Guest blog by Ray Costello
The following is the next of Ray's talk opening the Black History 2 Workshop in Liverpool on Thursday 19 February
Well, the Black History Month bus has
long left the station to return next year - to repair a somewhat interrupted
curriculum.
I’d like to share a few thoughts with
you on that journey.
A few short
decades ago even Black History Month did not exist. Previous notions of the
recording and teaching of the history of black people of the Diaspora were conceived
of in a very different way. In the United States after the Abolition of slavery
in 1865, white researchers considering the implications of the dawn of a Post-bellum era adopted something nearer
a detached anthropological study of black people. Even later sympathetic
studies, like historian and sociologist Frank Tannenbaum's (1893-1969) image of the South in the 1930s
and Walter White’s study of racial violence in the early twentieth century, still
possessed an element of social distance.
Joel Augustus Rogers, born in 1880 and the grand-daddy of us all, is my hero, a very early
example of an isolated individual black historian who laboured to alter this
perception of a people largely consigned to the dustbin of history throughout
previous centuries. This lonely pioneer could certainly be described as travelling
on the Black History bus in more than any metaphorical sense.
A Jamaican-American author, Rogers worked as a Pullman
porter, allowing him to travel and feed his appetite for
knowledge by using libraries in the cities which he visited. Self-publishing
the results of his research in several books, he used his light complexion to allow
him entrance into places that, at the time, a darker-skinned black man would
have found difficult. At one time,
he also worked
as a reporter for the Chicago Enterprise and for
Marcus Garvey’s newspaper.
Those
of us who have heard the youthful cry from the back of the car, ‘Are we there
yet?’ may have resorted to occupying young fellow travellers by encouraging
them to look for signposts to gauge the journey’s progress. But what if the
markers aiding us to record our journey have been removed? Many of us have
found building a narrative around the lives of people of African descent
difficult enough without the coathangers on which we frame that narrative being
actively interfered with, yet just that happened last year with
plans to eliminate the few existing black figures in British history taught
within schools in order to concentrate on Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell or
Nelson.
Mary Seacole was obviously not an
isolated anomaly to be revered as a black icon, rather was she a signpost for
those engaged in repairing that very ‘grand sweep of British history’ called
for - and was certainly not the only black participant in the Crimean War, my
own great-grandfather, Bermudan-born seaman Edward James, being amongst them.
Mary’s role is, we know, a rallying post for students, around which other black
people can be grouped, heroic or commonplace, like Edward - encouraging, rather
than side-tracking, valuable research into the social history of ordinary black
folk.
Likening these historical markers to archaeology,
a previously barren field might yield a few, often small, artefacts - the
occasional shard of pottery or a piece of equipment - showing the existence of
a long-forgotten people or society, leading to the discovery of a surprisingly
large community on that site, challenging any previously-held view. We know
that seemingly isolated black individuals serve as the posts in the ground of the
building, the spaces to be filled in later in the course of newer discoveries.
There
have long been complaints in conferences about an over-reliance upon
African-American history and the neglect of British Black history dating back
to at least the 1980s. Thankfully, the Black British community has thrown up
its own pioneers of British Black history.
And
there are others engaged in that struggle: The West Indian historian C. L. R.
James was long ago cited in Peter Fryer’s Staying
Power as saying – ‘The blacks will know as friends only those whites who
are fighting in the ranks beside them – And whites will be there.’
Some
white historians we know well are: Jeff Green, David Killingray, Marika
Sherwood, Sean Creighton, Audrey Dewjee, Stephen Bourne, Kathy Chater and
others working on a Black British approach.
The problem
has been that a good deal of the material has to be from primary sources. This
includes information to be found in the national archives – the official
sources, so to speak - and another rich primary source, the half-forgotten
memories of families to be found in their metaphorical and actual shoeboxes. Official
sources should not be considered in any way superior to those found in the
shoeboxes of ordinary folk. So-called primary sources found in archives are often
transcriptions of a clerk writing his version of reports he believed to be
true, whilst letters, photographs and diaries kept by descendants of black
settlers offer us first-hand material, free from interpretation (John Franklin
of the Smithsonian’s new African American Museum tells me that this was how his
department started). The biggest problem is still a shortfall of
anything in between primary sources and shoe boxes, normally to be found in
secondary source books - ordinary library books.
