What did Black radical politics look like in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s? What was its relation to the Black women’s movement, which urgently highlighted the multiple oppressions faced by Black women? How, in studying such movements, can we celebrate brilliant activists, without erasing the importance of whole movements and collectives? Here, A.S. Francis – author of Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – introduces us to Gerlin Bean, the Jamaican-born activist who came to the UK as a student nurse and became central to Black British Feminist Socialism. They describe Bean, who passed away in early 2025, as a radical listener and mediator who applied to her entire way of living an acute awareness of how race and gender intersect to create particular types of disadvantage – and spoke to those she helped, on the ground, with a skillset that sociologists and others could learn a lot from.

Through Bean’s determined activism and networking, argues A. S. Francis, we see concepts like intersectionality come alive and be used to inform action. And in studying her life, we also confront urgent questions about why some figures from history are canonised, while others risk obscurity.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Episode Readings

• Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – by A. S. Francis (2023)
• The History Matters journal
• UK Parliament information on The Race Relations Act of 1965
• The Young Historians and their film “We Are Our Own Liberators”
• The Black Liberation Front in the UK, the Black Unity and Freedom Party and the Black Panther Party
• Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later (Law School, Columbia University, 2017)
• Introductory notes on the concept of Triple Oppression Analysis
• In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance – by Shirin Hirsch (2020)
• The archival records for “Black Women Speak Out” (1971) at the George Padmore Institute
• Towards Black Unity – Black Panther Newsletter about the National Conference on the Rights of Black People in Britain (1971)
• The Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD)

Episode Credits

• Author: A.S. Francis
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardiner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe