Resisting Redaction: The Battle For A Black British Educational Movement

Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere | Lancaster University

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does the tree still make a sound? This thought experiment, though somewhat abstract, rings close to home for one British demographic than one might first think.

The Afro-Caribbean diaspora laid down roots in significant numbers in Britain after the end of the Second World War, signalling the beginning of a post-colonial era where conqueror and conquered were suddenly in close proximity. The legacy of that transition lives on through the fabric of our contemporary British society, but to unearth that story is a more difficult task than it should be.

Its origins are traceable in the ideological and political position of the British elite at the time. The nation was losing grip of its hegemony over the Global South and in need of more manpower to address its labour shortages. For those brought up on an imperial mindset that saw ‘Britain as best’, they were only too willing to bail out a waning powerhouse, providing a viable economic solution.

Yet, their arrival was no act of altruism from the government. Politicians did not warm to the iciness on the ground between racial communities that had not mixed before. Neither were they keen on the idea of people moving permanently to the West, repossessing resources stripped away in the colonial era. This was meant to be a temporary solution before the undesired were sent packing.

It is a damning indictment of the colonial mindset that the elites thought they could move the Windrush generation around the globe at their whim. But as people from the old colonies continued to migrate, the instruments of public policy began to respond. If these unwanted migrants were here to stay, then it was necessary that they could never aspire to be more than the lowest rung of society.

Here was the vision behind the systematic erasure of a Black presence in the educational space. Within schools, teachers received the mandate to minimise the engagement of Black children with anything beyond the rudimentary basics of English and Mathematics that they would need for menial, low-paying work. Ties to historical Black figures were severed, and where ‘Blackness’ was present, it only materialised through images that reinforced the ideas of dirtiness and depravity.

By the middle of the 1960s, the government doubled down on this agenda, deeming Black children were intellectually and culturally deficient and required ‘assimilation’ to a British lifestyle.

In 1964, the Commonwealth Immigrations Advisory Council proposed plans for ‘dispersal.’ It suggested, with no consultation of Black parents, that no more than 30% of any school population should be made up of students from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. For those in the inner-city localities of London, the policy of Circular 7/65 was a cutting revelation. Black children were sent by bus to schools outside of local catchment areas, opening up eyes in migrant communities to their reality.

Haringey, a borough in north London, housed a hotbed of dissatisfaction. Suspicion grew further in 1968 as politicians discussed the policy of ‘banding’, whereby primary school students would take IQ tests to qualify to attend comprehensive schools. Very little information about the process was in the public domain and the leaked Doulton Report of 1969 confirmed the Black community’s worst fears.

Caption: Afro-Caribbean migrants take to the streets of Haringey to protest the policy of banding. (Credit: George Padmore Institute website)

This secret document recorded the words of Alfred Doulton, headmaster of a public school in the borough, who admitted Black children would be disproportionately banded into schools with lower academic standards. The mainstream schooling system set up the next generation to fail. The walls were closing in, but the creativity of the Black community would creatively engineer answers.

Of course, there is a distinction between formal ‘schooling’ and education in a broader sense of the term. It is this second concept that grassroots Black communities, with no alternative to connect with their heritage or memory of who they were outside of a White national imaginary, clung onto.

Migrants from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora decided to take matters into their own hands. In London, they collaborated to create the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association (CECWA). CECWA coordinated agendas for the benefit of Black children and a Black Education Movement (BEM) was born at the grassroots. One of its lasting legacies was Supplementary Schools.

Supplementary Schools across the city varied in size, shape and exact educational agenda, but they broadly pursued the same target. Black parents and community leaders took it upon themselves to teach children, frequently going beyond the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic to engage with questions of Afro-Caribbean politics, music and historical resistance. As the educational movement developed, its impact extended into new realms of memorialising community heritage and culture.

An example of children’s work from a North London supplementary school with a dictation about Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey. (Credit: George Padmore Institute archives)

A key architect in this phase was educationalist Len Garrison. The son of migrant Jamaican parents, he developed an interest in freelance photography before pivoting to the politics of education. He acquired a diploma in development studies at Ruskin College, Oxford, then gained a BA degree in African and Caribbean history at his local University of Sussex. At the same time, his work with young people at the grassroots cultivated the same conclusions that communities were drawing in inner-city London. Local politicians pushed to destroy records of any attempts to systematically record the history of Black Britain, and he started to decisively take steps against the elite agenda.

In 1976, he founded the African Caribbean Education Resource (ACER). Funded by the Inner London Education Authority, ACER wished to teach Black youth that their history was woven into British history and build belief that they were an asset to a ‘multicultural’ country. Five years later, he helped to establish the Black Cultural Archives, a landmark site in Brixton dedicated to 'collect, document and disseminate the culture and history of peoples of Africa and Caribbean ancestry'.

In 1991, John La Rose, a prominent educationalist from BEM, followed in the footsteps of Garrison as a co-founder of the George Padmore Institute. This archive, situated in Finsbury Park, furthered the ambitions of the Black British community to chart the political and cultural history of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Other educational projects across Southampton, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham have been proof of a burgeoning Black British presence that is proud of its past.