Black
people have lived in Britain for centuries, but Liverpool’s community is
continuous, dating back to at least the 18th century. In my early
study, I was able to find a variety of occupations and social classes including
slaves and servants, freed black loyalists from America, the student sons of
African rulers, courted for political reasons, and, more than any other group,
seafarers.
Entries such
as this in St. James Parish Registers 1783 (Sept 10th) are to be
found–
“Peter
Salisbury, Negro from Baltimore, Maryland, was baptised September.”
Black
loyalists, black people who remained loyal to British rule were shipped out of
America to Britain in the 1780s from the American port of Savannah after the
British surrender to the American rebels.
But black
children born in Liverpool, were not only those of black loyalists.
I mentioned
African students: -
Some
African students of royal descent have been shown to have either stayed or had
their descendants return at a later date. In St. James Parish 1796, there is an
intriguing entry:
“Samuel
Baron, son of the African king Onramby, alias Johnson, was baptised January
21st.”
Was
this prince born during a visit, to a king in exile, or to an older royal
student settled in England? Whoever, it provides irrefutable evidence of early
British-born Black.
I
must say with some humour that I will not say too much about black seafarers on
this occasion, as I have just written a new book to be published by Liverpool
University Press, entitled Black Tommies:
Soldiers of African Descent in the First
World War – to be found in all good bookshops as they say!
The
effects of lack of recognition of the existence of the history of British-born
and domiciled black people can be quite far-reaching and damaging. Jeff Green
will be talking later about George William Christian, the son of an Antiguan
seaman who had left the West Indies to settle in Liverpool in the
mid-nineteenth century. After serving as a clerk
for Holt Shipping Line, George established his own merchant trading business in
Nigeria and Cameroon, with European as well as black employees.
As a British born Black man, George was in an unusual position for his
times. As a clerk, he occupied a role characteristic of colonial whites, yet he was not what was referred to back home as a
‘native’, a locally-born African. This often placed him in difficult
situations. His oil exporting business in West Africa hit problems when he was arrested and fined on one occasion
for not registering a title to land in German-held Cameroon, a prerequisite of
native-born German African subjects. This
required the intervention of the MP for Toxteth, as we will hear later.
And
their troubles were not only as individuals. We know that at the conclusion of the Great War, black
seamen and their settled families faced competition with poor whites. In
May of 1919 severe riots broke out in which white rioters attacked individual
blacks in the streets, their homes and lodgings. Returning
black and white soldiers led to demobilised black servicemen being considered,
along with other black settlers, as aliens, or at the very least late-comers,
in spite of some being British-born Black or long-domiciled.
Another
effect of the non-recognition of British-born Black is being considered a perpetual
immigrant, never a citizen. Paradoxically, they were not eligible for any
benefits relating to assignation to this group in terms of funding
implications, such as Liverpool having a low rating as an EPA (educational
priority area) in previous decades, as Section 11 funding of the 1966 Local
Government Act or 1969 Urban Programme did not apply, as many British-born Black people
were undifferentiated from the greater population in terms of language,
religion or culture, which was provided for. Non-recognition is a serious
setback to racial integration as it perpetuates two myths; one being that black
immigration is a recent phenomenon, and the other that assimilation and
acculturation can cure all of society’s problems of racism, a view supported in
governmental circles of all persuasions, who seem to think that the key to
integration lies solely in immigrants learning English and knowing about
British culture, rather than taking any responsibility for external factors,
such as racism.
Are
we are anywhere nearer the ‘post-black’, or even post-racial, era talked about
in the wake of the election of Barak Obama in the United States, suggesting the
beginning of a period in which race was no longer a defining issue of daily
life? This rather premature response to the euphoria of the election of an
African American president was seen to be possibly harmful in that the very
notion could have the effect of curtailing existing struggles to rectify inequalities.
Nevertheless, it is perhaps worth looking at the feasibility of the term
‘post-black’ and perhaps redefining it into something positive.
