They insisted that they had done nothing wrong, they were innocent and that as British citizens, they demanded British justice. It did not matter. Black men (and their white wives) had little or no positions of authority or power, no influence in local or national government, and had limited economic means.

One of the men attached and beaten mercilessly was Ernest Marke, a British citizen from Sierra Leone, who had arrived in Liverpool a few years earlier and was living there in 1919. Many years later, he wrote his memoirs, In Troubled Waters2, and left us a first-hand account of his experiences. Attacks were random, unrelenting and vicious. The police did nothing to help. But several white women intervened to prevent a beating so bad that it would have killed him.

All things considered; Ernest Marke accepted funds for repatriation to British Guiana where he was told there were great opportunities for work. He regretted it immediately – “I soon discovered that I’d jumped from the frying pan straight into the flaming fire”. The opportunities were non-existent.

Some other Black voices can be found in local newspapers. One example was D T Aleifasakure Toummanah, an African merchant and the secretary of Ethiopian Hall. He protested against the blatant racism, met with the Lord 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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Mayor and reminded him of the contributions that Black sailors and soldiers had made to Britain. “We ask for British justice, to be treated as true and loyal sons of Great Britain”3. Again, the plea fell on deaf ears.

We don’t know much about how Black educators, intellectuals and activists outside Liverpool – in London and the colonies - responded to this brutality and lack of official response (we’re collecting information right now).

There had been a pan-African conference in London in 1900, attended by Liverpool-born John Archer, who became the first Black mayor in Britain.

He was active in politics in London in 1919 and must have known about the racist violence. W E B Dubois organised the first pan African Congress in Paris early in 1919 (and had been at the one in London in 1900).

The pervasive racism in Liverpool in 1919 wasn’t the end of it; far more racism was to follow. Discrimination in the form of low pay, poor and unhealthy work conditions and permanent subordinate status was wellestablished in shipping companies like Elder Dempster. Trade Unions condoned or actively supported racist treatment of Black sailors, as did local and national authorities. The law turned a blind eye or was deliberately racist. For example, the 1925 Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order – legalised racist discrimination, demanding Black British citizens provided documents like passports before they could work. It was well known at that time that most sailors – Black and white – simply did not have such documents. Actions were taken to prevent them acquiring them. Just for good (racist) measure, the act was renewed in 1938 and 1942.

Black people and our families in Liverpool lacked access or were denied the resources to prevent police abuse and local government racism, but we have always refused to be silent; we have always supported and assisted one another against the odds; we have always persevered in our efforts to take charge of our own lives and shape our own priorities. We have always raised our voices to challenge the lies and distortions of those in power. Our history before and since 1919 is testimony to our embrace of self-determination.

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STEPHEN SMALL

PASTOR DANIELS EKARTE AND THE AFRICAN CHURCHES MISSION 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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24 Pastor Daniels Ekarte And The African Churches Mission

and men. He advised Africans and others that arrived in the city looking for work or housing. He also provided special services and events to celebrate holidays and the arrival of guests; and to bring some joy and the affirmation of life to a community struggling with poverty or debt. In the 1940s the Mission became a home for a small number of children, especially those of mixed parentage, including the so-called “Brown Babies” abandoned by Black American fathers who did military service in Liverpool during World War Two. His efforts to assist greater numbers of children were stifled, largely by racist opposition.

When he first arrived in Liverpool, Pastor Ekarte was appalled by the swearing, drunkenness misconduct and racism of many local white people.

Missionaries in Africa had deceived him into believing all whites were decent, moral and good. The harsh reality in Liverpool was a shock.

He had support from many local people who volunteered to help with cooking, cleaning, and secretarial services, maintenance and repairs to the buildings and fund raising. They admired and respected his commitment to helping people. The Bishop of Liverpool, for example, was present at the opening of the Mission. Ekarte reached out to other local welfare organisations, though they usually rejected him and verbal abuse and rejection was the main response from local and national authorities, including harassment from the police, from the Colonial Office and from the head of the Anti-slavery Society (Sir) John Harris, Britain’s self-appointed moral authority on all things to do with Black people. Harris went out of his way to prevent anyone helping the Mission - and he built on his past experience as a missionary in Rhodesia and South Africa, where he had advocated racial segregation.

Remember that most whites in Liverpool at this time expressed racist views, building on Liverpool’s history as the slaving capital of the world, and prolonged as Liverpool became the second city of Empire.

Eugenicist ideologies were prevalent at the time, as was the arrogance of imperial politicians and local competition for scarce resources like jobs and housing. The police were the vanguard of everyday racism against 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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Blacks, white men perpetrated random and routine acts of verbal and physical abuse and companies made sure Black people were at the back of the line when it came to jobs, whether in shipping or local factories.

The British had enslaved Africans in the Caribbean for economic extraction, under the guise of Christianity; the British then subordinated Africans in Africa – and in Liverpool - again for purposes of economic extraction, under the guise of doing them a favour too.

Academics at Liverpool University like D Caradog Jones and researchers like Rachel Fleming and Mabel Fletcher provided the veneer of science to justify discrimination. Under the guise of objectivity - and the validation of university backing, they compiled reports that vilified the entire Black community, especially the children of mixed relationships and their white mothers. Harold King, Warden of the University Settlement called Fletcher’s report “impressive and authoritative”. Their names should go down in infamy and would have done so already if Liverpool schools and universities had not whitewashed this history. But the truth is coming out. As we mentioned, not all Blacks were slandered in the same way - Blacks from the Caribbean (previously stereotyped as happy and contented slaves freed by the British) were by the twentieth century enjoying the fruits of civilisation under British political authority and guardianship. Africans in British colonies were still regarded as savages and heathens, living in the jungle, worshiping spirts and idols, led by witchdoctors and yet to full enjoy the benefits of civilisation. The British were working to improve Africans - if only Africans could see what was good for them. Museums in Liverpool and elsewhere made sure the local population knew the difference. In Liverpool, pastor Daniels experienced some of the worst of British racism, and his challenges to injustice were regarded by most authorities as impudence from an inferior.

Pastor Daniel’s sought inspiration in the Bible; and he did what Black people have always done, he reached out to other Black people across the city, the nation, in Africa and the Diaspora. Black people had already been passing through the city for a long time, African Americans like Frederick Douglass, Ellen Craft and Anna Julia Cooper campaigning

26 Pastor Daniels Ekarte And The African Churches Mission

against slavery in the United States, and W E B Dubois and Ida B Wells campaigning against lynching and legal segregation. Pan-Africanists like Edward Wilmott Blyden, and also Henry Sylvester Williams, who organised the first pan-African Congress in London in 1900 probably passed there also. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who became the first present of independent Nigeria knew Ekarte well and sent several of his brethren to stay at the ACM and Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minster of independent Ghana passed through Liverpool too.

Ekarte met pan-Africanists and champions of self-determination like George Padmore, and probably Ras Makonnen; he met race equality leader Harold Moody of the League of Coloured People. Ekarte probably interacted with people in the West African Students Association, founded in London in 1925, and must have known about the pan-African congress in Manchester in 1945. Ekarte met Paul Robeson in St George’s Hall in 1948, and Dorothy Kuya was at that meeting too. Ludwig Hesse, an active pan-Africanist and Dorothy’s mentor, was certainly there too, because he helped organise the visit by Robeson.

The endless struggles to keep the African Churches Mission open securing funding, delivering services, resisting racism – wore Pastor Ekarte down. Local authorities redirected services away from him. In 1956, for example, rather than funding his mission, the Colonial Office funded Stanley House as an alternative venue. Tired and demoralised, Ekarte laboured on. But he became weaker and the building more dilapidated. He was moved out of the building, which was demolished in 1964. He died a few weeks later and was buried in Allerton Cemetery.

I have never heard of any recognition or commemoration of his grave, which would be a necessary corrective to the memorials in the city that champion the likes of William Gladstone and Alfred Jones.

Ekarte’s life work reveals many of the quintessential elements of Black self-determination in the face of adversity. He exemplifies motivation, confidence, drive and endurance, as well as collective actions, and an embrace of Black people across Africa and the Diaspora.

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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Those of us seeking to decolonise Liverpool schools by providing insights into our history that identify the real and substantial contributions of Black women and men need to know about Pastor Daniels Ekarte, and the many other Black people that have been pushed into obscurity by Liverpool schools. And we owe a special debt of gratitude to people like Marika Sherwood, unsupported by academic institutions, who has rescued his story from oblivion, and has made sure he is not forgotten.

Pastor Daniels Ekarte and two of the children in his care (Date Unknown).

28

STEPHEN SMALL

DOROTHY KUYA – LIVERPOOL’S TIRELESS CHAMPION OF EQUALITY 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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30 Dorothy Kuya – Liverpool’s Tireless Champion of Equality

In the final decades of her life, most people in Liverpool knew about her work on Black history tours and at the International Slavery Museum (ISM).

Many knew about her efforts to prevent the destruction of Granby Street, including how she founded the Granby Resident’s association. Many people met her at meetings or heard her give presentations. But they didn’t know about her tremendous accomplishments before then.

Dorothy lived a long life. She was born in 1933 and died in 2013; she was an activist from early in her life, determined to tackle poverty and injustice, she joined the Young Communist League and confidently began public speaking while still a teenager. She was Liverpool’s first Senior Community Relations Officer. Several vital community organisations in Liverpool 8 would not exist without her, of would not have achieved as much as they did – including South Liverpool Personnel, the Black Social Workers Project and Charles Wootton College. Later on, she made important contributions to Elimu Academy and many others too.

In London she was Head Race Equality Advisor for Haringey Council, an active member of the UK African Reparations movement, Chair of Ujima a Housing Association; and a member of Broadwater Farm report on the 1985 so-called riots.

It is important that Dorothy is remembered for what she did in the final decades of her life. But it’s equally important that we learn a lot more about her earlier life. Both of us knew Dorothy and we knew about her life. Jimi was aware of Dorothy’s work from early in his life, but from a distance, working at high levels in politics for social change. He knew she has been significant in the foundation of several community organisations.

He got to know her later in his life when she knocked on his door and urged him to help save several terraced streets on Granby Street. To Jimi, Dorothy was far more than a local community activist - she was a giant whose thoughts, work, politics and aspirations always seemed to extend way beyond the local. Stephen met Dorothy in the 1990s and she was a student on a Master’s degree in Race and Ethnic Relations when he taught at the University of Warwick in 1991. Stephen also interacted with her in a number of meetings in London of the UK Reparations movement organised 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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by the Right Honorable Bernie Grant MP in the early 1990s. Stephen and Dorothy met many times over the years from the 1990s to the early 2000s. The last time he saw her was in summer 2009, when he conducted an in-person interview with Dorothy in her house on Jermyn Street.

We feel there is so much more that needs to be discovered and shared.

That is why we are writing this article.

What else do we need to know about Dorothy? First of all, Africa was always important to her and she recognised the importance of Africa to Black people in Liverpool and across Great Britain. She worked in many organisations based on African culture and values, such as the Ujima Housing Association in London, and worked to create an African Heritage and Cultural Centre, at the old Ibo Social Club location on Park Way. She worked on Reparations for the invasion of Africa – with the Right Honourable Bernie Grant MP in London, and spoke on this issue in Liverpool, including at the International Slavery Museum. Much earlier in her life, she was involved in the Colonial People’s Defence Association, which was set up in 1950 to promote equality for Black people and to challenge colonialism in Africa.

People do not typically describe Dorothy as a “Pan-Africanist”, but we believe she was a Pan-Africanist. Pan-Africanism is the belief that Black people can never be free in one nation if they are unfree in other nations and that they needed to unite across the world – across the African diaspora – to achieve real freedom. Central to Pan-Africanism throughout the twentieth century was anti-colonial struggle. Dorothy was a protégé of Pan-Africanist Ludwig Hesse, a Ghanaian who lived for decades in Liverpool and worked to end the British empire. (We need to find out a lot more about him, too). Right now, we don’t have any information readily available about what she did under his mentorship. That needs to change.

We know that she gave flowers to Paul Robeson when he visited Liverpool and was proud of that. It’s difficult to believe that Dorothy would have been content just to play the pretty young girl handing over flowers. What did she say to him, what did they discuss and how did it shape her life afterwards? We need to find out a lot more about that.

