How can archives fight racism? How can progressive educational resources tackle the harm of discrimination? Why have millennia of British history so often been presented through a reductive and harmful white gaze? Hannah Ishmael – lecturer in Digital Culture and Race at King’s College London – introduces Len Garrison, an activist, archivist and determined educationalist who worked to improve education, particularly for minoritised populations – and to disprove and displace assumptions about the history of Black presence in the UK. Garrison was central in creating ACER – the African Caribbean Education Resource project – and became a leading founder of BCA – the Black Cultural Archives – in Brixton, where, with others, he enacted his conviction that archives have the power to change the reality and representation of people’s lives.

After hearing Hannah’s essay, you’ll be led to rethink the very meaning and value of archives – as well as the nature and potential of anti-racist education today. Featuring reflection also on the work of Bernard Coard and Stuart Hall, and the importance of attending deeply to what people do as well as what they write.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Readings

• How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System – by Bernard Coard (1971)
• More about the life and work of Stuart Hall
• The early Black Education Movement (BEM) and the Black Supplementary Schools Movement (BSSM)
• More about the African-Caribbean Educational Resource project and the Black Cultural Archives
• Obituary of Len Garrison – by Mike Phillips (The Guardian, 2003)
• More about Audre Lorde and the American civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore
• The National Archives introduction to The Brixton Uprisings of 1981
• British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour – by Karen Sands-O’Connor (2022)
• Benjamin Zephaniah reads Len Garrison's poem “Where Are Our Monuments”

Episode Credits

• Author: Hannah Ishmael
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe