As I live in North Wales, I'm really excited that, following the success of our previous events in London, Liverpool, Bristol, Preston, Huddersfield and Leicester, we will be holding the fourteenth of the What's Happening in Black British History? Workshops (WHBBHXIV), at Bangor University in North Wales on Saturday 14 May 2022!

As regular readers will know, the aim of the series is to foster a creative dialogue between researchers, educationalists (mainstream and supplementary), artists and writers, archivists and curators, and policy makers. It seeks to identify and promote innovative new research into the history of people of African origin or descent in the UK and facilitate discussion of the latest developments in the dissemination of Black British history in a wide variety of settings including the media, the classroom and lecture hall, and museums and galleries, thus providing an opportunity to share good practice.

The workshop in Bangor was originally scheduled for April 2020, but the COVID-19 crisis obliged us to postpone it. As a consequence, we have already received a number of proposals and we are currently confirming arrangements with the authors. But we are still keen to attract some additional presentations for the rescheduled workshop on 14 May. There will be a strong local focus to the event, so we are specifically seeking proposals for presentations examining some aspect of the Welsh dimension of Black history. Please submit a title and a brief description of your presentation (no more than 300 words) as an attached Word document also stating your name, contact details, and, if you have them, Institution and Twitter handle to Professor Philip Murphy at Philip.Murphy@sas.ac.uk by Monday 17 January 2022.

You can see the full Call for Papers here.  

There's so much fascinating Black Welsh History out there, to give some North Wales examples: 18th century gardener John Ystmyllyn, who since I first encountered him now has an entry in the ODNB and a rose named after him; the Congo House school for Africans in Victorian Colwyn Bay, or boxer Randolph Turpin's time training at Gwrych Castle (now more famous as the site of ITV's I'm a Celebrity...) in 1951. I can't wait to find out more!

I am SO EXCITED to tell you all about the new Black Tudors course I've created with FutureLearn and a wonderful team of expert contributors!

Since writing my book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2017), I've continued my quest to bring the fascinating stories of the Africans who lived in Tudor England to the widest possible audience, particularly through giving my Black Tudors: Three Untold Stories talk in multiple locations, and working with teachers and educational publishers on my Teaching Black Tudors project... but this is taking it to another level!

The course is FREE to take, 6 weeks long (with about 4 hours of study a week) and is available to start anytime from Monday 12th July.

You'll meet a host of fascinating individuals, who some of you may remember from my book, including John Blanke, royal trumpeter to Henry VII and Henry VIII; Jacques Francis, a salvage diver on the wreck of the Mary Rose, Diego, who sailed the world with Francis Drake, and many more including a porter, a prince, a sailor, a prostitute and a silk weaver.

But this time, I'll be showing you the original documents that record these Black lives, and asking you to join the debate amongst historians about their true significance of the varied experiences of Black Tudors in the wider narrative of Black History, the long-standing Black presence in Britain, the origins of racial prejudice and enslavement and what it all means today.  You will be able to formulate your own evidence-based arguments and discuss with fellow learners throughout the course. 

I'm delighted that a number of experts I really admire have contributed to the course. From leading historians in the field of Black British History, to bright young things from the next generation of scholars, you’ll hear from them in video content each week. We have… drumroll please…

• David Olusoga, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester, BAFTA award-winning TV presenter and producer, and the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History to help us situate Black Tudor History in its broader context.

 

• Michael Ohajuru, Renaissance art historian, founder of the John Blanke Project, guide to the Image of the Black in London Galleries, and my colleague at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, where we co-curate the What's Happening in Black British History? workshop series, to discuss John Blanke, the Westminster Tournament of 1511, and images of Africans in European Art.

 

• Kevin Dawson, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced, author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Cultures in the African Diaspora and experienced free diver, whose work examines Early Modern Atlantic African swimming, underwater diving and more, to talk about Jacques Francis, and the mechanics of Tudor salvage diving.

 

• Cassander Smith, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World, specializing in early Black Atlantic literature and culture, to look at the lives of Prince Dederi Jacquoah and Diego, situating them in the wider stories of Tudor Trade with Africa and conflict with Spain in the Americas.

 

• Montaz Marche, writer, theatre director and PhD researcher at Birmingham University looking at the lives of Black women in 18-20th century Britain to explore the lives of African women in Tudor and early Stuart England.

 

• Wendy Lennon, Founder of ‘Shakespeare, Race & Pedagogy’, Fellow of the English Association, English teacher and postgraduate researcher at the Shakespeare Institute in Birmingham to give us an insight into the latest scholarship in the English Literature field, and discuss the pros and cons of using fiction to fill the gaps in the archival records.

 

• Sophie Merrix, PhD student at Lancaster University, Early Modern History editor at Epoch magazine,  studying and mapping the lives of Africans in Stuart England, to provide us with some brilliant maps showing the locations of Africans as they appear in records across England.

It is also quite thrilling that talented actors Paterson Joseph and Honey Gabriel are the narrators for the short videos scattered throughout the course which introduce you to each of the African individuals from the book. 

The FutureLearn format makes it all so accessible in bite-size steps, with great quality images and video content, as well as links to other outstanding online content – it's been brilliant to be able to share so much of this that didn't make it into the book or is brand-new. I'm so grateful to FutureLearn and the learning design team at Online Education Services for making this happen!

So, if you can't get enough of Black Tudors, want to do a deep dive into the archives; take a guided tour of all the latest scholarship; and discuss it all with like-minded individuals, this is the place to be!