32 Dorothy Kuya – Liverpool’s Tireless Champion of Equality

Beyond Paul Robeson, we know that many important champions of African liberation passed through Liverpool, people like African American scholar St Clare Drake, Jamaican Amy Ashwood Garvey. And what about Pastor Daniels Ekarte? Did she meet them, did they interact with one another and what was the impact of these experiences on her life and beliefs?

Many accounts of her life say she was a lifelong communist, and we don’t hear much about that either. It is well-known that there are many seemingly irreconcilable tensions between the views of communists on race, and the views of many Black activists including the most prominent ones (like George Padmore and C L R James) as well as the vastly more numerous community activists whose names don’t make it into the books.

How did Dorothy reconcile these tensions? If at all.

We need to hear a lot more about what her trials and tribulations as the first Community Relations Officer in Liverpool. Wally Brown’s biography tells us some of that, but we need more. We need more information on the substance of her work on Reparations UK. As we all know Dorothy was a Scouser and although her accent was tempered by many years living outside of the city, she was readily identified in London as a Scouser. Some tributes mention that her Scouseness was revealed in her no-nonsense attitude, her directness and her sense of humour. Sharon Grant, the widow of Bernie Grant called her “a true Liverpudlian at heart” who “insisted on meetings being held in Liverpool and on bringing Londoners to see the city”. She lived in London for decades and must have faced a number of stereotypes there (haven’t we all?) What were those experiences like? There is a multitude of people still alive today that knew Dorothy over her life, especially in Liverpool and London. We need more information from them.

We did not personally hear Dorothy mention “decolonisation” but we are convinced that she believed in decolonisation. We need to find out more about that too. Dorothy is an important voice in Liverpool and an indispensable voice in decolonising knowledge of the city, in making it 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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more accurate, more comprehensive and more inclusive. In other words, decolonising knowledge. She is an exemplary role model and inspiration to young and old people alike. So, it’s vital that we find out far more about her life and activities – so that they can be etched into our memories and can serve as a testament and legacy of her life.

Dorothy’s life, her teachings and her analysis, provide us with knowledge, insights and experiences that we never got from Liverpool or British schools. Her voice as a teacher and educator, an intellectual and community activist is invaluable. We understand from Dr Richard Benjamin, director of the International Slavery Museum, that there is an extensive collection of Dorothy’s papers at the museum. They are being sorted, arranged and catalogued by staff there that will provide us with far richer details about her life and activities than we have ever heard before.

We hope this short article stimulates people in Liverpool to do far more work on Dorothy and reveal far more about her important life.

Dorothy Kuya. From Dorothy Kuya Library and Personal Archive on loan to the International Slavery Museum.

34

JIMI JAGNE

THE “OXFORD OUT!” MARCH AND MASS RALLY 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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36 The “Oxford Out!” March and Mass Rally

walking home. As young family members disappeared behind bars, homes and relationships were left severely fractured or even shattered.

With unemployment invariably at twice the national average and 15% of the city’s property lying derelict, Liverpool was in a shocking state of decline. The Black community’s roots in Liverpool life are longstanding and run deep. Existing for well over 250 years, by 1981 it’d grown to make up approximately eight per cent of the city’s overall population. And while the accelerating decline in local prospects undoubtedly had an adverse impact on everyone living there, including the community’s white residents, the fact Liverpool 8 was home to the country’s oldest established Black community failed to reflect progress in the ability of local Blacks to compete for social and economic success, elsewhere in the city, on a fair and equal basis. If life was becoming tough for all Liverpudlians, then being locked rigid into a ghetto existence meant things were much worse for local Blacks.

Joblessness amongst Blacks was at an all-time high with no evidence of a visible Black workforce in sight. In housing, Black families were usually the last to be offered a new build home. Furthermore, Black school children from Liverpool 8 routinely faced classroom prejudice, flagrant racist abuse and typically developed unreasonably low expectations and, by 1981, only 63 local Black people were recorded as ever having received a university education.

However, young Black people not only suffered with the limits imposed on their personal success. They also found themselves quite literally having their movements restricted to within the confines of Liverpool 8. Skinheads and other white youths viewed their Black neighbours with contempt and more often than not attacked, on sight, those who’d dared to venture into their territory. The violence perpetrated, during the summer of 1972, by rioting whites running amok through the homes of Black families recently moved into the new Falkner Estate was viewed by residents as nothing less than a white intrusion into one of the very few spaces in the city to be considered private by the Black community.

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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This issue of contested territory and the relative lack of freedom of movement brought into focus more broader concerns regarding citizenship entitlement and the right to protection under law. Historically, even as legal citizens, Black Britons have never, at any point of time, enjoyed the same promise of freedom, justice and safety taken for granted by other, more recognised citizens. Full citizenship has always been reserved for a privileged portion of the population: principally those who are white and propertied. Consequently, the interests of the privileged were fundamentally protected by laws and codes which invariably marginalised the concerns of everyone else and Liverpool 8’s Black community was, in 1981, amongst the most underprivileged in the entire country. It was, of course, the police, tasked with maintaining the order of this perversely skewed society, who reminded Blacks living in Liverpool 8, considerably more than any other repressive aspect of ghetto life, that we were to remain compliant and silent and by brutally oppressive means if necessary.

Oxford Out! March (1981). Photographer Mike Abrahams.

38 The “Oxford Out!” March and Mass Rally

The Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, Kenneth Oxford, was the one establishment figurehead who most perceptibly represented the repressive force of the state at the local level. Furthermore, Oxford had recently made plain his disregard for local Black youth, dismissing outright the motives of those who took to the streets in purely racist terms. There’s no doubt an attempt to remove Oxford as Chief Constable would not only send a clear message to his miscreant police officers but also represent a significant effort on the part of the Liverpool 8 community to confront state repression and take back some level of control of our own streets.

The “Oxford Out! National Demonstration” was organised, principally, by the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. The Committee had initially tasked itself, in the face of much media and political resentment, with supporting those arrested, during July, and their families but eventually resolved to organise the call for Oxford to be ousted as Chief Constable.

Many in power made moves to condemn the Demonstration and some even took steps to prevent it being staged. Michael Foot, the Labour Party leader, voiced an emphatic “No!” to calls for Oxford’s dismissal.

The 4,500 strong Merseyside Police Federation threw their full weight behind Oxford, declaring, “Oxford Stays!” Michael Thornton, the Tory MP for Garston, requested William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, to ban the event arguing, it would only serve as “a blatant incitement to riot”. But local organisers were undeterred and confidently asserted there would be no resort to trouble.

The Demonstration, staged on 15 August, was effectively a three mile march from Sefton Park to the rally point, held at the Pier Head. The march wound its way through Liverpool 8, along Princes Road and the City Centre where police officers lined the streets, functioning as a brittle barrier separating protesters from the main shopping areas. The overwhelming swell of parents, grandparents and other elderly residents making up the 3,000 made their feelings of disobedience perfectly clear as they yelled abuse and hurled banners at the officers.

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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As a witness there myself, I can vividly recall the very striking image of a grandmother from my street striding onwards as though rejuvenated by the whole occasion, smiling broadly as she boldly waved her placard in my direction. As I watched her chanting, “Oxford Out! Oxford Out!” I recalled her frequently telling me off after finding out I was one of those going out at night to fight with the police. She and everything else happening that day not only felt like vindication for our having stood up to oppression. It felt like much more!

Young Men on Granby Street (1981). Photographer Mike Abrahams.

40

JIMI JAGNE

THE LIVERPOOL BLACK CAUCUS

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

41

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42 The Liverpool Black Caucus

Act (1976), formally adopt its own Equal Opportunity Policy and create a Race Relations Liaison Committee.

The Liaison Committee was comprised of 12 councillors and 12 representatives from various local Black organisations elected to advise the councillors on the adoption of progressive race relations policy. The most prominent of the Black led organisations represented were the Charles Wootton Centre for Adult Education, South Liverpool Personnel and the Community Relations Council.

Many of those assigned to what came to be referred to as The Black Caucus were highly experienced Liverpool born activists who had, throughout the 1970s, staged their own forms of protest against the very same systemically racist authority they’d now been invited to advise. They included, among others, Geraldine “Cookie” Ambrosius, Alex Bennett, Delroy Burris, Claire Dove, Liz Drysdale, Albert Fontenot, Linda Loy, Eric Lynch, David Okuefuna, Maria O’Reilly, Ray Quarless and Steve Smith, the Chairperson of the Caucus group throughout most of the key events.

The Caucus group were initially concerned with the unacceptable levels of institutionalised racism rife throughout the Council’s main departments. While Blacks numbered eight per cent of the city’s overall population in 1981, less than one per cent of the Council’s total workforce described themselves as Black. Tasked by the Council leadership to “examine ways” to achieve at least seven per cent Black employment, it seemed everything was in place for the Caucus to effect significant levels of authority reform.

However, the Liberals election loss to Labour, in 1983, was devastating.

Labour breezed into the Council with an overwhelming majority off the back of the far-left Militant persuasion that had come to dominate socialist politics in Liverpool during that time. Although led by a moderate, John Hamilton, the figure effectively exercising most power over Council affairs was its Deputy Leader, Derek Hatton, Militant’s most vocal and prominent devotee. No major policy decision was 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

43

approved without his personal say-so. Ominously, Hatton had vigorously opposed the Liberal proposal that Black employment parity be made a priority. Labour Militants argued that positive action would amount to mere “tokenism” and rail against “preserving working class unity”. The aggressive Labour stance had exposed a potential ideological conflict with the Caucus group. It was perhaps a statement of intent when Hatton appointed himself chairman of the Liaison Committee almost immediately following the election.

Consequently, the Caucus’ first year of “advising” the new militant leadership was fraught with a series of sharp disagreements that left them convinced Hatton was deliberately opposing realistic measures to combat the Council’s systemic racism. The two sides clashed mostly on Council employment, the Council’s ineffectual harassment policy, Black housing allocation and the proposed River Avon Street sheltered housing scheme for the local Black elderly.

Members of the Black Caucus meet with Neil Kinnock (C. 1980s). Photographer David Sinclair.

44 The Liverpool Black Caucus

The main bone of contention, however, was the Council’s reluctance to establish a Central Race Relations Unit. It eventually took the collective threat of the Black Caucus body, in June 1984, to resign itself from membership of the Liaison Committee to force the Council leadership to finally acquiesce. But the critical question of who and how the Principal Race Relations Adviser was to be appointed to lead the proposed unit served only to escalate the feud between the two opposed sides to breaking point.

On the day of the interviews for the post, the three Caucus members, led

by Steve Smith, had long been suspicious of Hatton’s intentions as Chair of the Appointment Committee. Despite the fact the shortlist included two particularly strong Liverpool 8 born candidates - Alex Bennett and Ray Quarless – Hatton had made clear during shortlisting that he strongly favoured a clearly less experienced candidate, the London based Sampson Bond. A specialist building surveyor, Bond had neither worked with Black organisations or specifically in combating racism. He did, however, make abundantly clear to the interviewing panel that he was totally opposed to all forms of positive action.

The fact Bond was also a committed Militant supporter completely quashed the chances of any of the other four candidates securing the post, particularly Bennett and Quarless who’d both served previously as Caucus representatives. Moreover, what the Caucus members had not been aware of at the time was that Hatton had already travelled to London to “interview” Bond prior to his being shortlisted. With a majority Labour panel vote of six to four in favour, Bond was offered the job. Hatton’s open embrace of Bond made sufficient suggestion that the appointment had been “fixed” giving rise to the suspicion that Bond was intended to function merely as a Militant stooge consorting with the Council in undermining the political interests of the local Black community.

Smith led a Caucus walkout from the panel meeting after lodging their formal objection to the appointment. He quickly mobilised representatives from various Black organisations to attend a picket of 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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the Council Municipal Building, the following morning, in support of a boycott of the Bond appointment. With as many as 30 other local activists including Peter and Solly Bassey, Manneh Brown, Frances Davis, Claire Dove, Liz Drysdale, Christine Duala, Donna McCoy, David Okuefuna, Maria O’Reilly, Dave Smith, Gloria Thompson and Manny Uchegbu, Smith staged a sit-in at the Deputy Leader’s office in an attempt to engage Hatton in negotiations.

After five hours of persistence, Hatton put his signature to a document agreeing in principle to re-advertise the post. Despite Hatton having previously made a number of public reassurances that the occupation had been peaceful and that he’d “not been threatened”, his District Labour Party peers abrogated the agreement, the following evening, on the grounds that Hatton had been held “hostage” and “forced” to sign agreement by “an unrepresentative group” seeking to appoint “one of their own”.

These comments suggested that it was actually the Caucus members who’d been guilty of resorting to underhanded tricks in an attempt to stool a self-serving appointment and outside the interests of the Black community. That was bad enough. But the deceitful insinuation that this was yet another example of Black people falling back on their usual “violent, criminal” behaviour smacked of racist language most in our community were all too familiar with. They had been, in the words of the Caucus membership, “transformed overnight from elected and respected Council sub-committee representatives to what has been called a violent and unrepresentative faction”.

The Caucus response was swift and effective. The membership gathered pledges of support to boycott the Bond appointment from every section of the local Black population, including the Caribbean, Somali, West African, Chinese, Pakistani, Hindi and Sikh communities.

Support, too, came from various denominations of the Church. Caucus supporters bravely ventured into local Labour heartland, speaking at normally partisan union branch and district party meetings to recruit

46 The Liverpool Black Caucus

left-wing support. Every big union in the region agreed to support the campaign. With the benefit of colossal support, the Caucus led a march of thousands to protest outside the Town Hall. Their lead banner read, ‘No More Bondage – Liverpool a Racialist Council’. It was a shocking and embarrassing blow to Militant egos.

Militant responded by dissolving the Liaison Committee – a cynical move that severed the Council’s formal relationship with the Black community intending to exclude it from all Council business. They dispatched staff distributing leaflets around Liverpool 8, house to house, accusing the Caucus of being “unrepresentative” and urging residents to sign their petition in favour of the Bond appointment. But this only served to consolidate support for the Caucus.

A mass lobby of protesters made their feelings known to Bond as he eventually arrived on the first day of his new job under a police escort protecting him from members of the Black community it was claimed he was recruited to serve. He was isolated and in desperate need of someone to consult with if he was to at least appear to be making interventions, on behalf of the community, on a legitimate basis.

A small group of local born Black sympathisers, calling themselves the Merseyside Action group, pledged support to Bond convinced he was principally interested in creating Black employment opportunities. Bond touted the group publicly as “the real voice of their community” while surreptitiously manipulating its membership. Initially apolitical, the group were soon steered and instigated, by agitating Militant activists Bond imported from London, to deliberately create division in Liverpool 8 by undermining support for the Black Caucus and advocating on behalf of Labour’s race policies. The Merseyside Action Group, however, attracted few supporters and disbanded only a few months later after publicly exposing Bond as a rabble-rouser.

1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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Militant’s persistent resort to dirty tricks finally caught up with them in 1986. Hatton and 46 other Labour councillors were found, by the local District Auditor, to have committed wilful misconduct, having set up an illegal deficit budget the previous year. This effectively ousted Militant from the Council leadership, in 1987, but only after the Caucus group’s four signed-up Labour members provided evidence in support of the Labour National Executive Committee’s inquiry into the Council’s behaviour. Their testimony, declaring their mistreatment by the Council, contributed in no small part to the decision, in June 1986, to expel the Militant leadership from the Labour party.

On 19 March 1987, only a week after his Militant peers were dismissed from office and the game was well and truly up, Bond finally resigned from his post as Principal Race Relations Adviser.

48

JIMI JAGNE

THE LIVERPOOL 8 RASTAFARIANS

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50 The Liverpool 8 Rastafarians

the least worthwhile to community life. It is more than small irony, then, that the Liverpool 8 Rastafarians have, perhaps, done more than anyone else to impress Blackness on our own perceptions of community and identity.

Liverpool 8 Rastafarians, like Rastas elsewhere in the country, were radical thinking Black people who impacted heavily on local thought, culture and lifestyle. Shunning the idea that a Black British future should essentially involve a blacker shade of Englishness, they, instead, embraced and promoted a distinct and uncompromised Black identity.

Rastafarianism, or Rastafari as it is better known to those more spiritually inclined, is essentially a religion. But Rastafari assumes a much wider, more profound, social significance when considered as a philosophy rooted in the colonial experience of British imperialism. The symbolism behind the Rastafarian deification of the late Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I not only represented a complete rejection of the tenets of white supremacy inherent in the imperialist image of a Christian white Jesus but also reflected the truth that Blackness corresponds with moral worth and goodness to no less an extent than whiteness. The significance of this was, perhaps, lost on most others in Liverpool 8 who were outside the collective but the fact remains, by elevating an image of Blackness Rastas were effectively resisting forms of imposed whiteness.

But the Liverpool 8 Rastafarians represent even more than just our community’s challenge to forms of white supremacy.

As mentioned elsewhere in these articles, almost all Liverpool-born Black youths growing up in the 1970s experienced the hardships of ghetto life. We pointed to the usual physical hardships of poverty, sub-standard housing conditions, inferior schooling and so on. But one aspect of ghetto living seldom mentioned was the fact we Black youths found ourselves confined and then locked into our situation. We had no social life outside of Liverpool 8 because, as youths, we were rarely allowed to cross beyond our neighbourhood boundaries. A hangover from the old days of the Colour Bar, territorialism dominated young Black lives to such an extent 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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that we’d be met with violence and run out of the district just for being Black and guilty of wandering into surrounding white neighbourhoods.

These facts were compounded further by what could only be described as an apparent media obsession with pushing images of the nation’s Black youth as essentially antisocial. Still strangers to people who considered Britain to be a white country, Black youths were marked as being criminal, deviant, aggressive, unintelligent and immoral – anything but appealing. Despite being born in the city, Liverpool’s Black youths were nonetheless viewed by working class white families, living outside the community, as “foreign”. All things considered, young Blacks were regarded as social pariahs in their own city and not the least bit British.

And then there were the inevitable confrontations with the police who virtually revelled in the prevailing atmosphere of Anti-Blackness. While being able to enjoy the reassuring comfort of family and friends, and the relative safety of Liverpool 8 provided some form of respite from the abrasive effects of constant racism endured at school, work or from just being outside the community, being Black youths, we felt as though we needed something more than just a means of escape.

In other cities, Rastafari was, understandably, embraced largely by Windrush youth making up overwhelmingly Caribbean communities.

While Liverpool had its own visible Caribbean community, the largest part of the local Black community consisted mainly of those generations of families born in the city, along with its burgeoning West African community. Youths from all these families had freely socialised with one another from infancy and it seemed only natural that they would eventually respond to the same influences, including those intrigued by the provocative messages they picked up from Reggae music and the inevitable appeal of Rastafari. Rastafarians saw themselves as belonging to something more than just a Caribbean culture. Belonging to a Caribbean, African or mixed heritage family made no difference if you were Black in Liverpool. Rastafari provided so many answers for any marginalised Black youth being made to feel insignificant as a consequence of having to live with the effects of racial oppression.

52 The Liverpool 8 Rastafarians

Rastas frequently reminded themselves how it is written that Babylon, metaphorically speaking, will surely fall and perish and Rastafarians will, in the end, be set free from their oppression. The strength of the meaning underlying that message and others like it, was not lost on any Rasta seeking the collective strength and encouragement that comes with investing in shared experience. For most of us who embraced Rastafari as teenagers, it was also the start of our education in challenging racism and more effectively taking control of our own lives as young Black people.

A previous generation of Liverpool 8 Blacks had taken their life shaping influences from American freedom fighting figures leading the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Local Rastas, however, preferred to relate more directly with the revolutionary fighters who’d fought for freedom in the homelands of their own ancestors. Rasta youth, instead, found their inspiration in heroes who resisted the evils of slavery, imperialism and postcolonial racism throughout the Caribbean and Africa. It’s fair to say that the majority of Liverpool Rastafarians were not prolific book readers but then they did not have to be. Reggae music teemed with histories of the Black Freedom Struggle and legendary artists like The Wailers, Burning Spear, Big Youth, the Wailing Souls, the Mighty Diamonds and Linton Kwesi Johnson were among those most prominently sharing these stories on vinyl. Rastas were introduced to names they might not otherwise have heard of: like Marcus Garvey, Patrice Lumumba, Paul Bogle, King Menelik of Ethiopia, Jomo Kenyatta and the Kenyan Kikuyu, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Steve Biko and Queen Nanny and the Maroons, amongst many others. Learning about their various histories and means of struggle reassured many of Liverpool’s Black youth that not only had the experience of racist struggle consumed the lives of so many previous generations of Black people but it could also be overcome if we, in turn, chose to defend ourselves against it.

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Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, being interviewed in the Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1962).

CBS/Getty Images.

54 The Liverpool 8 Rastafarians

The Liverpool 8 Rastafarians, in common with others everywhere, considered Africa to be our spiritual homeland and demonstrated devotion to the continent in a very practical sense. As Diaspora people, we celebrated and promoted African and Caribbean music and culture.

The performers making up the Delado African drum and dance ensemble were all Rastafarian women and men. Extremely popular in Liverpool throughout the 1980s, the group were eventually recognised as one of the finest African ensembles in Britain. Maxine Brown, recipient of the prestigious “Dance of the African Diaspora Lifetime Achievement Award” in 2019, developed her artistic skills with and remained one of the principal dancers for the ensemble’s entire duration. Levi Tafari, the legendary roots poet and urban griot, began his career reading poetry in support of Delado performances. Of course, so many in Liverpool wouldn’t, perhaps, enjoy Reggae music to the extent they do today if it hadn’t been for the impact of local sound system culture, first made popular by Liverpool 8 Rastafarians who played on the legendary Crasher Hi-Fi sound.

The impact of Rastafarian culture on community life in Liverpool 8 can be likened to an arresting generation of cultural electricity, sparking radically different notions of what it meant to be both Black and British at a time of enormous racial animosity and upheaval. Rastafarians set examples for others in the community to follow, demonstratin that to claim British birth right did not have to mean compromising on our embrace of Blackness. In fact, the Rastafarian relationship with the Diaspora and Blackness has only served to enrich and embolden what it means to be British in the twenty-first century.

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JIMI JAGNE

THE LIVERPOOL BLACK SISTERS

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All local Blacks had struggled to cope with ghetto living conditions and had been vocal in challenging the racial inequality and discrimination that downgraded our lives. However, Liverpool’s Black women also felt themselves trammelled by the additional burden of sexism and misogyny.

Being a woman meant having to contend with male disdain. But being both Black and female meant having to suffer contempt from everybody.

And to make matters even worse, this paradox was cruelly compounded by the fact they were usually forced to tolerate their mistreatment in relative silence.

One particular group of local Black women felt motivated to take stock and build on their unique experiences and ability to organise. They amassed and, in time, empowered many of the community’s most marginalised women. These women developed and shared resources, inspiring one another to become better trained and educated with a significant number eventually becoming community leaders in their own right. Perhaps most importantly, the community’s Black women no longer felt silenced. Liverpool Black women were finally able to realise their own collective strength and assert themselves - both as women and as Black people.

It’s more than fitting, then, that both Stephen and I should end this brief series on recollecting Liverpool’s Black community activism by reminding ourselves of how the Liverpool Black Sisters group provided one of the most crucial examples of Black self-determination in Liverpool 8.

Black women had consistently, throughout the 1970s, been among the most conspicuous campaigners against racist abuse and racial inequality in Liverpool. They were seen at the very front of every march. They were most vocal at the scene of every picket demonstration. And they shared and expressed their own ideas more openly than our men ever did. By 1981, many of these women made up a major section of the Black community’s most experienced activists.

58 The Liverpool Black Sisters

This group of women had spent many years growing up together as teenagers and developed a common understanding of the issues affecting the community and how these impacted on their own lives as women. The 1981 Uprising had been no less a watershed moment for our Black female activists than it was for the community’s active men. As mature adults, during the summer’s Uprising, they’d formed a significant portion of the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee leadership. As the public face of the embattled community, the Defence Committee withstood challenges and abuse from local politicians, the media, the police and even the national government, while effectively protecting and supporting the arrested, their families and the reputation of Liverpool 8. These female activists had become confident in their own ability to represent and were moved by the spirit of what had been essentially a youth-centred struggle to defend their own neighbourhood streets. In every sense, it was time for the females to take their turn.

Some of these women began talking together at the Charles Wootton Centre for Further Education, on Upper Parliament Street where a number of them were employed, discussing their hopes and ideas on how they should organise. They included the likes of Claire Dove, Liz Drysdale, Bea Freeman, Marion Mello, Carlene Montoute, Maria O’Reilly, Pauline Phillips, Gloria and Lorraine Thompson and also Linda Freeman, who took the time to spend a few hours with me, sharing her own personal memories of the Liverpool Black Women’s Group and its achievements.

Foremost in their thoughts was that feminist concerns in the city were essentially white and excluded the experiences and priorities of Liverpool’s Black women. This fact was made abundantly clear by an incident that happened around the same time the group was formed, in November 1981. A local Black woman was left reeling from shock when she telephoned for help and support at the Liverpool Rape Crisis Centre only for her adviser to postulate, “Well, what do you expect?”, after identifying her assailant as a Black man. At the moment she felt at her most vulnerable, this woman found herself being further abused.

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The incident was apparently even more appalling when framed in the context of the history of racist abuse frequently suffered by women just for being Black. Furthermore, it represented a depressingly familiar state of affairs to every member of the new group.

No longer prepared to tolerate any more abuse, the group quickly organised to occupy the Crisis Centre. Taking control of the call lines, a few within the group, such as Liz Drysdale, already possessed the skills and know-how to provide appropriate advisory support to any caller in crisis - regardless of their race or culture. The occupation was peaceful and, surprisingly, without any animosity from the Centre management. There were no police. There were no arrests. In fact, the Centre managers responded very positively to the protest. After only six weeks, they agreed to recruit Black staff to be trained to take calls and ensure all Centre employees received training on race awareness and equality issues.

Members of Liverpool Black Sisters protest at Derby Square C. 1980s.

Liverpool Black Sisters/Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre.

60 The Liverpool Black Sisters

Having established its base at “The Charlie”, the group opened up its meetings to the wider community with the initial aim of building local female solidarity and to develop a consensually based agenda. The membership grew quickly and as their numbers swelled, inevitably, the women became increasingly emboldened. They shared and expressed their politics and solidarity more openly and with greater self-assurance.

In the words of Linda Freeman, they were “...consciously trying to break through the glass ceiling of sexism. We’re here! We’re here! We’re here!”

And while that sentiment resonated with approval throughout most sections of the community, sadly, the feeling was not completely mutual at home.

A significant number of partners and spouses were not happy that their women had taken up membership within the Black Women’s Group. They complained unfairly that their woman’s place was at home looking after the kids. They took particular exception to playing babysitter while she went off to talk shop with other women. The chauvinistic attitudes of their men folk hampered these women with the inconvenience of having to take their kids along and parent them during meetings. This brazen bigotry and complete lack of empathy not only threatened to obstruct the personal interests of those particular members. Potentially, it also jeopardised the entire future of the group itself. Fortunately, Claire Dove was a director at The Charlie, as well as a founding member of the group. She’d already been instrumental in arranging for the group to be facilitated at the centre and, with her continued influence, The Charlie were prepared to accommodate crèche facilities for those members having to bring their kids along to meetings.

More women continued to join the group. Among them: Jeannette Bessman, Frances Davis, Donna McCoy, Suzanne Morris, Pat Salary and Beverley Williams. Estimates suggest that these were only a small fraction of some 120 women who had either been active with or benefitted directly from the work of the group, at one time or another, during the two decades of its existence. Some had been deeply involved for years while others were either less closely or more briefly involved.

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But many of those who became active with the group are now familiar names having worked with a number of our local organisations or as activists in their own right.

Next, the group moved into The Coach House, on Back Sandon Street (between Huskisson and Canning Streets). They had managed to raise the initial funds for the tenancy by selling colourful beanbags and cushions the members had made themselves from African patterned fabrics bought from Manchester. Now furnished to facilitate activities, the group formally constituted itself with the main aim of empowering local Black women, particularly with regards to their social and economic skills development. Although it eventually came about only after some considerable debate, both within the group and throughout the wider community, it was also decided to extend this support to those white women who were mothers of Black children.

The group encouraged new members, initially short on basic education and confidence to attend the local Home Link centre to study for English and maths GCSEs. Others took up introductory courses relevant to their personal experience, such as Women’s Health or Welfare Rights, while more aspiring members chose sociology, politics or poetry.

In some respects, the group became victims of its own success.

First, the burgeoning membership fast proved too much for the group to manage within the small space available at The Coach House.

This prompted a move to the large basement area of the Liverpool 8 Law Centre which had recently opened it’s doors on Princes Road.

Another problem developed as various members of the group gained new skills and became increasingly employable. A few of the younger members, most notably Miriam Serrano, began picking up children from a number of schools to look after them at the Law Centre until their mothers picked them up later, after finishing work. Before long, the meeting time crèche had been expanded into an after-school care service and served as a lifeline, especially for career-focussed single

62 The Liverpool Black Sisters

mothers who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to work. In time, the service was legally registered and became the responsibility of a small voluntary run team led by Suzanne Morris, a qualified nursery nurse. Much thought and attention was given over to ensuring the kids benefitted from learning based activities and fun.

During the mid-1980s, the group changed its name to the Liverpool Black Sisters – some self-recognition, surely, of their standing within the Black community. More new members continued to join the ranks, including Carol Doherty, Angela Odita, Christine Quarless, Julie Quarless, Sandra St Rose and Audrey Young. The Sisters group, although steadfastly committed to promoting Black female empowerment, continued to support the many community campaigns and protests that took place throughout the decade. These included, most notably, support for the Liverpool Black Caucus during ongoing clashes with the Militant City Council leadership and the “No More Bondage” campaign.

