Ansel Wong is the quiet man of British black politics, rarely in the limelight and never seeking political office. And yet his ‘career’ here – from Black Power firebrand to managing a multimillion budget as head of the Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minority Unit in the 1980s – spells out some of the most important developments in black educational and cultural projects. In this interview, he discusses his identification with Pan-Africanism, his involvement in student politics, his role in the establishment of youth projects and supplementary schools in the late 1960s and 1970s, and his involvement in black radical politics in London in the same period, all of which took place against the background of revolutionary ferment in the Third World and the world of ideas, and were not without their own internal class and ethnic conflicts.
FawthropTom, Education or Examination (London: Radical Student Alliance, 1968). The Radical Students Alliance (RSA), formed in 1966, called for a firmer stand in opposition to the Vietnam War, and a greater democratisation of student politics and university life, including complete student control over their unions, effective participation of students in all decisions which affected them, and free access to higher education. See HoefferleCaroline M., British Student Activism in the Long Sixties (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 68–69.
2.
EgbunaObi B. (1938–2014) was a Nigerian novelist and playwright. Egbuna moved to London on a scholarship from Nigeria in the early 1960s, and gained some success as a writer. He soon became involved with African anti-colonial politics and British anti-racist politics, in 1967 founding the United Coloured People’s Association, later to become the Black Panther Movement. Egbuna was one of the most vocal Black Power spokespersons in Britain, and received substantial media coverage. In 1968 he was arrested for inciting violence against police in a speech in Hyde Park. He spent six months on remand at Brixton prison before receiving a three-year suspended sentence. For his political writing, see Black Power in Britain (London: Universal Coloured People’s Association, 1967); Destroy This Temple: the voice of black power in Britain (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1971); The ABC of Black Power Thought (Lagos: Third World First Publications, 1973). See also Robert Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Obi B. Egbuna, C. L. R. James and the birth of the Black Power Movement in Britain’, Twentieth Century British History22, no. 3 (2011): pp. 391–414.
3.
The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) was a literary-artistic collective of Caribbean writers, artists and critics in Britain established by Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey, Trinidadian poet and publisher John La Rose, and Barbadian poet Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite in 1967. CAM held its regular meetings at the West Indian Students’ Centre from 1967 to 1970. See WalmsleyAnne, The Caribbean Artists Movement: a literary and cultural history (London: New Beacon Books, 1992).
4.
In February 1969, black students at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University staged a protest against what they saw as the deliberate failing of black students by a member of the biology faculty, blockading themselves in the university’s computer centre. A fire started in the building, and when smoke was seen pouring out some white onlookers were heard to shout ‘let the niggers burn!’. The occupation ended in violence as the police stormed the computer centre, and the leaders of the occupation were given prison sentences of four months and eighteen months. The events had a substantial impact among Caribbean students throughout the diaspora, and were a significant factor in the series of events leading to the Black Power revolt in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970. See David Austin, ‘All roads led to Montreal: Black Power, the Caribbean, and the Black radical tradition in Canada’, Journal of African American history92, no. 4 (2007): pp. 516–539; Valerie Belgrave, ‘The Sir George Williams Affair’, in RyanS.StewartT.McCreeR. eds, The Black Power Revolution of 1970: a retrospective (St. Augustine: University of the West Indies Press, 1995), pp. 119–131.
5.
On 21 April 1969, more than 650 bus workers in Trinidad and Tobago’s Transport and Industrial Workers Union went on strike. The conflict quickly escalated as Eric Williams’s government declared the strike illegal under the recently-passed Industrial Stabilisation Act, while strikers continued in defiance of the legislation. The stand-off is often interpreted as a precursor to the wider crisis of Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Power revolt of 1970. See Raoul Pantin, Black Power Day: the 1970 February Revolution. A reporter’s story (Santa Cruz: Hatuey Productions, 1990), pp. 13–18; James Millette, ‘Toward the Black Power revolt of 1970’, in Ryan, Stewart and McCree, eds, The Black Power Revolution of 1970, pp. 59–94.
6.
Althea Jones-Lecointe, a Trinidadian postgraduate student at University College London, became the new leader of the Black Panther Movement after Egbuna’s departure from the organisation in 1968. Her husband Eddie Lecointe also held a leading position in the Panthers. See Organised Youth, The British Black Panthers and Black Power Movement: an oral history and photograph project (London: Photofusion Educational Trust, 2013).
7.
The book was Michael Abdul Malik, From Michael de Freitas to Michael X (London: André Deutsch, 1968). Malik (1933–1975) was, alongside Egbuna, the most widely recognised face of British Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though many have questioned the extent of his activities or influence. He returned to Trinidad in 1971 and established a commune in Arima. In 1972 he was convicted for the murder, on his commune, of local labourer Joseph Skerritt and Gale Ann Benson, daughter of Conservative MP Leonard F. Plugge. Hanged in 1975, he remains a controversial figure. See John Williams, Michael X: a life in black and white (London: Century, 2008); Derek Humphrey and David Tindall, False Messiah: the story of Michael X (London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1977).
8.
FreirePaulo (1921–1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher. See his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 [1968]).
9.
Wong’s papers are held by the Black Cultural Archives, London.
10.
A list of library books held at the West Indian Students’ Centre in 1967 included works by Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris, Donald Hinds, Cheddi Jagan, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, John La Rose, Colin MacInnes, Claude McKay, Roger Mais, Edgar Mittelholzer, V. S. Naipaul, V. S. Reid, Andrew Salkey, Léopold Senghor, Derek Walcott, and Eric Williams. At this time the library contained only three texts on the United States of America: Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), and Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand (1958). However, by 1969, Students’ Centre leaders began a plan to radically overhaul the library to accommodate the literature and political demands of Black Power. A student newsletter of 1969 records that ‘Our aim is to make it a library that will cater for the needs of all our projects and the community; the place where the record of our struggle will be housed/catalogued for future reference. Our collection of Black writers will be extended to include our American and African Brothers and also small publications like Newsletters, Newspapers, Magazines, etc.’ Subsequent editions of the newsletter carried requests for donations of books by James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Malcolm X and Richard Wright. See West Indian Students Centre: library list (18September1967), British Library Andrew Salkey Collection (uncatalogued); Bumbo, No. 2 (u.d. [Autumn1969]), Black Cultural Archives, Ansel Wong papers, WONG/1/1.
11.
EytleTommy (1927–2007) was a Guyanese musician and actor who played jazz and calypso in London’s nightclubs in the 1950s and 1960s.
12.
ComrieLocksley, an engineering student at a Brixton technical college who moved to London from Kingston’s Trench Town district in the late 1960s, was a key figure in the radicalisation of the West Indian Students’ Centre before his return to Jamaica in 1969. See Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement.
13.
The Black Liberation Front (BLF) was founded in January 1971 by former members of the Black Panther Movement’s North and West London branches, and led by Goan activist Tony Soares. The group maintained close links with the US Black Panther Party, took its ideological lead from Marxism, and was sympathetic to the cultural nationalism of Ron Karenga. The BLF’s newspaper, Grassroots, enjoyed wide circulation in the 1970s, available in major cities across Britain. See Rosalind Eleanor Wild, ‘“Black Was the Colour of Our Fight”: Black Power in Britain, 1955–1976’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008), pp. 104–109.
14.
The Headstart Education and Leisure Programme was a supplementary school and youth club for black youth run from the BLF’s offices at 54 Wightman Road, London, from 26 September 1971. The BLF later established Operation Headstart, a community resource centre and bookshop, opened at 25 West Green Road, London, on 8 February 1976. See Grassroots1, no. 4 (September1971); ‘Operation Headstart: background information and progress report’ (22January1976), George Padmore Institute, Black Education Movement, BEM/3/1/3/8. On the Ujima Housing Association see footnote 18, below.
15.
On these connections, see Anne-Marie Angelo, ‘“We All Became Black”: Tony Soares, African-American internationalists, and anti-imperialism’, in KelleyRobin D. G.TuckStephen, eds, The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights, and Riots in Britain and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), pp. 95–102.
16.
Following Grassroots’ republication of a US Black Panther Party newsletter article containing the recipe for a Molotov cocktail in 1972, Tony Soares stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1973 on charges of attempting to incite the murder of persons unknown. During the trial, Detective Sergeant Westacott of Special Branch confirmed that it was his duty to keep black political organisations under investigation. See ‘Points of the Month’, Race Today4, no. 5 (May1972): p. 150.
17.