You can enrol for FREE now to take the 6 week course at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/black-tudors
 
And, if you haven't already, buy a copy of my book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, also available on Kindle and Audible, which will be a great accompanying text for the course. 

And talk about the course on social media using the hashtag #FLBlackTudors

Really looking forward to our next What’s Happening in Black British History? event which will be all about Books and Publishing! It will be held online via Zoom on Thursday 29th April. It's a FREE to attend, full day event- running from 10am- 6.30pm, and you can register here. To aid informal networking we are scheduling breakout rooms throughout the day and will be encouraging you to stay online after the formal proceedings end at 5.30pm to have a chat and a drink. This will also be when we announce the winner of the “What’s your Favourite Black British History book?” competition, in partnership with Black British Music,  which we’ll be asking you to nominate anytime from now and during the day using the hashtag  #WHBBHBooks.
 
As ever, we have a fantastic line-up of speakers for you, and we are going for shorter presentations so that there’s more discussion time.
 
We’ll get started with Children’s Publishing. There has been some progress in this area, as 10% of children’s books featured ethnic minority characters in 2019, compared with just 4% in 2017. But only 5% of these had ethnic minority main characters; which is just not good enough when we consider that over 30% of primary school children are from a minority ethnic background. You can read more details in the CLPE’s Reflecting Realities surveys. There is also the issue that between 2007 and 2017, fewer than 2% of all authors and/or illustrators of children’s books published in the UK were British people of colour. But there are reasons for optimism, including the Book Trust Represents project, and their #PassthePen initiative and the Scholastic Voices series. The panel will be chaired by the wonderful Catherine Johnson, who spoke to us at WHBBH3 back in 2015. She has authored several books for young people with Black British protagonists, including Hero, A Nest of Vipers, Sawbones and Freedom and is currently working on a TV drama series based on Black Tudors! He latest book, Queen of Freedom, which tells the story of Nanny of the Maroons, had just been shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize. She’ll be speaking to Kandace Chimbiri, also an author of Black history books for children (Secrets of the Afro Comb, 6,000 Years of Art and Culture, The Story of Early Ancient Egypt, Step Back in Time to Ancient Kush and The Story of the Windrush) who is now writing a prequel to her Windrush book for Scholastic, who will be producing wall charts and teaching resources to accompany both books. Scholastic have also recently published Diver’s Daughter: A Black Tudor story by another of our speakers, writer Patrice Lawrence, who is also on the Jhalak Prize shortlist for Eight Pieces of Silva, which has also been shortlisted for The Bookseller YA Prize. They’ll be joined by S.I. Martin,  museum educator and author of children’s books Jupiter Williams and Jupiter Amidships, as well as Incomparable World which has just been reprinted by Penguin as part of the Black Britain, Writing Back series curated by Bernadine Evaristo. We’ll also hear from Karen Sands-O'Connor, author of Children’s Publishing and Black Britain 1965-2015 and teacher and writer Darren Chetty, a contributor to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla, who together have authored this series of articles in Books for Keeps examining the way black, Asian and minority ethnic voices have been represented in the English national story, through children’s literature. As you can tell by the length of this paragraph, I’m very excited to hear what they all have to say!
 
Next, we’ll look at the state of play in Educational Publishing. The need to get more Black British History into our classrooms has been a constant refrain at WHBBH events ever since they started back in 2014. I recently blogged on the subject with a list of 19 ideas of how to do so without waiting for the Government to take action. One of the points on the list was to work with educational publishers, so I’m really keen to hear what this panel has to say. Lavinya Stennett, founder of The Black Curriculum will be in the chair. I’m delighted she’ll be joining us as she’s been a driving force in pushing for change in the curriculum, producing this report on Black British History in the National Curriculum; working directly with schools, companies and non-profit organisations, and producing teaching resources including some in collaboration with the TES. We’ll be hearing from teacher and history education consultant Hannah Cusworth, who has worked with Oak Academy, The Historical Association, Schools History Project and BBC Teach, via a pre-recorded video. You can also see some of her TV interviews and newspaper comment pieces here. Joining us on the day will be publishers Janice Mansel-Chan (Oxford University Press) and William Goodfellow (Hodder Education), who are both beginning to include more Black British History in their materials, including the Hodder Teaching Black Tudors resources (coming out later this year)  as well as WHBBH regulars, the wonderful educational consultancy Justice2History duo Abdul Mohamed and Robin Whitburn, who are also authors of several textbooks as well as Doing Justice to History: Transforming Black history in secondary schools. You can revisit some of their previous appearances, and other WHBBH panels on Education here.

After Lunch, we’ll examine Academic Publishing, with Dr. Meleisa Ono-George in the chair. This is of course a vital part of the jigsaw, as new knowledge continues to be exhumed from the archives, but are academic books prohibitively expensive and who gets access to online journals? Dr. Ono-George is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean and has recently been appointed as an Associate Professor at Queen’s College, Oxford. We'll have a pre-recorded interview with publisher Alison Welsby from Liverpool University Press, who commissioned Britain’s Black Past, edited by Gretchen Gerzina, which features contributions from many of the leading scholars of Black British History, including Chapter 1 on the John Blanke Project by our very own Michael Ohajuru. Then we'll hear from Dr. Kennetta Hammond Perry, author of London is the Place For Me:  Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race and the Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University. She was our keynote speaker at WHBBHX in Leicester in 2018, and we’re delighted to welcome her back. Helen Gilmour and Geraldine Richards who publish history journals at Routledge, Taylor and Francis will also bring their perspectives on this important aspect of academic history publishing.
 
Last but certainly not least, we’ll finish the day with a look at what is known in the trade as Trade Publishing, essentially commercial books aimed at ‘the general reader’, an area where last summer saw books by Black British authors topping both the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists for the first time. Our chair will be Kadija George MBE, literary activist, writer, poet and editor of SABLELitMag, and several anthologies including Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature and C3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (with Courttia Newland). We’ll have a video from Colin Grant, author of Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, who recently recorded this excellent Thinking Black essay series for BBC Radio 3, launching WritersMosaic, an online platform for new writing from a mosaic of literary voices. Then we’ll hear from historian Robin Walker, ‘The Black History Man’; Patrick Vernon OBE, the co-author with Angelina Osbourne of 100 Great Black Britons and tireless campaigner, most recently in aid of the Windrush generation and part of the #RejectThe Report response to the Sewell report (you can sign the letter, which has over 20,000 signatures already here). Joining them will be editor Hannah Chukwu (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House), who worked with Bernadine Evaristo on the Black Britain, Writing Back series and the #LitinColour project with the Runnymede Trust, and literary agent Natalie Jerome (Aevitas Creative), whose clients include David Harewood and Sir Lenny Henry, and helped found Creative Access, a mentoring and graduate trainee scheme for BAME candidates looking for paid internships across the creative industries and media sector. 
 
After all that, we’ll be encouraging you to fetch a drink of your choice, and join us for the informal chat we miss so much from our IRL Drinks Receptions!
 
Wow, what a day it’s going to be! Really hope you can join us. It's FREE to attend and you can find the booking form and full agenda here.  

If you can't make it, we'll be live-tweeting @BlackBritHist #WHBBHBooks throughout the day, and the recordings will be made available after the event. 

And don’t forget to nominate your favourite Black British History Book using the hashtag hashtag #WHBBHBooks If you need some inspiration check out this Black British Music video 'Those African Books Go And Read' by Music4Causes with kind support by Prof Paul Gilroy, Prof Lez Henry and Tony Warner Compiled & edited by Kwaku.

In Part 1 of this blog I explained that while the fight for curriculum change must of course continue, I am far too impatient to wait for this Government to have a change of heart and make teaching Black British History mandatory, or for another generation of teachers to become ‘comfortable talking about topics they themselves were taught.’ I highlighted the importance of having a history lesson on the campaign to change history lessons, to allow us to learn from the victories and defeats of the last thirty years, and the need to must combine the passion and energy of young campaigners and a new cohort of innovative young history teachers with the experience and wisdom of stalwarts, whilst considering the many constraints placed upon our teachers and  the importance of having a detailed knowledge of how our schools actually operate.

Following this discussion, below is my list of 19 specific ideas that I have picked up from many conversations over the years as to how we can change things, NOW.

Since I first began drafting this list in July progress in some of these areas have been accelerating, and so I will also be signposting existing initiatives in the relevant areas. However, I am not privy to all of these, so please add things I’ve missed in the comments and I’ll incorporate them.

19 Ways to Get More Black British History into our Classrooms

Information Gathering

1. Build on the Impact of Omission Survey to build a full picture what exactly is currently being taught in schools, and how. Many teachers have begun to make changes in the wake of the events of this summer. It is important to fully map the landscape, both in order to assess the scale of the problem, and to identify examples of best practice to be replicated.

2. We need a clear picture of what changes we want to see. A working group should go through the existing curriculum highlighting places where Black British History can currently be taught (including in other subject areas) with practical suggestions and tips for teachers. This might be a task that could be undertaken by the new Steering Group to review diversity in GCSE and A-Level specifications announced by the Historical Association in October. This survey could go way beyond the Department of Education’s brief list of such opportunities, and draw on the detailed submission made by the BASA Education Committee during the curriculum consultation period in 2013. Another angle here is to use the requirement for a local study: all you need is one local record- such as the baptism of an African in a local church (see for example this searchable dataset for London), and you have a springboard into the subject. There are various ongoing mapping projects that could help with this, including this map of graves and memorials, this one of Frederick Douglass and other African American abolitionists’ speaking tours of Britain; this one by Buzzfeed and Historic England’s Another England, and more references (such as some 400 records of Black Tudors and Stuarts I found during my doctoral research) can be found at your local county archive- a school visit to which would be an educational experience in itself. There are also opportunities to talk about history in other subject areas, such as literature, geography, music and art that could be exploited. The group should also prepare a guide to convincing your school to make these changes.

Training and Recruitment

3. Provide better Initial Teacher Training and Continuing Professional Development. Even were the curriculum to be redrafted, the prospect of teachers being mandated to teach subjects they know little about is quite frankly, terrifying. I’ve heard stories of teachers running classroom “slave auctions”, asking students to get under their desks and pretend they are on a slaving ship, write a ‘slave narrative’ or to write a business plan imagining they are a plantation owner. More benignly, but equally unhelpful and revealing, is the almost ubiquitous focus on 20th century American Black History during British Black History Month. It is vital therefore that teachers learn Black British History themselves, both while studying for their PGCE, and through Continuing Professional Development opportunities such as the TIDE/Runnymede Beacon Fellowships or the Historical Association Teacher Fellowship Programme on Britain and Transatlantic Slavery. There is also scope in the field of online learning platforms to increase coverage of Black British History. This summer Enrich Learning offered a short Black British History course ; FutureLearn currently has courses on Empire: the Controversies of British Imperialism and the History of Slavery in the British Caribbean. For the truly committed, there are now two Masters courses, at Chichester (History of Africa and the African Diaspora) and Goldsmiths (Black British History), both of which can be done part-time, and in the case of Chichester, remotely.​

4. While teachers of all backgrounds need to think about how to teach Black British History, we should work to ensure that schools not only recruit more Black teachers but work to promote them to leadership roles, where a more diverse range of perspectives will help make change. Nick Dennis has recently blogged on how we could apply the Parker Review on Ethnic Diversity of UK boards (2017) to the school setting.

Providing Better Resources

5. Work with Educational publishers of textbooks to similarly diversify their offering. Some of the existing texts need immediate revision. One credits Sir John Hawkins with “inventing the slave trade”- a statement that is both factually inaccurate (the Portuguese initiated the transatlantic trafficking of Africans half a century earlier), and perversely celebratory- another great British first! Some publishers have made public statements of solidarity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that can be leveraged to persuade them to put their money where their mouth is. For example Hachette have agreed to republish The History of the African and  Caribbean Communities in Britain by Hakim Adi following this video (2.5K views) and this petition (999 signatures). Similarly, after pressure on Twitter, Routledge has issued Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives in paperback, making it available at the price of £29.99 as opposed to the previously prohibitive £120 hardback. New titles should also be commissioned, and some publishers are beginning to take steps in the right direction, such as Pearson Education, who are working with Stephen Bourne (author of Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great War) to create a new KS2 resource.

6. Work to distribute the latest books to schools. It is often said that one barrier to teaching new topics in school is the cost of buying new books. Publishers should do more to make sure their books are getting to the students that would most benefit from them; whilst school librarians should push for them to be prioritised. Besides textbooks for specific courses such as the Migration GCSE module and the African Kingdoms A level option, there are a growing number of Black British History books aimed at school-age children. Amongst the books every school should have are the children's version of David Olusoga's Black and British: A Short Essential History  (which brilliantly donates 50p to the Black Curriculum for every copy purchased); Angelina Osbourne and Patrick Vernon's 100 Great Black Britons (there is currently a GoFundMe campaign to send a copy to every secondary school in the country; please support if you can, or if you''re a teacher, you can request a copy for your school here); Hakim Adi's The History of the African and  Caribbean Communities in Britain; Stephen Bourne's Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great War; Kandace Chimbiri's The Story of Windrush; Floella Benjamin's Coming to England; Dan Lyndon's Journeys: The Story of Migration to Britain; and Shirley Anstis's Black British Members of Parliament in the House of Commons: 22 Stories of Passion, Achievement and Success - and I'm sure many more (please add suggestions in the comments so I can incorporate them- we may need a separate reading list!). Schools could also read fiction titles with Black British themes such as those by S.I. Martin and Catherine Johnson and the new Scholastic Voices series. This allows history to get into the classroom under cover of literacy, a tactic I discussed with my sister, a primary school teacher, here. 

7. Provide high quality free online teaching resources. There are many of these already out there, and the Institute of Historical Research Library has recently gathered many together here, and is still collecting others via this form. The TES has recently launched a new hub for black British History resources, though they look far from very comprehensive at present. Examples of the high quality recent resources out there include the Runnymede Trust’s Our Migration Story; England's Immigrants 1330–1550; the TIDE Project (Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, c. 1550 – 1700); and the Bernie Grant Trust Marginalised No More project. 

Change from below

8. Establish closer relationships between historians and school teachers. I’ve found the #historyteacher hashtag on Twitter and the History Teachers’ Book Club to be great ways to engage with an online community of enthusiastic history teachers. More traditionally, there are two major teaching conferences each year run by the Historical Association and the Schools History Project where teachers share ideas. It was exciting to see a diverse range of topics on both of their 2020 agendas (HA conference; SHP conference). The Historical Association also has two teaching magazines, Teaching History and Primary History with wide readerships. My own Teaching Black Tudors project started two years ago after I tweeted about the idea. I got a big response, ran a workshop, gathered lesson plans and schemes of work (a term I learnt along the way!) and we are now working with a leading educational publisher to enhance and distribute the resources. Interest has grown from the initial 20 or so teachers who attended the workshop in 2018 to some 700 people signed up to the project mailing list. This is a way of working that could be applied to other topics.

9. Work with Black supplementary schools, public and community historians such as those listed on the National Association of Black Supplementary Schools website;  the Croydon Supplementary Education Project;  Black History Walks, Black History Studies; the Windrush Foundation; the Equiano Society, Robin Walker; the Thinking Black educational project and and BTWSC/AHR/BBM/BMC to share knowledge and approaches to teaching Black British History, allowing school teachers to learn from the wisdom of community practitioners who have been teaching and making the subject accessible for decades. 

10. Harness Parent Power. While some parents have been conscious of the problem for years, the homeschooling necessitated by lockdown this year will have meant many others have encountered the detail of their children's history lessons for the first time; while the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the gaps in the narrative. Parents keen to diversify what their kids are learning can be signposted to the many resources referenced in this blog; but can also put pressure on schools to make change. 

11. Engage pupils themselves in the process of change. It's clear many young people have their own views on this problem already, and have taken action, for example the Black Curriculum, Impact of Omission and Fill in the Blanks campaigns, as well as involvement in Black Lives Matter protests this year. The energy of current pupils can be channeled within schools into changing what lessons look like.  An excellent example of this comes from Dr. Challoner’s Grammar School in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where the Assistant head teacher Catherine Priggs (who recently wrote about this process in the Historical Association’s Teaching History magazine) engaged her Year 8 pupils to lead the school’s review of the Key Stage 3 curriculum, and make their own recommendations for how to diversify what was being taught.

