The West Indian Students' Centre (WISC) was located at 1 Collingham Gardens, Earls Court, London, in a building bought with the support of West Indian governments, and officially opened on 1 June 1955 by Princess Margaret. [1] Hosting activities and events primarily for students from the West Indies, WISC also became a key London venue for others from the African diaspora, and provided facilities and a meeting place for such organisations as the West Indian Standing Committee, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), [1] which latter grouping held regular public sessions there from March 1967. [2] [3] Among leaders from the Caribbean who when visiting the UK made a point of speaking at meetings organised at WISC were Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Forbes Burnham, and Cheddi Jagan, [4]
The International Democracy Union is an international alliance of centre-right political parties. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, the IDU consists of 84 full and associate members from 65 countries. It is chaired by Stephen Harper, former prime minister of Canada, two affiliated international organizations and six affiliated regional organizations.
Ralph Everard Gonsalves is a Vincentian politician. He is currently the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the leader of the Unity Labour Party (ULP).
Maurice Rupert Bishop was a Grenadian revolutionary and the leader of New Jewel Movement – a Marxist–Leninist party that sought to prioritise socio-economic development, education, and black liberation – that came to power during the 13 March 1979 revolution that removed Eric Gairy from office. Bishop headed the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada from 1979 to 1983, when he was dismissed from his post and executed during the coup by Bernard Coard, leading to upheaval.
The Pan-African Congress (PAC) was a series of eight meetings which took place on the back of the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900. The Pan-African Congress gained a reputation as a peacemaker for decolonization in Africa and in the West Indies. It made a significant advance for the Pan-African cause. One of the group's major demands was to end colonial rule and racial discrimination. It stood against imperialism and it demanded human rights and equality of economic opportunity. The manifesto given by the Pan-African Congress included the political and economic demands of the Congress for a new world context of international cooperation and the need to address the issues facing Africa as a result of European colonization of most of the continent.
Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diasporas of African ancestry. Based on a common goal dating back to the Atlantic slave trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe.
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.
British Afro-Caribbean people are an ethnic group in the United Kingdom. They are British citizens whose ancestry originates from the Caribbean or they are nationals of the Caribbean who reside in the UK. There are some self-identified Afro-Caribbean people who are multi-racial. The most common and traditional use of the term African-Caribbean community is in reference to groups of residents continuing aspects of Caribbean culture, customs and traditions in the UK.
Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin.
Aubrey Williams was a Guyanese artist. He was best known for his large, oil-on-canvas paintings, which combine elements of abstract expressionism with forms, images and symbols inspired by the pre-Columbian art of indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Amy Ashwood Garvey was a Jamaican Pan-Africanist activist. She was a director of the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, and along with her former husband Marcus Garvey she founded the Negro World newspaper.
The International African Service Bureau (IASB) was a pan-African organisation founded in London in 1937 by West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, T. Ras Makonnen and Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leonean labour activist and agitator I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson. Chris Braithwaite, was Secretary of this organisation.
Afro-Caribbean leftism refers to left-wing political currents that have developed among various African-Caribbean communities in the Caribbean, the United States of America, France, Great Britain, or anywhere else they have chosen to settle.
Caribbean art refers to the visual as well as plastic arts originating from the islands of the Caribbean. Art in the Caribbean reflects thousands of years of habitation by Arawak, Kalinago, and other people of the Caribbean followed by waves of immigration, which included artists of European origins and subsequently by artists with heritage from countries all around the world. The nature of Caribbean art reflects these diverse origins, as artists have taken their traditions and adapted these influences to reflect the reality of their lives in the Caribbean.
Obi Benue Egbuna was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist known for leading the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) and being a member of the British Black Panther Movement (1968–72) during the years when he lived in England, between 1961 and 1973. Egbuna published several texts on Marxist–Black Power, including Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (1971) and The ABC of Black Power Thought (1973).
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."
The First Pan-African Conference was held in London from 23 to 25 July 1900. Organized primarily by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, the conference took place in Westminster Town Hall and was attended by 37 delegates and about 10 other participants and observers from Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Alcindor, Benito Sylvain, Dadabhai Naoroji, John Archer, Henry Francis Downing, Anna H. Jones, Anna Julia Cooper, and W. E. B. Du Bois, with Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church taking the chair.
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."
Ansel Keith David Wong is a Trinidadian-British cultural and political activist, who has been influential in many organisations particularly in the black community in the United Kingdom, where he has been based since the 1960s. He is the former Chair of the Notting Hill Carnival Board and founder of Elimu Mas Band. He is also an educationist and academic, and in a wide-ranging career has worked at senior levels in various organisations in the public and charitable sectors, including with the Windrush Foundation established in 1996 by Arthur Torrington.
The Black Power Movement in Montreal in the 1960s was a period of rediscovering black identity through a process of invoking cultural, economic, and political thought amongst blacks. The eruption of political activism during Montreal's Quiet Revolution as well as the reformation of immigration policies which discriminated against non-white immigrants allowed black communities to publicly express and bring awareness to their struggles with racism. The movement was an integral component of the emerging global challenges to imperialism during the 1960s, stemming from various movements including Garveyism, pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, Rastafari, and others. Montreal's Black Power movement culminated in the aftermath of the Sir George Williams Affair—a student occupation that resulted in an estimated $2 million worth of damages and 97 arrests—which raised concerns of racism worldwide.
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.