The Operation Headstart Management Committee was behind the establishment of the Ujima Housing Association, founded in 1976 with the objective of providing housing for black applicants. Ujima was Britain’s first and, until its end in 2008, biggest black housing association. See ‘Ujima Housing Association’, London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4450/C/05/0342.
18.
Jack Hines, a Jamaican student holding the post of Discussions Officer, was at the core of the West Indian Students’ Centre organisation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Plans between Hines and Wong for a supplementary school began in June 1969, resulting in the C. L. R. James Supplementary School, one of the first of the wave of black supplementary schools established over the following decade.
19.
Brathwaite was a pioneer and early champion of Caribbean vernacular writing. See his The Arrivants: a New World trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), and History of the Voice: the development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984).
20.
Marc Matthews (Guyana), Basil Smith (Jamaica) and Femi Fatoba (Nigeria) were three young poets at the heart of the black arts poetry of early 1970s London. All three were regularly involved in West Indian Students’ Centre events, and became regular attendees at CAM events in the early 1970s. While anthologies of their work did not appear until the 1980s, several black journals in Britain published their poetry in this period.
21.
Shalom, Inc. was a youth project established by Methodist minister Harold Eads in East Harlem in the late 1960s. Eads led a programme of intercultural and dramatic music programmes, aimed at bringing together youth from the diverse ethnic and religious communities of the area. See ‘Thursday Parade’, New Yorker (16August1969), p. 26; RussellLetty M., Future of Partnership (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979), pp. 111–112.
22.
The Gresham Road Project was a youth centre established at 1 Gresham Road, Brixton, in the early 1970s. Initially a combined youth and educational centre, the youth centre provision was renamed the Abeng Centre in 1974, while the educational centre was relaunched as the Ahfiwe (‘All for We’) school.
23.
The White Lion Street Free School was founded in 1972 in a derelict house at The Angel, Islington. The school taught around forty pupils, some of whom were referred by social services. The principles of the school were an abandonment of hierarchy among teachers and between teachers and students, sharing of work (including chores), equality of rights and decision making, and voluntary attendance. The White Lion became the best-known example of a libertarian free school in Britain, and many radical educators followed its activities closely. See John Shotton, No Master High or Low: libertarian education and schooling in Britain, 1890–1990 (Bristol: Libertarian Education, 1993), pp. 226–238; Nigel Wright, Free School: the White Lion experience (Leire: Libertarian Education, 1989). Alexander Sutherland (A.S.) Neill (1883–1973) was a Scottish educationalist who pioneered a form of libertarian schooling in which pupils were given freedom from authority and encouraged to develop their emotional health. His Summerhill School, established in 1924, enjoyed a revival of interest from radical educators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the birth of the free school movement. See Jonathan Croall, Neill of Summerhill: the permanent rebel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
24.
GarrisonLen (1943–2003) joined his family in Britain from Jamaica as a child in 1954. In the 1960s, he became involved in youth work in Brixton, teaching classes in black history, and he continued this interest through degrees at Oxford’s Ruskin College and the University of Sussex. The ACER Project was established by Garrison in the autumn of 1976, and brought together his twin interests in education and black history and culture. Aiming ‘to collect and disseminate material drawn from the African and Afro-Caribbean sources related to the black child’s cultural background for use in the multi-cultural classroom’, it was funded by the Inner London Education Authority, and housed at the Centre for Urban Education Studies. Garrison’s collection of material grew and in 1981, in the wake of the Brixton ‘riots’, he founded the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), as a community resource.
25.
The Caribbean Teachers’ Association was founded in 1972 as an umbrella organisation for debating, and providing advice and support on, difficulties faced by black teachers and students (see ‘The Caribbean Teachers’ Association’, London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4463/D/05). It was funded by the Community Relations Commission and later by Urban Aid. Teachers Against Racism, founded in 1971, was a London-based organisation advocating the integration of black studies into school curricula, and co-ordinating new black studies courses. The National Association for Multi-Racial Education (NAME) was founded in 1965 as an organisation concerned with teaching English to non-native speakers. In the early 1980s, NAME was challenged by many of its members to abandon its liberal-multicultural politics in favour of a firmer denunciation of societal and political racism, and recognition of anti-racism as a radical political project. See Alastair Bonnett, Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 109–112.