Change from above

12. Work with Exam boards to ensure they include and vigorously promote more Black British History modules. Up till now, none of the EdExcel (Britain’s most popular board)’s GCSE modules mention Black people in Britain. Edexcel’s parent company Pearson are now planning to introduce a module on Migration (a topic offered by OCR and AQA since 2016- listen to Martin Spafford talking about the course it here). However, only 4% of schools currently take this module, so the exam boards (and the rest of us) must do more to incentivise uptake. Besides specific modules on the topic, exam boards should ensure that all their modules take account of Black British History, whether asking questions about Cromwell’s imperial designs or using the contrasting example of the Bristol bus boycott to the better known events in Montgomery, Alabama. The OCR African Kingdoms A level option is an excellent example of how the offer can be diversified.

13. Work with Ofsted to ensure they are effectively inspecting the content as well as the quality of lessons, and including this in training of inspectors. The new 2019 inspection framework specifically guards against ‘curriculum narrowing’, so we must ensure inspectors have a good grounding in how a broad curriculum should incorporate Black British History. Senior Leadership Teams in schools will listen if Ofsted reports suggest that things need to change, and inspectors, unlike policy makers, actually see what happens in the classroom.

14. Petition individual schools, academy trusts and federations, as well as the local authorities (who still control a number of schools and can have quite a lot of wider influence over schools in their catchment area), asking them to consider making some of the changes listed here. The Runnymede Trust has suggested contacting school governors, or becoming a governor yourself. They provides further advice on this and a letter template here.
 
15. Petition to increase the amount of time given for teaching history in general, reviewing whether to make it a compulsory GCSE option. When calling for new topics to be taught, we need to bear in mind that some teachers only have an hour a week to teach history. This is not an excuse, and Black British History should not be seen as an extra to be bolted on, but rather a theme to integrate- for example by being sure to talk about Black soldiers and giving a global perspective when looking at the World Wars, but more time would clearly help.

16. Establish a Centre for Teaching Race, Migration and Empire, a suggestion made by the Runnymede Trust and the TIDE project last year in their Teaching Migration, Belonging and Empire in Secondary Schools report. This would be modelled on the high successful  UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, and provide a hub and most importantly funding, for many of the suggestions made in this blog. Some of this funding might have to come from non-governmental sources, as with the Centre for Holocaust Education which is run in partnership between the Department for Education and the Pears Foundation. For more about how to support the campaign for such a Centre click here.

Harnessing the influence of other stakeholders

17. Engage with Museums and Galleries to ensure they are including Black British History in their Schools outreach programmes. They could follow the example of the Black Cultural Archives’s Schools Programme, as well as learning from groups such as Museum Detox, and freelance experts such as Michael Ohajuru, who leads Image of the Black tours in London’s major galleries, as well as taking his John Blanke Project into schools. Positive steps are being made in this direction, with Historic Royal Palaces hiring a Curator for Inclusive Histories, and Royal Museums Greenwich looking to include more Black History in their Tudors programming.

18. Assemble some prominent historians to back reform, some of whom have tweeted in support of change in recent months. This would be facilitated by the document created by the working group, which would make it clear exactly what is being proposed. Most historians would probably back at least the proposal to make more time for history in school timetables. Some might also be interested in working more closely with teachers to ensure the latest research is injected straight into the classroom. While it is often not practical for historians to make regular school visits (and this can be a bit of an add-on), short video clips of them talking direct to camera, as used to great effect by Jason Todd and Yasmin Khan, looking at her book The Raj at War, is a more scalable way of bringing them into the classroom. This would also help us to reach less motivated teachers, who could be encouraged by the example of their history heroes, as well as making a lasting impression on students.

19. Engage with journalists by pitching stories, tweeting, responding to the news cycle (even blogging!), and giving a more in depth understanding of and commentary the topic, especially the point that Black British History is about so much more than enslavement. The media can make a big difference, and more initiatives like the Guardian's Black History Timeline, which was rewritten and reissued this summer, or ITV's Back to School with Alison Hammond should be encouraged. Another positive development is that the BBC has made some of their back catalogue, such as David Olusoga's Black and British: A Forgotten History, available on iPlayer under the heading: 'Exploring Black History'- there are many more programmes that could be made more accessible in this way by both the BBC and other channels. 

There is a heartening willingness amongst increasing numbers of teachers, schools and other stakeholders to make this change, and some great examples of schools that are already teaching Black British History. I hope some of them will have further ideas to add to this list. We are stronger together and if we want to change what happens in our classrooms sooner rather than later we need to pool our resources and experiences and look beyond changing the National Curriculum to ensure young people learn the true story of our nation.
 
This blog is the result of many conversations over several years, made urgent once more by the events of this year. These have at times been hard to keep up with, so if I’ve missed anything, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add/edit accordingly.
 
I would particularly like to thank the following people for their input and feedback on this blog, while emphasising that any errors remain my own: Shahmima Akhtar, Kerry Apps, Sean Creighton, Hannah Elias, Corinne Fowler, Tim Jenner, Abdul Mohamud, Michael Ohajuru, Helen Sanson, Martin Spafford and.Robin Whitburn.

What I want to contribute to the conversation is a list of 19 specific ideas that I have picked up from many conversations over the years as to how we can change things, NOW. Because solutions, not problems, are the agents of change. Since I first began drafting this list in July progress in some of these areas have been accelerating, and so I will also be signposting existing initiatives in the relevant areas. However, I am not privy to all of these, so please add things I’ve missed in the comments and I’ll incorporate them.
 
