Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power, 1964-1985

During the mid- to late 20th century calls for 'Black Power' swept the globe, capturing the hearts and minds of activists engaged in struggles to confront the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy. Conventionally regarded as a U.S. phenomenon, Black Power in fact had considerable global appeal and this project contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the subject by attending to the movement's specific historical development and significance in modern Britain. While much of the nascent literature on British Black Power adopts a metropolitan focus, this project shifts the lens beyond London to three nationally significant but under-examined sites: Greater Manchester in the North West and Nottingham and Leicester in the East Midlands. Specifically it will 1) investigate how considerations of historical place and region informed the distinct character and development of local Black Power struggles; 2) trace the networks of relations that connected these local struggles to each other and their counterparts in the nation's capital and around the globe; and, in turn, 3) assess how these wider circuits of pan-African and anti-colonial solidarity fed-back influencing Black Power activism at the grassroots level. By adopting this novel 'bottom-up' approach and carefully attending to overlooked regional variances in movement mobilisation this project offers a fuller account of British Black Power. In the process, it challenges prevailing interpretations of British Black Power's ideological, temporal and spatial dimensions and as casts new light on how a series of discrete local struggles became an increasingly interconnected national movement with transformative implications for British culture and society.

In recovering these histories, this project adopts a community-based research methodology that builds upon the strengths and resources already present within communities engaging people with lived experience as important knowledge-bearers and partners in the research process. Working in tandem with alternative community-based archiving initiatives, the project team will conduct a series of memory workshops and oral histories in which community elders and former movement participants will be invited to share their recollections and insights. Through these collaborative activities academic researchers will learn with and alongside a diverse group of differently-situated participants, each with their own knowledge and expertise.

This two-year project will culminate in the development of a suite of research outputs designed to contribute to multiple academic disciplines as well as deliver meaningful reparative justice impacts for non-academic beneficiaries in the archive and heritage sector, education, and community-based advocacy work. In addition to high profile journal articles and conference papers, the project will draw on existing partnerships with local archives, cultural arts practitioners, and community members to co-curate new manuscript and oral history collections. These collections will be deposited with collaborating archives to support future research and public engagement activities as well as provide a foundation for much-needed curricula interventions related to Black British histories. With this aim in mind, the project will build on established relationships with local educationalists and youth advocacy groups to co-produce high quality place-based teaching resources to be disseminated via a project website for delivery in both traditional and supplementary school contexts. Upon completion of the project, the research team will also disseminate major research findings and outputs at a public symposium designed to raise awareness of the vital contributions of activists of African and Asian descent outside London to the (re)making of modern Britain.