Black History 365

Recommendations from the UCL History BAME Network and Dr Jagjeet Lally

Read

• Studying Black History at UCL, perspectives from two past UCL History students
• Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, Akala
• Black and British: A Forgotten History, David Olusoga
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge

Watch

• Guye Dai, past UCL History student and International Network Student Facilitator discusses Stonewall hero Marsha P. Johnson

• Africa Turns the Page, documentary about ‘African’ writers from the early twentieth century to the present day
• I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck documentary where James Baldwin tells the story of race in modern America
• Rest in Power, six-episode series documents the shooting of Trayvon Martin and explores the racial tension in the United States that followed
• Selma, chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965
• Akala’s Oxford Union address
• BBC Four: Africa’s Greatest Civilisations
• So who was Roy Francis? A Squidge Rugby Deep Dive, a passionate and almost entirely positive commentary from South African rugby fans – a country where the shadow of apartheid is still very heavy - gives a sense of the historical significance of the debates
• Dr Jagjeet Lally discusses Early Modern Afro-Indians

Listen

• Black History Buff Podcast
• Code Switch Podcast
• Black Girl Podcast
• The Stoop Podcast, stories from across the Black diaspora

Explore

• Nigeria@60 at the Horniman Museum of South London, 60 Years of Independence contains the Horniman’s collection from 1960s Nigeria and objects collected by designer and artist Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman from the same period

Recommendations from Professor Margot Finn

• IHR Wohl Library’s Black History Collections
• Our Migration Story, the untold stories of the generations of migrants who came to and shaped the British Isles
• Runnymede Trust, a leading Race Equality UK think tank
• UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation

Recommendations from Professor Matt Smith

• Centre for the study of the Legacies of British Slavery
• Beyond a Boundary, 1976 film about the Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C.L.R James
• PBS Egalite for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution (2009), the story of the most successful slave uprising in world history explored by filmmaker Nolan Walker
• The 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery
• Slave Voyages Database, a digital memorial exploring questions and documentation about the largest slave trades in history
• The Agronomist, a 2003 American documentary directed by Jonathan Demme, following the life of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haiti-Inter, during multiple repressive regimes

• Professor Matt Smith discusses Jamaican poet Louise Bennett Coverley, aka Ms Lou

Recommendation from Dr Chloe Ireton

• Black Atlantics in the Global South: Primary Sources in Conversation, a public history project developed by Dr Ireton and students of her undergraduate research seminar contributing short primary source-based essays engaging with the public about their research projects

Recommendations from Professor Benedetta Rossi

• Studies in the History of the African Diaspora (SHADD), named after Mary Ann Shadd (an anti-slavery activist and the first Black female newspaper editor in North America), SHADD hosts primary documents and archival inventories that are housed at the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University, Canada
• Freedom Narratives, containing testimonies of West Africans from the era of slavery, including autobiographical accounts
• Equiano’s World: Gustavus Vassa and the Abolition of the Slave Trade sheds light on the life and work of an inspiring African author and abolitionist
• DATAS: Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery studies African names and ethnonyms to reconstruct the histories of those enslaved across the Atlantic and Americas
• Professor Benedetta Rossi tells the story of Tadoutchi, a former slave woman whose acts of resistance in the first half of the 20th century undermined slavery in what is now the Republic of the Niger

Recommendation from Dr Michael Collins

• The Stuart Hall Project: John Akomfrah, a 2013 British film written and directed by John Akomfrah centred on cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who is regarded as one of the founding figures of the New Left and a key architect of Cultural Studies in Britain

Recommendation from Dr Aaron Graham

• Race and Slavery Petitions, a searchable database containing details of hundreds of petitions by and about free and enslaved people of colour to legislatures and courts in the US South between 1775 and 1867
• Slave revolt in Jamaica, 1760-61: a cartographic narrative of a major slave revolt in Jamaica in 1760, providing day-by-day visualisation of the course and progress of the revolt and its suppression
• British Library: Endangered Archive Programme: Manumission Books, 1747-79, a digitised collection of nine volumes of ‘manumission libers’ containing the certificates of freedom granted in Jamaica to enslaved people of colour manumitted or freed by slaveowners between 1747 and 1779
• Liberated Africans, a database of details of the Courts of Mixed Commission established across the world in the nineteenth century to rule on slave ships seized, including links to a range of court records giving details of ships condemned and enslaved peoples landed in places such as Sierra Leone
• Esclavage & Indemnités, a French counterpart to the Legacies of British Slavery project, giving details of the individual slaveowners who claimed compensation from the Haitian Government after the treaty with France in 1825 and from the French government in 1849 after the abolition of slavery in Martinique, Guadeloupe and other French territories
• Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century, a comprehensive database of nearly a thousand advertisements for runaway slaves in Britain

Studying Black History at UCL 

Adila

Black History is so vast, rich and complex that studying a small branch of it as ‘Black Atlantics in the Global South’ was immensely eye-opening and impactful - both socially and intellectually. Finding some links in my research in the political agency of Black maroon societies (communities of people who escaped enslavement, living independently of plantation societies) in the 16th and 17th centuries to the Black Lives Matter movement today, showed me just how important it is to understand the impact of Black History on our societies and how it shapes and adds meaning to the lives of so many. 
 
My studies in Black History barely touched the surface in what is a fascinating and inspiring branch of History that has deep historical and global connections that I encourage everyone to research. However, it is clear that much work needs to be done to better represent and integrate the history of the many and not just the few – especially in our own department, discipline, and institution. Undoubtedly, de-colonising the curriculum is a good way to start!

Adila was a BA History student on Dr Chloe Ireton’s Black Atlantics in the Global South seminar in 2019-20. She was also the Student Facilitator and member of the UCL History BAME Network.

Britney

Spending Year 2 studying Black History was eye-opening for me. It was my first time learning about Black History that was not confined to an assembly or single topic. I was presented with primary sources, such as diaries, written by Africans, Mulattos, Creoles, and others within the diaspora. Although I used sources from the 17th and 18th centuries in my project, the interesting thing about Black History is that a lot of it has real relevance today. So, I found spending a year on a Black History to be invaluable. During the last few months, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has spread across the globe. This seminar supported the notion that Black Lives Matter because its re-focused Black History on Africans and the African continent. We read about Black History not just in relation to colonialism or slavery in the Americas. It is quite shocking that as a class it had to be highlighted to us that black lives existed before Europe’s first encounters, and that African Kings, Queens and peoples were not only passive participants.   

 
I believe de-colonising the curriculum is one of the most important tasks for this subject during the next decade. But there needs to be more BAME history undergraduates and subsequently teachers and academics for this to happen. The Euro-centric and North American perspective needs to be challenged by minorities so our historiography can gain greater depth. In secondary school lessons about WWII and Winston Churchill, for example, Churchill’s white supremacism should be a starting point, rather than a side note. Britain needs to highlight and discuss the parts of history that it is not proud of. The unbiased covering of topics in secondary education would only serve to encourage more students into studying history at a higher level. This would eventually diversify the field and therefore strengthen both historical research and discussion.

Britney was a BA History student on Dr Chloe Ireton’s Black Atlantics in the Global South seminar in 2019-20. She was also a member of the UCL History BAME Network.