Click here to skip straight to the ideas.
 
It seems clear to me that the current Government is not going to be part of the solution anytime soon. The Petitions Committee are currently conducting a listening exercise in response to the fact that 268,182 people have signed a petition to Teach Britain's colonial past as part of the UK's compulsory curriculum
created by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson of Impact of Omission; whilst two other petitions, Add education on diversity and racism to all school curriculums and Making the UK education curriculum more inclusive of BAME history, have received 115,575 signatures combined. While the evidence (watch the 5th November session here; the 18th November session here) makes for illuminating listening, if the 20th October debate on the subject (text from Hansard here) is anything to go by, we have a long struggle ahead if we are to convince the current Government to change the curriculum. The Minister for Equalities herself asserted that the curriculum does not need to change, and that while children ‘can learn about the British empire and colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition, and how our history has been shaped by people of all ethnicities…we should not apologise for the fact that British children primarily study the history of these islands.’ This elides the fact that there have been ‘people of all ethnicities’ in ‘these islands’ since at least the Roman period; that Black History is British History, and extends far beyond the narrative of enslavement and colonialism. As I told the Department for Education back in 2012, the Edwardian ‘Our Island Story’ narrative is no longer fit for purpose. But, our Government believe the curriculum is already ‘incredibly diverse’. It is revealing that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has tweeted approvingly about the frankly worrying right-wing think tank Policy Exchange’s History Matters project, which, concerned that British History is becoming ‘politicised, and sometimes distorted, in the current moment’, are compiling a dossier to record the changes being made, they suggest, ‘without proper thought and against public opinion’. And Saturday’s Daily Express summed up Williamson’s stance, and that of the ‘Common Sense’ group of Tory MPs, under the headline:  We will NOT bow to the PC brigade! PM rejects calls for 'woke' school curriculum. While the fight for curriculum change must of course continue, I for one, am far too impatient to wait for this Government to have a change of heart and make teaching Black British History mandatory.
 
Neither is change going to happen organically, ‘as university curriculums evolve’ as a overly-optimistic article in the Economist this summer suggested. As the Royal Historical Society’s 2018 Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report highlighted, universities have their own problems including a lack of diversity in both the curriculum and the teaching staff. Further, a damning set of recommendations released in November 2020 by Universities UK concluded that British higher education perpetuates institutional racism.  And the pace of change would be far too slow. I don’t want to wait for another generation of teachers to become, as the Economist suggested, ‘comfortable talking about topics they themselves were taught.’
 
Before we decide on a future strategy, it is important to recognize the many individuals, groups and organizations who have been campaigning for this vital change, and providing extra-curricular education for children since before the first National Curriculum was written in 1988. A history lesson on the campaign to change history lessons, if you will. Taking a longer view allows us to learn from the victories and defeats along the way. The establishment of Black History Month in 1987 was a step towards highlighting this history in schools.  In 1991 Peter Fryer, author of the seminal Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984), complained alongside Julia Bush, in a pamphlet on ‘The Politics of Black History’ that ‘the intentions of this government are to ram a nationalistic, narrow, stereotype down children’s throats’, which sounds strikingly familiar. The Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA), founded in 1991, petitioned the National Curriculum Council, Educational Publishers, and Ofsted throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and submitted detailed feedback during the curriculum consultation period in 2013. BASA member and history teacher Martin Spafford helped design the 2007 History National Curriculum which recommended the teaching of the continued ethnic diversity of the people of Britain throughout history, precolonial African civilisations, empire and decolonization, but sadly this progress was arrested in 2013. It’s also worth going back to listen to the various public discussion of the subject held over the last few years. Since 2014, education has been a recurrent theme at the What’s Happening in Black British History? workshops I run with Michael Ohajuru at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. In 2015 Hakim Adi held the History Matters conference highlighting the alarmingly low numbers of Black history students and teachers, which is now being combatted by the inspirational Young Historians Project. There have also been excellent discussions on the Justice2History podcast, at the 2018 Institute of Historical Research event ‘Where do we fit in?’ Black and Asian British History on the Curriculum, and at the new Institute of Historical Research Black British History Seminar in October.
 
To succeed, we must combine the passion and energy of young campaigners such as the Black Curriculum, Fill in the Blanks and Impact of Omission, and a new cohort of innovative young history teachers with the experience and wisdom of stalwarts including BASA veterans Marika Sherwood, Hakim Adi, Stephen Bourne,  Sean Creighton; campaigners like Arthur Torrington, co-founder of the Equiano Society and the Windrush Foundation; Angelina Osborne and Patrick Vernon, who have developed the 100 Great Black Britons project from a poll in 2003 to a nice fat book, out this year; history teachers like Martin Spafford, Nick Dennis and Dan Lyndon (who started his BlackHistory4Schools website back in 2006, and has recently written Colonial Countryside Project teaching materials); and those who train teachers and act as educational consultants like Justice2History’s Adbullah Mohamud and Robin Whitburn of UCL’s Institute of Education, Jason Todd at Oxford’s Education Department, Will Bailey-Watson in Reading; Black History Studies; Robin Walker (who co-wrote Black British History: Black Influences on British Culture (1948 to 2016) with the requirements of the current National Curriculum in mind); the Thinking Black educational project, the Windrush Foundation; the Equiano Society,  BTWSC/AHR/BBM/BMC and Black History Walks, to name a few.
 
It is also vital to include teachers and educational specialists (Mohamud and Whitburn’s ‘choreographers’) themselves in the conversation alongside ‘pugilists’(activists/campaigners) and ‘diggers’(historians): we cannot change anything without considering the many constraints placed upon our teachers and a detailed knowledge of how our schools actually operate. This oversight is nowhere more apparent than in the exclusive focus on curriculum change. Nearly a third of publicly-funded schools in England are now ‘academies’ (22 per cent of primary and 68 per cent of secondary schools), which no longer have to follow the curriculum (though many still do). Schools are also still implementing a vast array of changes imposed upon them over the last few years, including the 2019 Ofsted regulations, not to mention the unprecedented challenges of operating during a pandemic. While curriculum change should continue to be a goal, I fear that demanding this happen under the present Government will only lead to heads bloodied from repeated impact with the proverbial brick wall.
 
With this in mind, we need to be inventive, and attack the problem from all conceivable angles.

Go to my next blog to find my running list of proactive ideas to change what happens in our classrooms, besides maintaining the pressure on the Government to change the National Curriculum.
 
This blog is the result of many conversations over several years, made urgent once more by the events of this year. These have at times been hard to keep up with, so if I’ve missed anything, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add/edit accordingly.
 
 I would particularly like to thank the following people for their input and feedback on this blog, while emphasising that any errors remain my own: Shahmima Akhtar, Kerry Apps, Sean Creighton, Hannah Elias, Corinne Fowler, Tim Jenner, Abdul Mohamud, Michael Ohajuru, Helen Sanson, Martin Spafford and Robin Whitburn.

Long, long ago, BC (Before Coronavirus), I travelled to Plymouth to be interviewed by Professor Alice Roberts for Channel 4's Britain's Most Historic Towns episode, Elizabethan Plymouth. This is airing tomorrow (Saturday 28th November 2020) night at 8.30pm on Channel 4, and will be available to watch online afterwards here. I was in the city for two days, but have no idea how much and which parts of the footage filmed will make the final cut!

​We were mostly talking about Sir Francis Drake, as well as the wider geopolitical context of the Elizabethan era, but I did my best to get some Black Tudors stories in there. Besides Diego, who brokered Drake's alliance with the Panama Maroons in 1573 and sailed (but sadly died) on his circumnavigation voyage 1577-1580; Maria, the woman he captured from the Spanish but then abandoned heavily pregnant on an Indonesian island; and the other Africans that sailed with him, there were also a number of other Africans living in Elizabethan Plymouth, whose baptisms and burials are listed in the registers of St. Andrew's Church, which it was exciting to set foot in for the first time! (You can read all about them in Chapter 3 of Black Tudors, and the recently added entry on Diego in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

We filmed at the Royal Citadel, which is on the site of an earlier fort built by Drake in the 1590s, where it was a challenge to try to summarise the challenges facing Elizabeth I when she came to the throne in 1558 in less than a minute, on  a very windy and wet citadel wall (lucky I wore my raincoat and wellies). The next day, we headed to Buckland Abbey, near Yelverton, about 20 mins drive north of the city, which Drake purchased in 1581, having stolen a fortune from the Spanish on his voyage round the world.

I had already visited Buckland as part of my work with the Colonial Countryside project, which led to Diego and Maria featuring in their World Encompassed exhibition in 2018. I'm excited to read the creative writing by Ayanna Gillian Lloyd and local schoolchildren inspired by this story that will be published next year as part of the project. I hadn't been able to visit the exhibition at the time, so it was fantastic to see the mid 20th century Pym mural which depicts Drake's route round the world-and Alice very kindly made this little video of me telling the story of the voyage through a Black Tudors lens:

Anyway, I hope you're able to tune in  tomorrow (Saturday 28th November 2020) night at 8.30pm on Channel 4, or are able to watch online afterwards here. Would love to hear your thoughts on the programme so do comment below, or get involved on Twitter @MirandaKaufmann #HistoricTowns, where I will be live-tweeting during the episode!

We had so many excellent proposals for our What’s Happening in Black British History? Transnational Workshop earlier this month that we have decided to arrange a second event, the What’s Happening in Black British History? Transnational Workshop II, which will be held online via Zoom on Wednesday 25th November 2020. It's a FREE to attend, full day event- running from 11.30am- 6pm, though again sadly not followed by the usual Drinks Reception - though again I could be persuaded to have a chat and a drink over Zoom with anyone who's keen after the formal proceedings are over!

The day will start with a panel looking at Education and Public Engagement from a wide variety of angles. First Yvonne Sinclair, a former Head of History, who now lectures trainee teachers, will give us an insight into her current PhD research comparing how enslavement is taught in both England and Jamaica.  Then we'll hear from Carina Ancell and Alan Kunna about how they have explored the topic at Newham Sixth Form College in East London with their students using the Hutchison Family of  the Gold Coast and Britain as a case study. 
Education doesn't end when we leave school of course so the next two presentations will look at engaging museum and local community audiences with Black British History. Susanna Jorek will talk about Processes of Decolonization in Museums in Germany and the UK, with a particular focus on Bristol Museums; and then we will hear how  Tony Kalume of Diversity Lewes has been Celebrating African Caribbeans in Sussex Past And Present.

After lunch Gretchen Gerzina, author of Black London and presenter of BBC Radio 4 documentary Britain's Black Past will tell us about her new edited collection of essays also entitled Britain's Black Past, which presents a dazzling range of new research and projects from some of the stars of the field (including our own Michael Ohajuru writing about his John Blanke Project), many of whom have presented at previous WHBBH events.  You can feast your eyes on the contents page here. 

Next, we'll be hearing about Digital Humanities and Databases. Charles R. Foy will tell us all about his 
Black Mariner Database, with a special focus on the over 1,700 British Black mariners included therein, and the 'anxious Atlantic' world they had to navigate (Charles also has a chapter about this in the new book, Britain's Black Past, edited by Gretchen Gerzina). Katy Roscoe will talk about her database of over 2500 prisoners incarcerated on Cockatoo island, Sydney's most notorious 19th century prison, some of whom were of African origin.

Then Daniel Domingues will present his Visualizing Abolition Project, which maps the suppression of the trade in enslaved Africans by tracing nearly 31,000 records of correspondence exchanged between the British Foreign Office and British commissioners, ministers, naval officers, and representatives of foreign governments around the world over the course of the nineteenth century. 
           
The final session will be on the theme of Art and Culture. This September, British-American artist Melissa Hill added an image to an existing mural of 'three regular medieval guys chilling' in The Shambles, at the heart of the medieval town of Sevenoaks, Kent.  Motivated by BLM protests in towns across Kent, she wanted to raise the question of how far back one might have found a Black presence in the town. She will reflect on shaking up the imagination of historical possibility in a rural English town. Then Mark McCarthy will explore the depiction of Black Loyalists in Benjamin West’s 'Allegory of Britannia', which in what Simon Schama has called 'an outrageously self-serving fiction', shows a bountiful Britain compensating those who had fought for her during the American War of Independence. Finally Australian art historian Alice Proctor, author of The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it, who has been leading Uncomfortable Art Tours of London's leading museums and galleries for several years will talk about Discomfort: Truth and Representation in British Galleries. 

Really hope you can join us for what looks to be a really thought provoking and invigorating day. It's FREE to attend and you can find the booking form and full agenda here.  

If you can't make it, we'll be live-tweeting @BlackBritHist #WHBBH_TN2 throughout the day, and the recordings will be made available after the event. 

​In an autumn in which it feels there's not a lot to look forward to, I'm excited about the What’s Happening in Black British History? Transnational Workshop, which will be held online via Zoom on Wednesday 14th October 2020. It's a full day event- running from 10.30am- 6pm, though sadly not followed by the usual Drinks Reception - though I could be persuaded to have a chat and a drink over Zoom with anyone who's keen after the formal proceedings are over!

We're opening with a panel on Political Activism and transnational solidarity, which will provide some much-needed long term context for the events of this summer.  In chronological order, we will start over a hundred years ago with David Killingray speaking about the events leading up to and following on from the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, in his paper on ‘Early pan-African endeavours in the black Atlantic world, 1890-1912’; followed by Kesewa John explaining the role of Caribbean activists in Britain in the anti-imperialist activism of the 1930s in ‘Militant Diaspora: The International African Service Bureau and the Caribbean Labour Rebellions’. Then Ellie Kramer-Taylor will take up the story as she speaks about ‘The West Indian Federation and the Caribbean diaspora in Britain’, in the 1950s and 1960s.

After a break, we will then be able to benefit from the silver lining that online events allow us to hear from speakers from around the world and welcome Shireen Mushtaq, Aiman Iqbal and Arooba Ali from Kinnaird College for Women, in Lahore, Pakistan, who will present on 'Racism as structural violence: The case of British African-Caribbean People’ during the Cold War period,  before Robin Bunce ends the session with his discussion of ‘Black Sections in the Labour Party 1983-7: Apartheid, Colonialism and understandings of anti-racism in Britain’. I'm sure I'll learn a lot as the 20th century is 'not my period', and I hope the themes of this panel will help us to learn lessons from the past as we continue to fight racism today. 

After lunch (of your choice!), we can tuck into our regular New Books panel. There are so many great new Black British History books out there at the moment, so much so that we won't have time to highlight all of them (but keep an eye on our Twitter @BlackBritHist). We are thrilled to be hearing about these exciting new titles:

• 100 Great Black Britons by Patrick Vernon & Angelina Osbourne 
• Journeys: The Story of Migration to Britain by Dan Lyndon-Cohen
• Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business by Kathleen Chater

And although they can't be with us on the day, we will hear from Kadie Kanneh-Mason, who will be discussing House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons with  ​Shirley J. Thompson OBE  and David Olusoga, who spoke to me about the new version of his book for young people Black and British: A Short, Essential History (for every copy sold, 50p will go to The Black Curriculum). 

The final session will be devoted to  Representing Black Women. It is  fantastic that after six years of featuring Sarah Forbes Bonetta on our publicity material, we are finally having a talk about her, entitled ‘Girl/Ship: Challenging Geographic, Historical, and Formal Historical Methods in Black British Studies’, by Samantha Pinto, whose new book, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, explores her life alongside other 'celebrity' historical figures: Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman,  and Mary Seacole, who is the subject of  Jordan Harris's paper ‘Claiming Mary Seacole’. Harris will compare how Seacole is seen in Jamaica, the country of her birth, with her status in Britain, asking 'what exactly makes Seacole British, and who has the right to claim her as a national symbol?' Finally, Jeff Bowersox will introduce us to 'Josephine Morcashani: A Briton Performing Black Femininity on Stages across Europe’, an entertainer who was something of a celebrity in her day (1870-1929), but is now largely unknown.  This will allow for a fascinating conversation on who we remember and why, and how women specifically have been represented, or represented themselves. 

Really hope you can join us for what looks to be a really thought provoking and invigorating day. You can find the booking form and full agenda here. 

If you can't make it, we'll be live-tweeting @BlackBritHist #WHBBH_TN throughout the day, and the recordings will be made available after the event.