Kathleen Wrasama (her name sometimes given as Kathleen Warsama) was an Ethiopian-born British community organiser. As a child she moved to England and became a founding member of the Stepney Coloured Peoples Association, an organisation working to improve community relations, education and housing for black people. [1] In 2018 she was cited by The Voice newspaper as one of eight black women – alongside Olive Morris, Connie Mark, Fanny Eaton, Diane Abbott, Lilian Bader, Margaret Busby and Mary Seacole – who have contributed to changing British history, [1] although there has been little documentation of her life. [2]
Wrasama was brought to England as a child in 1917 by church missionaries. [1] [3] The experiences she suffered living in a children's home in Yorkshire caused her to run away, and she subsequently found work as a farm labourer. [4] Moving to London in the 1930s, she worked as an extra in Paul Robeson films. [4] She and her husband later established a Somali seaman's mission in Stepney, and in the 1950s she was a founding member of the Stepney Coloured People's Association, which was committed to improving community relations, as well as education and housing for black people. [1] She told of her life in London's East End in an interview for the 1982 BBC documentary Surviving: Experience of Migration and Exile, [5] and was later invited to visit a school, where she spoke about her early years and her experiences of racism. [6]
Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first Black president of the American Psychological Association.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and a past president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Collins was the 100th president of the ASA and the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Somalis in the United Kingdom include British citizens and residents born in or with ancestors from Somalia. The United Kingdom (UK) is home to the largest Somali community in Europe, with an estimated 108,000 Somali-born immigrants residing in the UK in 2018 according to the Office for National Statistics. The majority of these live in England, with the largest number found in London. Smaller Somali communities exist in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Cardiff.
Claudia Vera Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the US, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, in 1958, and played a central role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest annual carnival in the world.
Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.
Unita Zelma Blackwell was an American civil rights activist who was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Blackwell was a project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and helped organize voter drives for African Americans across Mississippi. She was also a founder of the US–China Peoples Friendship Association, a group dedicated to promoting cultural exchange between the United States and China. She also served as an advisor to 6 US Presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
Olive Elaine Morris was a Jamaican-born British-based community leader and activist in the feminist, black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s. At the age of 17, she claimed she was assaulted by Metropolitan Police officers following an incident involving a Nigerian diplomat in Brixton, South London. She joined the British Black Panthers, becoming a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. She squatted buildings on Railton Road in Brixton; one hosted Sabarr Books and later became the 121 Centre, another was used as offices by the Race Today collective. Morris became a key organiser in the Black Women's Movement in the United Kingdom, co-founding the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent in London.
Sylvia D. Hamilton is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, poet, and artist. Based in Nova Scotia, her work explores the lives and experiences of people of African descent. Her special focus is on African Nova Scotians, and especially women. In particular, her work takes the form of documentary films, writing, public presentations, teaching, mentoring, extensive volunteer work and community involvement. She has uncovered stories of struggles and contributions of African Canadians and introduced them to mainstream audiences. Through her work, she exposes the roots and the presence of systemic racism in Canada. She aims to provide opportunities for Black and Indigenous youth through education and empowerment.
Racism in the United Kingdom refers to negative attitudes and views on race or ethnicity within the viewpoints of groups or individuals or existing systemically in the United Kingdom. The extent and the targets of racist attitudes in the United Kingdom have varied over time. It has resulted in cases of discrimination, riots and racially motivated murders. Racism was uncommon in the attitudes and norms of the British class system during the 19th century, in which race mattered less than social distinction: an African tribal chief was unquestionably superior to an English costermonger. Use of the word "racism" became more widespread after 1936, although the term "race hatred" was used in the late 1920s by sociologist Frederick Hertz. Laws were passed in the 1960s that specifically prohibited racial segregation.
Chris Searle is a British educator, poet, anti-racist activist and socialist. He has written widely on cricket, language, jazz, race and social justice, and has taught in Canada, England, Tobago, Mozambique and Grenada. He has been associated with the Institute of Race Relations since the 1970s, and is on the editorial board of Race & Class. He writes a weekly column on jazz for the left-wing newspaper Morning Star.
Louise Da-Cocodia, BEM, JP was an anti-racism campaigner and former Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Manchester.
Altheia Jones-LeCointe is a Trinidadian physician and research scientist also known for her role as a leader of the British Black Panther Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Jones-LeCointe came to public attention in 1970 as one of the nine protestors, known as the Mangrove Nine, arrested and tried on charges that included conspiracy to incite a riot, following a protest against repeated police raids of The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, London. They were all acquitted of the most serious charges and the trial became the first judicial acknowledgement of behaviour motivated by racial hatred, rather than legitimate crime control, within the Metropolitan Police.
Loretta J. Ross is an African American academic, feminist, and activist who advocates for reproductive justice, especially among women of color. As an activist, Ross has written on reproductive justice activism and the history of African American women.
Edith Ramsay, (1895–1983) was an English educator and community activist who served on the Colonial Office Advisory Committee. Ramsay worked to improve conditions for immigrants arriving in Stepney, London in the mid-20th century and was known as "the Florence Nightingale of the Brothels" for her work in London slums.
African American women played a variety of important roles in the civil rights movement. They served as leaders, demonstrators, organizers, fundraisers, theorists, formed abolition and self-help societies. They also created and published newspapers, poems, and stories about how they are treated and it paved the way for the modern civil rights movement. They were judged by the color of their skin, as well as being discriminated against society because they are women. African American women faced two struggles, both sexism and racism. Womanism fully encompasses the intersectionality between these two social barriers, thus encompassing African American female involvement in the civil rights movement. African American women led organizations and struggles for their suffrage, anti-lynching laws, full employment and especially against the Jim Crow Laws. They had to constantly fight for equality and needed to have a voice in what they can do in society. Black women served a special role as "bridge leaders," forming connections between those in formal positions of power and political constituents. They were the middle person going back and forth between the two groups and provided information to them. A major turning point was the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, which followed Rosa Park's bold move of not giving up her bus seat. Several notable African American female activists and organizations emerged from this movement, making essential gains in the civil rights agenda, despite restricted access to power and the Cold War atmosphere pushing for silence within the United States.
Nkenge Touré is a leader in the Reproductive Justice, Anti-Racism, and Black women's health movements and a former member of the Black Panther Party.
Ebun Joseph Arogundade is a Nigerian-Irish lecturer, author, and consultant. She is founder and module coordinator of the first Black Studies module in Ireland at University College Dublin.
In the United Kingdom, racial segregation occurred in pubs, workplaces, shops and other commercial premises, which operated a colour bar where non-white customers were banned from using certain rooms and facilities. Segregation also operated in the 20th century in certain professions, in housing and at Buckingham Palace. There were no British laws requiring racial segregation, but until 1965, there were no laws prohibiting racial segregation either.
Elouise Edwards was a community activist and civil rights campaigner. She was born in British Guiana and moved to Manchester, England in the 1960s, becoming known for her campaigns to fight racial discrimination and to develop community services in the Moss Side area of Manchester. Her work included housing projects, women's networking groups, medical assistance programs, and the development of art and cultural programs.
Gerlin Bean is a Jamaican community worker who was active in the radical feminist and Black nationalist movements in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. Trained as a nurse, she became a dedicated community activist and social worker, involved in the founding of the Black Women's Action Committee of the Black Unity and Freedom Party, the women's section of the Black Liberation Front, the Brixton Black Women's Group, and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. Bean's work and activism focused on eliminating discriminatory policies for people of color, women, and people with disabilities. She fought for equal educational opportunity, fair wages, adequate housing, and programs that supported families, such as counseling services, child care, and health care.