Continued from:
http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/11/afrucan-lives-in-north-east-part-1.html
I have been working with Mel Earnshaw (Policy Support Advisor (Race and Religion) and Nayanika Mookerjee (Socio-cultural Anthropology) at Durham University on the Black History Month and the Violence and Memorialisation module which has included walks in the Cathedral, Palace Green and the Market Square, archive sessions with Francis Gotto of the University’s Special Collections, and giving talks. e.g. November 2019 and February 2020. If it had not been for COVID I would have been back in Durham in October. Instead I gave a talk on Durham County’s links with slavery and abolition as part of the University’s Black History Month. That talk is available here:
Every time I prepare for these activities new
ideas come to mind. Following the talk I sent them the following file.
I have also helped Mel with the posting about
Lilian Bader including sourcing the photo via Stephen Bourne, a British Black
History researcher and writer (see also below).
www.dur.ac.uk/equality.diversity/blackhistorymonth18/bhmdidyouknow
The same section of the website includes a posting Black Lives Matter - How can I help? In which it is
stated that ‘At Durham
University we want to inspire and foster a community of expression and
engagement. We would encourage our community to be active in the fight
against racism. Below are ways we as individuals, and collectively as part
of a community, can help and use our voices.’
www.dur.ac.uk/equality.diversity/blacklivesmatter
As a result of my involvement with University
staff and students and the Special Collections archivist I submitted some
papers for the University to consider on the curriculum, research in the
Special Collections, tackling racism and classism, diversity, and projects
looking at its links with Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College and students coming
to Durham, and a project on its former graduate George (Coleridge-) Taylor and his
great uncle the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. A particular small project
that could be usefully undertaken is a biographical study of Professor Johnson,
who was an active supporter of emancipation in the United States.
As these cannot be uploaded please email me at sean.creighton1947@btinternet.com.
I have been in touch
with Lamesha Ruddock, a history student active in the
Young Historians Project, who was a member of the Institute of Historical
Research Zoom panel discussion on 15 October on Student Experiences of Black British History in
Universities. She tells me that she is
carrying out a history project about the early black students in Durham
and Fourah Bay.
Other Universities in the North East might find
some of the papers I submitted to Durham relevant to them.
Durham City Walk
Emeritus Prof Sandra Bell of the Department
of Anthropology and Adrian Green from History at the University are preparing a guide to accompany
a walking route around Durham City that focuses on its industrial past.
At her request I have supplied my Palace Green and the Market Square slavery
and abolition walk material. I have posed the questions:
·
As the City had a large
scale weaving industry, is there any evidence that some of the dyes came from
imports from the British slave colonies?
·
As trade union
organisation seems to have begun in the 18th, was it in the weaving
industry?
·
From where did the
Salvins import cotton for their spinning mill?
·
Which people involved in
ownership of industries in the County had property in the City?
·
Did Guilds in Durham
hold processions including to support Parliamentary candidates, or thank out-
going MPs?
·
Which shopkeepers sold tobacco, snuff, cotton, coffee,
furniture, etc, from the British Caribbean and Central and South American slave
colonies?
An example of such activities of a shopkeeper is in:
http://familyrecords.dur.ac.uk/nei/NEI_exhib_trade.pdf
Durham And The
Black Curriculum In Schools
A separate piece of work has been the publication of The Black Curriculum report by Dr Jason
Arday, Assistant
Professor in Sociology at the University, and Trustee of the Runnymede Trust. He
recommends:
1)
Developing a multi-cultural diverse National Curriculum and curriculum's:
Moving away from a very prescriptive curriculum requires teachers to reimagine
the History curriculum within the UK and consider how to develop a discourse
that interweaves the contribution of Black History to the canon as a form or
body of legitimate knowledge.
2)
Britain is multi-cultural and our past and present History National Curriculum
must reflect this: Understanding that within an ever-changing multi-diverse
society, conventions of Britishness will always require reconceptualizing to
incorporate all of our histories and stories.
3)
Diversifying History teaching workforces: The dearth of Black History teachers
within the teaching profession is problematic and when aligned to
discriminatory practices that exclude Black and ethnic minority teachers this
remains a significant factor in the narrative of British history that get
purported within our classrooms.
4)
Teaching Black history not only benefits Black students, but it is also
beneficial to British society as a whole: The cognition which ensues allows us
as a nation to collectively pause and reflect on race relations. Widening the
scope of Black history study can also help society to unravel many of the
racial stereotypes that linger into the present.
https://diversityuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Black-Curriculum-Report-2020.pdf
Although dated last January, The Guardian only reported it on 25 November.
Continued at:
http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/11/african-lives-in-north-east-part-3.html
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