Unsung heroes
As this year’s Black History Month gets underway, the Runnymede Trust’s Hannah Francis highlights three important Black British figures whose stories are often overlooked but remain strikingly relevant today: William Cuffay, Kathleen Locke and Jean Binta Breeze.
Black History Month (BHM) was only adopted in Britain in 1987 after the efforts of Ghanaian-born pan-African journalist and analyst Akyaaba Addai-Sebo. Two years earlier, while working for the Ethnic Minority Unit of the Greater London Council (GLC), Addai-Sebo approached colleagues with his ambition to rectify the lack of celebration of the presence of Africans and the African diaspora in Britain. He went on to pen a declaration for the GLC and other local authorities across London to declare October as BHM.
Since then, however, BHM has become a period in which the British state frames the presence of Black people in the UK through heavily manipulated and isolated narratives. Many Black activists, workers, organisers and artists are reduced to individual symbols to represent the ‘diversity’ of Britain instead of grounding their work in the betterment of the lives of Black, occupied and working people in the face of the violence of the British Empire.
In this piece, I focus on three key – but often overlooked – figures whose work is rooted in the advancement of the African diaspora and in allyship with the disadvantaged across the world.
‘This charter called for Irish independence from Britain alongside universal suffrage’
Born in Kent in 1788, William Cuffay was the son of an English woman named Juliana Fox and a formerly enslaved man originally from St Kitts named Chatham Cuffay. He was born with a physical disability affecting his spine and shins, but still took on work as a tailor’s apprentice and became an active member of the tailors’ trade union. He became a leader of the Chartists Movement – ‘the first national working-class organisation in Britain’s history’, as Professor Hakim Adi notes in African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History – and was elected as chair of the Great Public Meeting of the Tailors in 1842 where he oversaw the presentation of the second national petition for the People’s Charter to the British government.
This charter called for Irish independence from Britain alongside universal suffrage and further demands that would grant Britain’s working people the right to vote and be represented in parliament. As Keshia N Abraham and John Woolf report in Black Victorians, being both Black and an active Chartist, Cuffay was often racially abused in newspapers such as the Times, which ‘painted Cuffay as a destabilising alien import’, and middle-class-oriented publications such as Punch, which reduced him to a derogatory figure of madness, alongside his fellow organisers of Irish heritage.
While Cuffay’s story has been appearing more frequently in BHM content, his solidarity with the Irish people, the recognition of ‘the struggles waged by the working people of Britain against human trafficking and enslavement’ and its impact on modern day anti-racist organising – to quote Adi – is often understated.
‘A contemporary of Kwame Nkrumah’
Kathleen Locke was born in Manchester in 1928 to a Nigerian seaman from Calabar, Cross River State and an English mother who was a teacher from Lancashire. Alongside her sisters, Coca Clarke and Ada Phillips, Locke faced a lot of racism in school while growing up in Blackpool, so the family decided to return to Manchester, where the three sisters became politically active in Moss Side.
In her younger years, Locke was a contemporary of Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of Ghana, and was involved in the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. She even went on to request Manchester City Council commemorate the event by petitioning for a red plaque to be placed on Chorlton Hall, the building in which it was held.
Locke and her sisters went on to found the Manchester Black Women’s Cooperative in 1975, an organisation that later grew into the Abasindi Cooperative in 1980 and sought to retrain ‘unsupported and unqualified black mothers in the office skills needed to re-enter the workplace in Manchester’ during a major period of unemployment throughout a city hit by growing deindustrialisation.
She was also a key collaborator of the Manchester Black Parents Organisation (MBPO), founded by youth and community campaigner Gus John, leading the justice campaign for her son, Stephen, when he and five young Black boys aged 12-14 were wrongfully accused by police of attacking an unnamed student in 1979. The charges were dropped in 1980 and Locke’s campaign leadership saw the MBPO become an official section of the national Black Parents’ Movement.
Her sustained identification with the global African diaspora was imperative to her political and community activism in Britain.
‘The first female dub poet’
Born in Cornwall Parish in Hanover, Jamaica in 1956, Jean Binta Breeze is considered to be the first female dub poet, a style of poetry emulating dub music from her home country and coined by her contemporary Linton Kwesi Johnson.
She first visited the UK in 1985 when Kwesi Johnson invited her to perform at the International Book Fair of Black Radical and Third World books. Months later, she returned to teach in London and eventually moved to Leicester in 2013, splitting her time between the UK and Jamaica in the years leading up to her passing.
One of her most well-known works, the eponymous poem from the first collection she published in 1988, Riddym Ravings and Other Poems, speaks to her experiences of schizophrenia as a young woman. Often called ‘The Mad Woman’s Poem’, it describes a ‘mad’ young homeless black woman wandering a city, hearing voices ‘implanted’ by the radio in her head. The woman is repeatedly taken to Bellevue Hospital located in Jamaica, the largest English-speaking psychiatric hospital in the Caribbean, by her landlord and doctors. The voices eventually tell her to return to the countryside where she belongs.
The reference to Bellevue is pointed: the institution was built by the British colonial government in 1862, has been a site of political repression – admitting ‘Rastifarian luminaries, forefathers of pan-Africanism, and other Jamaicans who challenged British racial oppression’ – and remains Jamaica’s only psychiatric hospital.
Breeze’s poetry spoke to the everyday lives of Caribbean women, touched by the colonisation of African and Caribbean people and land, forced migration, mental illness and liberation, and her presence in Britain’s dub poetry scene broadened the realm of possibility for change.
Further reading
BHM is about much more than simply celebrating figures and events in isolation. It requires us to observe how the work, art and organising efforts of the African and Caribbean diaspora in Britain are inseparable from global resistance and Black self-determination.
Some key sources of Black British history include:
Hannah Francis is a research analyst at the Runnymede Trust.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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Photo: Jean Binta Breeze at Humber Mouth 2007 by Walnut Whippet, licensed under CC BY 2.0