Scholars like myself are indebted to these community-based records for their revelation of otherwise unspoken histories. In the same way that mainstream schooling systematically erased Black presence, ‘official’ bodies of archival knowledge have seldom put Black histories front and centre of their collections. It has been down to grassroots actors to recognise the richness of Black British history and fortify the strength of their community through the generosity of older generations.

Take the Black Cultural Archive: Garrison’s interest in photography pushed him to find whatever artefacts and materials were available to add to the collections of the archive. Fragmented snapshots of cultural, political and educational activity have expanded catalogues of ‘ephemeral material.’ Disparate pieces of the past have been brought together for the purpose of memorialising Black British culture in the knowledge that these community-based archives will do them justice.

Even with the contributions from the National Fund to these archives, they remain connected to their historical roots. Ephemera from other Black educational archives has increased public access to the work of the Supplementary Schools from the 1970s and 1980s and resistance to racism in all its forms. Grassroots actors from that era have donated remnants of texts, pamphlets, articles and witness accounts, enriching the quality as well as the quantity of scholarly research this century into the BEM.

To add to the systematisation of primary source material, community-based archives have began to engage in oral history projects. These projects, now accessible around the country, involve retrospective conversations with the activists and intellectuals on the ground to fight for Black Britain.

These records are still far from ‘complete.’ The burden of responsibility to document and collate these histories has fallen upon the same people who were responsible for change. Beyond the opposition of politicians to this grassroots educational movement, there were logistical challenges to taking care of historical material. Activists in the Black community were fighting for survival and not in a position to drive the processes of systematisation that we have seen in the archives this century.

Questions require empirical evidence to answer, and many critical fragments of the past have been lost. But to dwell on that fact is to miss the point. The remnants of Supplementary Schools show that Black communities were not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with a complete retrieval of their past in the scholarly sense. Resistance at the grassroots was practical and actionable, looking for ways to empower all members of local communities to counter racial oppression in their own way.

The George Padmore/Albertina Slyvester Supplementary School is an excellent case in point. Students engaged in music lessons, where they received sheets with scores of Caribbean traditional songs. These creative, cultural sessions were spaces where the youth would have the freedom to learn about their heritage through performance, integrating accompanying instruments, adding lyrics and changing rhythms of the pieces as they saw fit. Here were the roots of a communal educational culture that allowed young people to become more conscious of a vibrant, rich heritage and confident at articulating a part of their ‘selves’ that had been silenced by mainstream schooling until that point.

A music sheet with a traditional Caribbean song to be performed by students at a North London Supplementary School. (Credit: George Padmore Institute archives)

Performing arts provided a platform through which these students started to devise creative responses to racialised authority. In another collection of children’s work from the George Padmore Institute, young people wrote scripts to perform plays based on their interactions with discriminatory hecklers in the public. There were no references to the Caribbean or the Patois language that their parents had brought to Britain. But what remained in their work was the wittiness to respond to and ridicule the contradictions of racists who told them to return to a place that had never been theirs.

Where the Windrush generation could comfort itself with lived experiences in Africa and the Caribbean, the next generation gained confidence through a defiant spirit rooted in resistance to the racism of Britain. The richness of the archives continues with stories about youths openly flaunting authority in the court of law, representing themselves in legal cases and cautionary tales to warn peers about how the police tried to lower their guards when making surprise visits to mainstream schools.

A script of a play written by children in a North London Supplementary School based on their experiences of racism in Britain. (Credit: George Padmore Institute archives)

The continuity of that creative tradition, and the knowledge that British schooling is not the be-all and end-all of education, have helped the Black British community to imagine and realise a future that was never meant to be its portion. Memory might fade and its fragments might disappear, but the quest to connect with the experiential heritage of the diaspora is very much alive and well.

Black British history remains on the margins of the national curriculum, but the community can confidently point to a past housed in the archives and harboured in their hearts. Politicians have hacked at and hidden away the tree, but roots of resistance remain visible from the diaspora today.

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Further Reading

· Kehinde Andrews, Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and The Black Supplementary School Movement (Institute of Education Press, 2013)

· Beverley Bryan and others, Heart of The Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (Virago Press Limited, 1985)

· Bernard Coard, ‘How the Caribbean Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System’ in Tell It Like It Is: How Our Schools Fail Black Children, ed. by Brian Richardson (Trentham Books, 2005), pp. 27-60

· Sally Tomlinson, Education and Race from Empire to Brexit (Policy Press, 2019)

· The Black Cultural Archives and the George Padmore Institute both have excellent summaries of their history and archival collections which are well worth visiting if you have the chance.

Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere is an incoming PhD candidate at Lancaster University. His prior research has focused on the politics of race and legacies of colonialism and he is now embarking on a project to examine those topics within the context of British public policy within the arts and cultural sector.

LinkedIn: Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere