"We had a deep responsibility to educate our communities": the Work of Women of Colour on Educational Campaigns in England from 1955 to 1992

Worldwide protests against racism that took place in the summer of 2020 propelled debates about race to the forefront of public attention. Many of these debates were closely concerned with systems of education, reigniting campaigns like Rhodes Must Fall and growing support for decolonising the curriculum in Britain. These contemporary initiatives should be understood as a continuation of the long history of the Black education movement, in which Black and Brown communities responded to racialized educational agendas with organised activism. Using local and national archives and oral interviews, this research project will explore education activism and reform in post-war England, focusing on woman activists of colour and women's organisations from 1955-1992. The project will centre the work of women of colour to create social and political change in education, and will examine efforts by these women to educate their communities and organise in response to discriminatory practices in education. The following questions will guide the project:
What was the political, social, and community role of educational reform organisations founded and led by women of colour?
How did educational initiatives led by women of colour collaborate, intersect, or work autonomously within different community and political institutions?
What impact did the work of women of colour have on English educational provision and policies?
How did the work done by women of colour activists interact with and respond to various Local Education Authority (LEA) and central government policies and vice versa?
How did the educational work of women of colour activists influence and contribute to the wider struggle for racial equality and liberation in England in the second half of the twentieth century?
This project will create a public-facing digital map of educational campaigns, organisations, and movements led by women of colour. While some material on more well-known campaigns and activists has been consolidated in larger archives like the Black Cultural Archives and the British Library, a significant portion of these histories remains scattered across local archives and has yet to be collected, and other histories are completely missing from the archives and are known only by the organisers themselves. This map will bring forth previously neglected education activists and campaigns that are not yet known beyond their local context in order to accurately represent the work of women of colour all over England.
This project's focus on women of colour's educational activism seeks to move beyond the state-centred focus with which the history of Black and Brown educational experiences have usually been told. This project will explore how bottom-up activism led by women sought to change educational provisions and policies in England. This project will expand our understanding of modern British history by examining how race and gender impacted educational campaigns and how activism led by women of colour altered not only English education systems, but also English society itself.