African Lives In The North East. Part 3. Tyne & Wear

Continued from:

http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/11/african-lives-in-north-east-part-2.html

 Newcastle University

 The University says that ‘Black History Month offers one important touchstone in the academic year when we can progress those ideas through debate, listening and sharing.’

This year visiting Professor of Social Justice Dr Keith Magee gave the Black History Month Insights Lecture on 20 October A bItter Sweet Journey: from slavery to freedom and beyond the colour line; how Britain’s association with slavery did not end when the practice was abolished in 1834.

In July Ian McDonald talked film students, Dami Fawehinmi and Warren Brown, about Racism, Black Lives Matter and studying Documentary Filmmaking at Newcastle University.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlRoFjqGe3U

A month earlier Dorothy Chirwa, a student called out the University for lack of diversity. 

https://thetab.com/uk/newcastle/2020/06/12/newcastle-university-student-calls-out-the-uni-for-lack-of-diversity-50483

Northumbria University 

Led by Brian Ward, Professor in American Studies,  newly published research has examined and offered practical solutions as to how the US civil rights movement is taught in UK schools. It seeks to balance engagement with Britain’s own racial and imperial histories. It  looks at how Martin Luther King for example was portrayed offering practical suggestions for how teachers can connect the unfinished story of the struggle for racial justice in the US to similar historic, equally incomplete, struggles for racial equality in Britain.

www.asiansunday.co.uk/northumbria-university-study-calls-for-a-change-in-how-black-british-history-and-the-us-civil-rights-movement-are-taught-in-schools

He discusses the issues at

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/uks-school-curriculum-reveals-historical-amnesia-when-it-comes-black-history-168476

This linkage is at the core of the work of Journey for Justice, which was in Middlesbrough in 2016.

https://journeytojustice.org.uk/projects/middlesbrough

Brian Ward’s book Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne: The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in the North East of England (Tyne Bridge Publishing. 2017) was the basis of the exhibition at Newcastle University in 2017, details of which and a video of Ward speaking can be seen at:

www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/fragile-mementoes-martin-luther-kings-13588653  

Ward has wider interests in black abolitionists in Britain. He gave a talk Before Martin Luther King – Frederick Douglass and Abolitionism in the North East on 18 October in the Berwick Literary Festival.

Statues, Street Names, Plaques and History Boards

Newcastle Council is continuing to look at statues and street names which may be controversial following the drowning of the Colston statue in Bristol. I have shared my thoughts with Bill Griffiths. e.g.

• a history board next to the Earl Grey statue to explain  about his role in anti-slavery
•  plaques to people of African Heritage that are featured in the calendar and others with offering an advisory  consultancy to Nubian Jak Community Trust, the black lives plaque experts.
• assessing whether street names were decided by the Council in the past or the developers and whether some could be changed or boards put up to explain them
• history boards or information carved into paving stones at key locations along  the City’s slavery and abolition trail

The issues about memorials was the subject of India Gerritson’s dissertation Memory Lingers Here”: Are Newcastle Monuments Sites of Collective Memory? It won the 2019 North East Labour History Society’s Sid Chaplin Essay Prize. An article based on it will be published in North East History journal next year.

Continued at:

http://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2020/11/african-lives-in-north-east-part-4.html