Some believe its origin to lie in
the book The End of Blackness by
Debra Dickerson, written in 1995 and, already, the term post-black has been used in the art world as a category of
contemporary African American art in which the black experience is used rather
perversely to dispel the notion that race matters. In the late 1990s, the
artist Thelma Golden was attributed along with her fellow artist Glenn Ligon
with coining the term ‘post-black art’, which she defined, rather
paradoxically, as an insistence by certain artists who are “adamant about not
being labelled ‘black’ artists, even though their work is deeply involved with
redefining complex notions of blackness”. Golden gave a detailed explanation of
the term ‘post-black’ art in 2001 in the catalogue for the Freestyle
exhibition in the Studio Museum in Harlem showing the work of twenty-eight
emerging African American artists. Some people felt that the notion of
‘post-black’ was, however, a strange avoidance of the unfortunate history of
African Americans, particularly as it appeared to be contradictory in that it
found its sustenance by delving into that very rich heritage. Golden even admitted that ‘post-black’ is “both a
hollow social construction and a reality, with an indispensable history”, while
others feel that the very use of the term defines it as an ethnic marker, in
spite of a professed avoidance of identity labels. In the face of such a confused, enigmatic, and certainly arty presentation, we have yet to
convincingly test this notion against other areas of the curriculum.
How, then, does the present state of
Black British history stand up to the notion of us entering a ‘post-black’
phase? Eventually, there might seem to be some mileage in this idea, as to the
‘post-black historian’ the study of the
history of people of African descent in British society should be merely
filling the gaps in history left by previous scholars, rather than black
history being considered a discrete subject, separate from the mainstream of
British history. One of the problems of the designation Black History, is that it provides academic institutions with a
concrete entity distinct from other topics within the history syllabus, thus
providing a tangible target allowing administrators and decision-makers in
schools and university departments to make judgements according to their own
political, moral and emotional, leanings and, if their decisions are
unfavourable, can have the effect of cutting out the history of a whole section
of British society at the stroke of a pen. Thus, the very isolating of Black
History (often, ironically, a self-elected title by proponents such as us) can
provide an all too observable target, leading to a species of academic
apartheid still practiced in some otherwise very credit-worthy educational
institutions. In a post-black era, with the study of black historical figures
and institutions becoming mainstream, any efforts to surgically incise it from
the curriculum would obviously be far more difficult to implement. And it
should be said that the section of British society likely to be deprived of
having their history documented is larger than those walking the cloisters of
hallowed halls might think, as the last census figures show.
Still,
the Black History Month bus trundles on, regardless of obstacles and ignorance.
Times can change after decades of hardship, as South Africans and African
Americans, with their seemingly abrupt changes of leadership, know. The wheels
of the carriage may rattle occasionally, but the momentum gathers and we may
have to change to another vehicle in the course of the journey. The
compartmentalisation and segregation of history cannot endure and must give
way.
At
a local level, there is now a very good exhibition put on by Karen O’Rourke,
the Curator of the Liverpool Kings Regiment Gallery at the Museum of Liverpool,
aiming at a more conscious integration. Using previously unseen images, it
tells the untold stories of the First World War, complementing the Museum’s
items on display in the City Soldiers Gallery and the ‘From the Waterfront to
Western Front’ Exhibition. The stories of black families are shown alongside
those of white, and other participants.
The nirvana of historical research of
any sort is never attained, but the excitement of the struggle and the joy of
new discovery in this virgin and fertile area of research is so much worth the
struggle. I personally believe in an approach which works towards filling the
gaps in history, rather than providing cynics (or racists) with an all too
separate and isolated target. Nor am I an eventualist – this should be
happening now in all educational institutions, but, unfortunately we still need
the markers – much more work of discovery to be done.
These are just a few of my own
thoughts on the journey, of course. So much work is yet to be done around the
building of any narrative of Black British people, but history has taught us
that talking about goals and labouring towards destinations can often bring
them about, as our own abolitionist spiritual ancestors, black and white, would
agree. Although perhaps struggling on the fringes of academia, hopefully we can
make a contribution to that goal today.
Ray Costello
