Reclaiming a Lost Past: Black British Women, Visibility and the BBC.

Greater awareness of the diversity of British history has grown in recent years following the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, captured in BBC series such as David Olusoga's Black and British: A Forgotten History (BBC Two, 2016). Yet the role played by Black women in shaping twentieth-century British society, and its relationship to the media, still remains too often hidden or overlooked. Reclaiming a Lost Past challenges this invisibility by encouraging public engagement with two important and contrasting strands related to the Black British female struggle for visible representation in mainstream media and society from the 1960s onwards. The first connects to pioneering Black actresses seen and heard by mass audiences on BBC TV and on BBC Radio; the second to Black feminist activist politics and women's liberation as mediated by the BBC.

These strands reveal two very different sides to the BBC's relationship to Black British women in the second half of the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first). Black actresses were amongst the first to embody, through mass media, the new contours of British national identity following mass migration from Britain's former colonies. Indeed, mainstream BBC programming from the 1960s onwards offered a hyper-visibility to those actresses cast in popular shows such as the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (Valerie Murray) or the science fiction show Blake's Seven (Josette Simon). This hyper-visibility broke new ground in terms of showcasing the creative reach of Black British female performers at a time of widespread racism and sexism. But so too did it bring challenges: of being thrust into the spotlight, of bearing a burden of representation and of navigating the territory of being typecast or playing against type in certain roles. Meanwhile for Black British feminists from the 1970s onwards, when the fight against sexism and racism grew rapidly as a political force in the UK, the story was largely one of invisibility. As women's equality took hold, Black feminist voices and faces, and their ideas on women's liberation (shaped by the experiences of racism as much as misogyny), were often left out of mass media programming on female equality, including at the BBC. It was mostly not until decades later, in the 1990s and 2000s, when young Black female BBC producers finally began to bring to air the contribution of pioneering feminists including Stella Dadzie and Gail Lewis.

Reclaiming a Lost Past move these stories from the margins of public understandings of the BBC's history to centre stage. This project encourages a range of distinct demographics, particularly Black British women of different generations, to engage with the lesser told 'herstories' of Black feminist activism and of Black actresses in Britain - as told through artefacts from the BBC's archives and through profiles of key trailblazing figures - and to explore some of the complexities of how the BBC dealt with the promotion of race and gender equality. In collaboration with three community-oriented partners - the Young Vic Theatre in London, the podcast Letter to a Black Girl and the Feminist Library in London - the project will both spark and deliver dialogue, discussion and educational outreach across three varying age groups and constituencies. This will be done through curriculum and extra-curricular activities for Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 in two South London schools, via podcast makers and audiences comprised of Black British women aged 20s-40s, and an event aimed at dialogue and discussion between feminist activists of all generations, but especially those Black feminists in the 50+ age category. The project will deliver a podcast, a recorded talk and discussion event and educationally-framed creative responses to curated artefacts from the BBC's archives, which will be hosted and promoted via partner organisations' platforms and via the website and social media channels of the BBC.