In 1967, in a meeting room of leftists and radicals at the University of Kent, Di Parkin met her future life-long friend and comrade Lorraine Hewitt. The political connection that drew the two young women together was immediate: Di had…
Author: WHN
Black History Month: Mary Prince
In September 1831 the Anti-Slavery Society in London published The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by herself. Prince, who was illiterate, had dictated her story, at her own suggestion, to a young abolitionist named Susanna Strickland…
Black History Month: Hart Sisters
In September 1809 Anne Hart Gilbert and her sister Elizabeth opened a Methodist Sunday school (the first in the West Indies) at the naval centre of English Harbour, Antigua, which was willing to teach both slave and free children. Anne…
Black History Month: On the margins? British Caribbean and British Asian Women: A Brief History, Part 2.
Continued from Part 1. By the mid 1980s more British Asian women worked outside the home in Britain than was assumed by the white population and many such women, particularly those of Hindu and Sikh backgrounds, were moving into the…
Black History Month: On the margins? British Caribbean and British Asian Women: A Brief History, Part 1.
Handsworth, 1971(George Hallett): Source: http://birminghamblackhistory.com/external/gallery.html Black History Month, 2010, provides an opportunity to focus on the lives of British Caribbean and British Asian women – their histories and the factors that have influenced, and continue to influence, their lives. In…
Black History Month: Phillis Wheatley
On 18 October 1770 there appeared at Boston, Massachusetts, an advertisement for a broadside entitled An Elegiac Poem, On the Death of . . . George Whitefield. Whitefield was a charismatic evangelical preacher from England, who had died near Boston…
Black History Month: Lilian Masediba Ngoyi (1911-1980)
FEDSAW Women’s Protests, Pretoria 1956. In 1954, Lilian Masediba Ngoyi took to the stage of the inaugural conference of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and stated to the gathered group of multiracial delegates: “Let us be brave: we…
Black History Month: Slavery
Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago this month the slave ship Zong left Africa for Jamaica loaded with newly captured people, of whom an even larger number than usual were doomed to die on the voyage. When by the end…
Black History Month: Hidden lives and silent voices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Caribbean island of Grenada.
In Britain it has always been a challenge to establish what sort of lives poorer people had during this period; the lives of black and mixed-race women in the British West Indies island of Grenada are even more difficult to…