Linton Kwesi Johnson, also known as LKJ, is a Jamaica-born, British-based dub poet and activist. In 2002 he became the second living poet, and the only black one, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. His performance poetry involves the recitation of his own verse in Jamaican patois over dub-reggae, usually written in collaboration with reggae producer/artist Dennis Bovell.
George Padmore, born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He left his native Trinidad in 1924 to study medicine in the United States, where he also joined the Communist Party.
The New Cross house fire was a fire that occurred during a party at a house in New Cross, south-east London, in the early hours of Sunday, 18 January 1981. The blaze killed 13 young black people aged between 14 and 22, and one survivor killed himself two years later.
John La Rose was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher, founder in 1966 of New Beacon Books, the first specialist Caribbean publishing company in Britain, and subsequently Chairman of the George Padmore Institute. He was originally from Trinidad and Tobago but was involved in the struggle for political independence and cultural and social change in the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s and later in Britain, the rest of Europe and the Third World.
Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin.
Race Today was a monthly British political magazine. Launched in 1969 by the Institute of Race Relations, it was from 1973 published by the Race Today Collective, which included figures such as Darcus Howe, Farrukh Dhondy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Leila Hassan and Jean Ambrose. The magazine was a leading organ of Black politics in 1970s Britain; publication ended in 1988.
The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) was an influential cultural initiative, begun in London, England, in 1966 and active until about 1972, that focused on the works being produced by Caribbean writers, visual artists, poets, dramatists, film makers, actors and musicians. The key people involved in setting up CAM were Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey. As Angela Cobbinah has written, "the movement had an enormous impact on Caribbean arts in Britain. In its intense five-year existence it set the dominant artistic trends, at the same time forging a bridge between West Indian migrants and those who came to be known as black Britons."
Alex Pascall, OBE, is a British broadcaster, journalist, musician, composer, oral historian and educator. Based in Britain for more than 50 years, he was one of the developers of the Notting Hill Carnival, is a political campaigner and was part of the team behind the birth of Britain's first national black newspaper The Voice. Credited with having "established a black presence in the British media", Pascall is most notable as having been one of the first regular Black radio voices in the UK, presenting the programme Black Londoners on BBC Radio London for 14 years from 1974. Initially planned as a test series of six programmes, Black Londoners became, in 1978, the first black daily radio show in British history.
The George Padmore Institute (GPI), founded in 1991 in Stroud Green Road, North London, by John La Rose (1927–2006) and a group of political and cultural activists connected to New Beacon Books, is an archive, library, educational resource and research centre that houses "materials relating to the black community of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in Britain and continental Europe". The institute also hosts talks and readings, as well as other educational and cultural activities.
Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, née Nunez, was a Trinidadian-born theatrical and literary agent, actress and cultural activist, who was a pioneering campaigner for the recognition and promotion of African Caribbean arts. In the UK, in the 1950s, she was the first agent to represent black and other minority ethnic actors, writers and film-makers, and during the early 1960s was instrumental in setting up one of Britain's first black theatre companies, the Negro Theatre Workshop. In the words of John La Rose, who delivered a eulogy at her funeral on 26 February 2005: "Pearl Connor-Mogotsi was pivotal in the effort to remake the landscape for innovation and for the inclusion of African, Caribbean and Asian artists in shaping a new vision of consciousness for art and society."
Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications (BLP) is a radical London-based publishing company founded by Guyanese activists Jessica Huntley and Eric Huntley in 1969, when its first title, Walter Rodney's The Groundings With My Brothers, was published. Named in honour of two outstanding liberation fighters in Caribbean history, Toussaint L'Ouverture and Paul Bogle, the company began operating during a period in the UK when "books by Black authors or written with a sympathetic view of Black people's history and culture were rare in mainstream bookshops in the UK." Alongside New Beacon Books and Allison & Busby, BLP was one of the first black-owned independent publishing companies in the UK. BLP has been described as "a small, unorthodox, self-financing venture that brought a radical perspective to non-fiction, fiction, poetry and children's books."
Errol Lloyd is a Jamaican-born artist, writer, art critic, editor and arts administrator. Since the 1960s he has been based in London, to which he originally travelled to study law. Now well known as a book illustrator, he was runner-up for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1973 for his work on My Brother Sean by Petronella Breinburg.
No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 was a major public art and archives exhibition, the first of its kind in the UK, held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, over a six-month period, with a future digital touring exhibition, and an associated programme of events. No Colour Bar took its impetus from the life work and archives of Jessica Huntley and Eric Huntley, Guyanese-born campaigners, political activists and publishers, who founded the publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications and the associated Walter Rodney Bookshop.
Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede is a Nigerian poet, storyteller and artist, best known as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He
The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, often referred to as The Black Book Fair, was inaugurated in London, England, in April 1982 and continued until 1995, bringing together a number of Black publishers, intellectuals and educationalists. It was held on 12 occasions: annually from 1982 to 1991, and then biennially, in 1993 and 1995. The first three Book Fairs took place in different areas of London — Islington, Lambeth and Acton — representing the respective bases of the three founding organisers: New Beacon Books, Race Today Publications and Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications. Additionally, from 1985, there were associated book fairs held elsewhere in England, in Manchester and Bradford (1985–93), Leeds, and in 1993 and 1995 in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1987 and 1988, a sister event — the Caribbean Peoples International Bookfair and Bookfair Festival — took place in Trinidad, organised by the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union there.
Donald Hinds was a Jamaican-born writer, journalist, historian and teacher. He is best known for his work on the West Indian Gazette and his fiction and non-fiction books portraying the West Indian community in Britain, particularly his 1966 work Journey to an Illusion, which has been called a groundbreaking book that "captured the plight of Commonwealth immigrants and foresaw the multicultural London of today".
Althea McNishFSCD was an artist from Trinidad who became the first Black British textile designer to earn an international reputation.
Jessica Elleisse Huntley was an Guyanese-British political reformer and prominent race equality campaigner. She was a publisher of black and Asian literature, and a women's and community rights activist. She is notable as the founder in 1969 of Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications in London.
Anne Walmsley is a British-born editor, scholar, critic and author, notable as a specialist in Caribbean art and literature, whose career spans five decades. She is widely recognised for her work as Longman's Caribbean publisher, and for Caribbean books that she authored and edited. Her pioneering school anthology, The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (1968), drew on her use of local literary material while teaching in Jamaica. A participant in and chronicler of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Walmsley is also the author of The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966–1971 (1992) and Art in the Caribbean (2010). She lives in London.
The Beacon was a Caribbean "little magazine" published in Trinidad monthly from March 1931 to November 1933, and briefly revived in 1939. The main names associated with the magazine were Albert M. Gomes, C. L. R. James and Alfred H. Mendes, who formed the core of what was known as "the Beacon group", regarded as having "shaped a nascent Trinidadian literary consciousness in the 1930s". Among other notable writers and artists associated with the influential group were Ralph de Boissière and Hugh Stollmeyer.
