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The Guardian
28-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Manchester's radical Black female activists: ‘We didn't define ourselves as feminists'
The women kept their doors open through the night, providing refuge and transportation to the hospital to the frightened and injured young people. It was July 1981, and years of frustration had boiled over into uprisings across England. By the third night, police moved into the neighbourhood with a display of force unprecedented in England. The city was the moth-eaten Manchester of the 80s, with the cotton industry that shaped it long in decline. Peaceful resistance to the constricts of Thatcher's Britain – and personal liberation – came in the form of Moss Side's Abasindi Co-operative, founded at the turn of that decade as one of the first Black women-only organisations in the UK, and the most influential in the post-industrial north. Manchester's industrial growth owed an unacknowledged debt to transatlantic slavery, which still cast a shadow over Black Britons in the late 70s and early 80s in the shape of employment discrimination, police racism and thwarted, wasted potential. Then, when the smoke and shouts of the uprising engulfed Moss Side, white and Black youths alike having taken to the streets to protest against police brutality, James Anderton, the city's authoritarian police chief, resorted to tactics refined by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland's Troubles. Anderton, an evangelical Christian, knew Moss Side's young Black people had been denied opportunity amid record unemployment – but was determined to restore order to the streets 'fast and hard'. 'With the uprisings, people's eyes were opened … they began to see the value of organisations such as Abasindi,' said Diane Watt, the co-author of a book on the history of Black women's activism in the UK, recalling how Abasindi's headquarters, Moss Side People's Centre, became a shelter in the storm. Police vans were driven at protesters as the state cracked down and bystanders arrested and assaulted. 'Those who were young people then, men and women now, have not forgotten us because we didn't close the door against them then,' she added. Abasindi emerged as a distinct group from Manchester's self-help Black Women's Co-operative, which was established in the mid-70s. Among BWC founder members was Olive Morris, the Jamaican-born Black British feminist community leader and squatters' rights activist who was last year posthumously honoured with a blue plaque in Brixton, where she lived as a squatter and hosted study groups for Black women. 'However, [BWC] membership was for men and women – and, to a degree, the voices of the men were more dominant,' Watt said. 'So we felt as though we weren't being heard. And the only way for us to be heard is for us to create a space for ourselves. We weren't defining ourselves as feminist. We were seeing ourselves as Black female activists.' The name Abasindi – Zulu for 'born to survive' – was influenced by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Men could be allies but not members. Abasindi was one Black activist group among many that fought for a better society in a radical era, but the scale of members' achievements – as a collective, as individuals and in collaboration with other groups – distinguished them. In Manchester, the legacy of the Abasindi women is everywhere. Its poets and performers, such as Abina Likoya, SuAndi and Shirley May, have influenced countless others. Whether it is a family centre, a business park, an arts collective, an education trust, specialist NHS centre, a housing association or a commemorative plaque – if it was set up in Manchester in the 80, 90s or 00s for the benefit of the Black community, there will be an Abasindi connection. The proceeds from arts and crafts, drumming, dancing and natural women's hairdressing allowed Abasindi to be financially self-sufficient. All were determined to reawaken pride in African cultures that had been outlawed, demeaned or diminished by the legacy of slavery. Founders and members challenged systemic inequalities in the education system by founding supplementary schools, working to get Black students into university via access courses. They campaigned for good-quality, affordable housing in a city where Black home-ownership rates had been devastated by so-called slum clearance programmes, which knocked down streets of terraces but did not compensate the owners enough to buy again. Abasindi women also gave their children African names, travelled to the continent and collected oral histories for posterity, affirming a Black identity subjugated by society. Then there was the practical work of looking after elderly people and campaigning for the NHS to recognise the devastating impact sickle cell anaemia and thalassaemia had on Black and Asian patients. They also successfully fought to prevent the deportation of domestic violence survivors whose migration status depended on abusive husbands, as Southall Black Sisters did in London, leading to a change in the law. The founding of the Nia centre in Hulme, the first Black arts centre in Europe of its size, also involved Abasindi women. Fittingly, the civil rights activist and musician Nina Simone performed on its opening night. Watt said: 'We were very good at making alliances – we were all about working with other organisations. When a lot of feminists wouldn't work with men, we would look for ways of working together, rather than things that divided us.' Abasindi's influences and mentors were from the Windrush generation. Guyana's émigrés were particularly influential in the development of community organising in Manchester – the teacher Betty Luckham, the social worker Elouise Edwards, and the engineer Ron Phillips, now all deceased, were inspirational figures. So was Louise Da-Cocodia, the first Black senior nursing officer in Manchester, having answered the call in the 1950s to leave Jamaica to work in the recently founded NHS. She was the formidable nurse in command when their headquarters became a shelter during the uprising. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion The political activist Kath Locke, a pioneering campaigner for Black history to be taught in schools and recognised in the public realm, was another local icon. Born in Blackpool in 1928, the daughter of a white mother from Lancashire and a Nigerian seaman, she was a child of Britain whose Britishness was always being questioned. Commitment to community and dedication to the betterment of society united these activists, as did the pan-African ideology which – with Manchester having hosted the fifth Pan-African Congress, advancing decolonisation in 1945, as well as having been home to intellectuals such the St Lucian economist and Nobel laureate W Arthur Lewis – was well rooted in Manchester. 'But they couldn't have done what they did without a groundswell, the grassroots, behind them,' said Adele Jones, a co-author with Watt, about the ordinary Black women and men who have not become storied figures among historians. For the writer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay, a former chancellor of the University of Manchester, coming into contact with the group was an act of personal emancipation, as he emerged from a repressive state-care system that had separated him from his mother and his Ethiopian heritage. 'It was at the Abasindi Co-op where I first read poetry live. I'd never been in a room with so many people of colour before … I was in awe,' he said. 'I had a broad Lancashire accent – with dreadlocks. I wasn't like anybody else who was there. At the same time, I really felt the community was saying: 'Tell us what you've been through.' That was the beginning of the rest of my life as a poet.' For Watt, coming into contact with Black scholars and activists, through Abasindi, opened new horizons. 'When you were at school, you got told you can't,' she said. 'With that group, you were told: 'You can, and you owe it to yourself.' People like myself came out from thinking: 'I'm going to stay at being a secretary' and started going to classes and then growing and growing. 'We left that stereotype that we had inherited from society about Black people being limited, Black people not being aspiring or not able. All those things we removed from our vocabulary.' Manchester is a city proud of its radical past. The fifth Pan-African Congress, the fight for women's suffrage, the Peterloo Massacre, the campaign for gay rights – all milestones in the mythology of a city on the right side of history, each touching, in different ways, on the lives of the women in Absasindi's orbit. But it was the persistence of injustice – in spite of that campaigning legacy – that made the group's resistance necessary, adding their names to the pantheon of the city's greatest activists. By 2008, the group had wound down. But Jones, 45 years on from the New Year's Day meeting where Locke, Duduzile Lethlaku, Yvonne Hypolite, Maria Noble, Popgee Manderson, Madge Gordon, Abena Braithwaite and Shirley Inniss formed Abasindi, is acutely aware that the battles they fought continue. 'The transatlantic slave trade has created the conditions in which modern society still functions – the issues of race and inequality,' Jones said. 'Young people have to be aware that progress towards any form of equality is a long-term thing – you have to be in it for the long haul.' Unsung Stories of Black Women's Activism in the UK: Spirits of Resistance and Resilience by Adele Jones and Diana Watt, is published by Springer Cham and features in the Black British book festival at Manchester Central Library on 29 March.
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Windrush victims could have compensation reconsidered after ruling
Windrush scandal victims who have been denied compensation could see their cases reconsidered after a landmark ruling against the Home Office. Raymond Lee, 67, was returning from a trip to Jamaica in 1999 when he was denied re-entry to the UK, detained and removed, separating him from his family and putting him out of work. He applied to the Windrush compensation scheme in 2019, but his claim was rejected 19 months later – a decision that was upheld in two subsequent internal reviews. Now, a judicial review has found that the then home secretary 'wrongly misunderstood how immigration law, including the immigration rules in force in 1999, would have applied to the claimant', and that his case should go back to the Home Office to be reconsidered. The Home Office refused Lee's compensation with the claim that at the time he was detained his indefinite leave to remain had 'lapsed' – despite the fact that under the rules at the time, he could be re-granted leave to enter or remain on return to the UK. The ruling is expected to have implications for other members of the Windrush generation whose claims have been refused. 'For years, I have lived with the pain and injustice of being turned away from the UK,' Lee said after the ruling. 'No one should have to fight this hard just to be recognised and treated fairly. I hope this decision forces the Home Office to do right by others who have suffered as I have.' In the judicial review hearing, the deputy high court judge Michael Ford KC found the then-home secretary had failed to recognise that under immigration rules then in force, Lee had a right to seek readmission to the UK as a returning resident. While the timeline of Lee's case covers Priti Patel and Suella Braverman's periods in office, it is Braverman's final decision in December 2022 that is covered by judicial review. The Windrush scandal was revealed by the Guardian in 2017 and 2018. It concerned thousands of Black Britons who were wrongly detained and removed, having settled in the UK lawfully from former British colonies in the Caribbean, often as children, who were never provided with documents 'proving' their status. Lee was born a 'British subject' in Jamaica. He came to the UK in 1971, attended school, married, worked as a builder and raised a family in south London with indefinite leave to remain. However, in July 1999, on returning from a trip to Jamaica, he was stopped at Heathrow. At the time, Lee was travelling on a Jamaican passport, as he had always done, and visas were not needed to enter from Jamaica. But immigration officials refused him re-entry. Lee returned to the UK in 2000 and was again granted indefinite leave to remain. When the Windrush compensation scheme was set up in April 2019 to compensate members of the postwar Windrush generation, who, like Lee, had suffered after officials began insisting they prove their status in the country, he made an application, but the claim was rejected in 2021 and upheld twice. After the review, in which the judge concluded 'legal error' led to the decision that Lee was 'ineligible for compensation', his lawyer, Stephanie Hill, described the judgment as a 'significant victory for Raymond and others affected by the Windrush scandal', urging government 'to take swift action to properly compensate Raymond and ensure the Windrush Compensation Scheme operates fairly and lawfully'. The Home Office has been approached for comment.
The Independent
27-02-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Stop and search: will the new Metropolitan Police charter overcome distrust?
Britain's largest police force has published a 'charter' for stop and search, two years after it was severely criticised in an independent review for 'over-policing and under-protecting' Black Londoners. It is the response by the Metropolitan Police to Baroness Casey's demand for a 'fundamental reset' of the tactic, which is widely considered to be used in a discriminatory way against members of ethnic minorities. The Met says the charter has been put together following 18 months of engagement with more than 8,500 Londoners of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. It includes commitments that officers should use respectful communication and tone when carrying out stop and search, that they will be given improved training and supervision, and that complaints will be handled more effectively. Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, said the charter was not about reducing the use of stop and search, but about 'doing it better by improving the quality of encounters, informed by the views of the public it is intended to protect'. Hasn't stop and search always been controversial? Even before the founding of the Metropolitan Police by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, constables had the power under the Vagrancy Act 1824 to search anyone suspected of being 'disorderly' or 'a rogue and vagabond'. This and similar powers were known as 'sus laws' (short for 'suspicion') and contributed to friction between the police and many young Black Britons. After the Brixton riots in 1981, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 introduced a power to stop and search people if the police had 'reasonable grounds' for doing so. The Macpherson report of 1999, which found that the Met was 'institutionally racist', accepted that stop and search was necessary but called for all stops to be recorded and monitored. Wasn't it one of Theresa May's 'burning injustices'? When she became prime minister, she said: 'If you're Black, you're treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you're white.' Previously, as home secretary, she had responded to the increasing use of stop and search by trying to reduce it. May brought in a Best Use of Stop and Search (Buss) scheme, and reiterated earlier guidance that said that personal factors, including ethnicity, were not reasonable grounds for a search. The House of Commons Library commented: 'A substantial reduction in the use of stop and search powers did follow these reforms, and they appeared to contribute to improved practice among police officers. However, the disparity in stop and search rates by ethnicity did not improve, as searches of white people fell faster than searches of Black, Asian and minority ethnic people.' Does stop and search work? 'Evidence regarding the impact of stop and search on crime is mixed,' conclude the House of Commons Library researchers. 'There is little evidence to suggest that stop and search provides an effective deterrent to offending. Stop and search is more effective at detection, but still most searches result in officers finding nothing.' They continue: 'However, those in policing argue that when stop and search is targeted and conducted in line with the law and guidance, they can confiscate dangerous and prohibited items and do so without undermining public trust in the police. Those opposed to stop and search argue that a history of poor use and longstanding ethnic disparities demonstrate that it is a fundamentally flawed police power.' It is striking that none of the inquiries into police conduct that have dealt with the subject have proposed abolishing stop and search – but the issuing of yet another set of guidelines, this time called a 'charter', does raise the question of whether the power can ever be used in a way that commands confidence among all sections of society.