The 1990s saw a change in direction for the Sisters group. They corporatised and elected a board membership, which would feature prominent members such as Marlene Amoo, Jill Moglioney, Norma Tagoe, Betty Walker and Dorothy Zack-Williams. The voluntary After Care Service team was expanded into a much broader base of employed professionals responsible for organising events and activities, as well as support with skills training. The essential focus of the board’s overall vision was the establishment of a Centre devoted to supporting the community’s women. The purpose built Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, which stands on the junction of Princes Road with Upper Stanhope Street, was formally launched in summer 2004.

This development, unfortunately, signalled the demise of the Black Sisters as a campaigning group as the work of the centre increasingly established its reputation as a community organisation. The building, itself, represents a remarkable achievement for a group of activists who’d little more than their own resourcefulness and a great deal of determination. But the most significant legacy of the Black Sisters 1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present

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group to life in our community has to be the overwhelming proportion of Black women who are conspicuous today by the level of their professional aspirations and achievements, their ability to impact and influence outside the community, as well as a commitment to shaping the local agenda. Thanks to the Black Sisters group, women in the Black community are taking control of their own lives.

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FOOTNOTES

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1.

Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration (1968-1969). Minutes of Evidence taken at Liverpool, Wednesday 26 and Thursday 27 March 1969.

2.

Marke, E., (1986) In Troubled Waters: Memoirs of My Seventy Years in England.

Karia.

3.

From a statement given to the Liverpool Post, 11 June 1919.

4.

Sherwood, M. (1994) Pastor Daniels Ekarte and the African Churches Mission.

The Savannah Press, London.

5.

Costello, R., (2007) Liverpool Black Pioneers. The Bluecoat Press.

6.

Ben-Tovim, G., credited as Liverpool Black Caucus (1986) The Racial Politics of Militant in Liverpool: Black Community’s Struggle for Participation in Local Politics, 1980-1986. Merseyside Area Profile Group and The Runnymede Trust.

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BIOGRAPHIES

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PAWLET BROOKES MBE Pawlet Brookes MBE is the founder, CEO and artistic director of Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage. An experienced and highly respected senior leader and producer, Brookes has been at the forefront of the development of Black arts in the UK. Brookes pioneered the establishment of an annual dance festival in Leicester since 2011, Let’s Dance International Frontiers, and coordinates the high profile annual Black History Month Leicester. With Serendipity she has produced two National Lottery Heritage Funded initiatives and recently launched Unearthed: Forgotten Histories. Brookes has edited over 18 publications focusing on Black arts and heritage including Serious About Dance – Let’s Talk (2005), Hidden Movement: Contemporary Voices of Black British Dance (2013), Reflections: Irrepressible Voices of Black British Cultural Resilience (2020), Creating Socially Engaged Art: Can Dance Change the World? (2021) and BlackInk: Arts, Heritage and Cultural Politics, a magazine published annually for Black History Month.

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JIMI JAGNE Jimi Jagne was born and raised in Liverpool’s Black community, known historically by locals as Liverpool 8 but now referred to elsewhere as Toxteth. He has always lived in the community and has been a community activist there for most of his adult life. As a schoolchild of the 1970s, Jimi experienced the full extent of ghetto life, including neighbourhood segregation, racist abuse and mistreatment at school and frequent police harassment.

On leaving school, he took up a cultural interest in Rastafarianism and joined other local people in defending his community’s streets. First, it was against National Front demonstrators who frequently marched through the neighbourhood and then against the police, during the major Uprising of 1981. Jimi was arrested and convicted, in January 1982, for his part in the local revolt. Jimi was also an active Anti-Apartheid campaigner during the 1980s, organising local boycotts, pickets and demonstrations. Most notably, while studying at University of Liverpool, he led a campaign to have all investments in apartheid trading companies divested from the university’s financial portfolio.

Over subsequent years, Jimi managed the REACHing High Black Boys mentoring programme and was a co-founder of Toxteth Against the Riots (TAR) in response to the threat of street disturbances posed by outside agitators, during the summer of 2011. For more than a decade now, Jimi has devoted substantial time to discussing the history and significance of the 1981 Uprising. He has been particularly concerned with challenging the prevailing narrative of violent criminality, as well as the misconceptions which confound the truth that the Uprising represented uncompromising local resistance.

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As well as appearing regularly to speak at public events, Jimi has provided interviews to local and national newspapers, local radio stations in various parts of the UK; national radio, including the BBC’s The Today Programme (Radio 4) and the Witness daily strand (World Service).

He has also provided historical expertise on television productions, such as A House Through Time (BBC2) and has been profiled in two books featuring histories of the Liverpool 8 Uprising: Promised You A Miracle: UK 80-82 by Andy Beckett (Allen Lane, 2015) and There She Goes: Liverpool A City On It’s Own by Simon Hughes (deCourbertin Books, 2019).

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STEPHEN SMALL PHD Stephen Small is a Professor in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1995; and he is Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. He is a faculty member of the Black Europe Summer School – a two-week programme in Amsterdam, founded and directed for Dr Kwame Nimako. He earned his PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1989). His most recent book is 20 Questions and Answers on Black Europe (2018). He is writing a book on Black Culture in Liverpool in the 1970s-1990s to be published by Liverpool University Press.

Stephen was born and raised in Liverpool – the city with the nation’s longest-standing Black population.

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SERENDIPITY INSTITUTE FOR BLACK ARTS AND HERITAGE Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage, Leicester. Serendipity’s mission is to centre perspectives from the African and African Caribbean Diaspora, embedded as part of cultural experiences for all. Serendipity’s programmes include the flagship dance festival, Let’s Dance International Frontiers, Black History Month Leicester and the Annual Windrush Day Lecture. Serendipity has established a legacy through hosting a growing Living Archive documenting Black arts, heritage and culture, publishing the voices of Black arts practitioners and community activists, nurturing artists to create high quality new work and mentoring young people.

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1981 - Black Liverpool Past and Present is an insight into the history of Liverpool’s Black communities through the eyes of two Liverpudlians Jimi Jagne and Stephen Small. Centred around the 1981 Uprising as a pinnacle moment, Jagne and Small contextualise Liverpool’s Black history before and after. In doing so, they recognise the people who have shaped Liverpool and their stories of resistance and self-determination.