Erasing Black History Month
I worried it would be politically correct neo-Marxist drivel masquerading as real lived history. But I was wrong.
On October 25th, 2018, as part of the local Black Country Living Museum’s contribution to black history month, I reluctantly attended a Black People in the NHS event. After a similar event in Birmingham two years previously (more of that later), I had become disillusioned with the latest iteration of the Black History Month events. I worried it would be politically correct neo-Marxist drivel masquerading as real lived history. But I was wrong and delighted by much of the evening, which had moments of Black History Month at its very best: aural historical archiving.
A panel of black and one Asian person had been assembled who had achieved excellence or career firsts in the local National Health Service (NHS). The event proceeded with the Chairman gently asking the panel to describe their experiences. The first speaker was the eldest, Marva Nesbitt (above extreme right), the first Jamaican nurse in Wolverhampton. Elderly and dignified, she explained how her experiences were based on her explicit Christian love of her neighbour, which was at the heart of her nursing.
With humility, she explained her experiences as the first Black nurse. There were trials, as she had to prove herself and then that she could progress to the next level of training, when some of her white colleagues were not convinced. She achieved additional qualifications and enhanced grades and responsibilities with support from a white senior nurse.
Mrs Nesbitt exemplified the first migrant arrivals from Jamaica; she felt it was an honour to serve the people of Wolverhampton and preferred to recall the positive experiences. One white gentleman, whom she nursed back to good health, went on to send her a birthday card every year for decades afterwards until he had recently died. Marva Nesbitt’s local MP was Enoch Powell, and she may have been negatively impacted in the wake of his infamous speech.
She refused to be drawn on the matter and focused on her Christian duty to love and nurse her neighbours and to forgive those who, through ignorance or fear, did not see her or know Jesus Christ. She was a truly remarkable lady. Her contribution was her Christian testimony, which electrified the room and set a very high standard of love, forgiveness, mutual respect, and shared humanity.
Dr S.V. Sharma was the first Indian Hindu GP in Bilston; he explained that the white husbands were not that sure about a “darkie” examining their wives. And so, he was happy for them to sit in if they wanted to. Quickly, word of mouth spread that the Indian was a good doctor. Eventually, the local community made him an honorary Bilstonian to express their gratitude. Mr Sharma was astute; He did not play down the initial racial prejudice he had faced. But like that first generation of migrants, he saw himself as showing what a foreigner could do in the mother country, given a reasonable chance. He hoped he had opened opportunities for others. He delighted in the respect he had earned, the prejudice he defused, and his contribution to his many Bilston patients.
Contributions came from the first Black Senior Nurse, the first Black Health Commissioner in Dudley, the first Birmingham University Nursing Lecturer, and the first Birmingham University Faculty Head. This was real history, and the older participants expressed genuine affection for the Black country towns and the white community they had served and won over despite occasions of racial prejudice.
Birmingham neighbours the four Black Country towns. As the panel worked from right to left, it was noticeable how the educational and medical university panel members saw themselves more in conflict with their institutions and white colleagues, disengaged from the broader communities they served and involved in more overtly political battles that seemed more about career advancement than service or vocation.
Whereas Marva Nesbitt had sought to change hearts and minds, the final speakers revolted against their institutions and sought to leverage power. Somewhere between the two, when racial tolerance had been massively extended and opportunities embedded in statute, something had been lost, and perhaps something more than the obvious absence of religious belief. I was not convinced that things were harder in the 2000s and 2010s than in the 1960s and 70s.
Black History Month was something I looked forward to and, at one point, helped to promote or organise. I attended my first one in 1990 after attending an African History class at a local community centre. I had always loved history and got an A at O level, but had also been entered for CSE - just in case I messed up the more challenging exam - my project was on German Unification, and my aural examination was on the rise of Adolf Hitler. I had forced myself to read the dismal Mein Kampf as part of my research, argued with my assessor that Hitler was charismatic, did not just get lucky, but was able not only to manipulate but also to connect with his traumatised nation and got a Grade 1. Ten years later, I tried to fill a vacuum in my knowledge and immersed myself in African diasporan history.
Most towns or cities with an organised Caribbean, mostly Jamaican community presence, would apply for council funding to invite writers, historians, and artists to put on a series of events that comprise Black History Month. The history might include the two to three decades of Black people in Britain since the Caribbean immigration of the late fifties and sixties, or it might document the Caribbean and Commonwealth presence in the Second World War, something few black or white people were aware of. At its best, it would reveal, salvage and restore real lived history that would otherwise be marginalised.
There would be an aural history - I heard a presentation from one of the black RAF pilots from the Caribbean who had settled in the UK. I once attended a presentation by the white Marxist author Peter Fryer on his book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. It was one of the first attempts to document the presence of black people in these Isles from the Roman period. The recent suggestion that Britain was multicultural from the outset involves several unnecessary retrospective sleights of hand, which I will eventually explore separately. But it is obvious that a black presence was scattered in early European history, a regular feature in mercenary armies and the Moors in Spain, and that exaggeration can undermine.
Black History Month might include the African American perspective with invited speakers and writers, particularly those who gradually became referred to as Afrocentric, activists and historians attempting to recover the black perspective in history and culture going back to antiquity and thereafter. Whatever the missteps and occasional grifters, the point of view of the African, as opposed to the European, diasporas, will have different takes on history and even the same historical event. And whilst we need to agree on objective and scrupulous factual research, we should be able to document different experiences without denigrating or revising the historical voices of any race, ethnicity, religion or age or foisting a minority of a minority perspective on a majority community.
Before the European wars and the histories of the Prussians, Rus, Magyars, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, original Britons and proto-Scottish Picts were all considered valid and often referred to as actual races. And the same could and should be applied to African nations and civilizations. The fact that different races and ethnic groups have different historical stories to tell used to be considered a given. The movement of peoples has involved a general radiation out of East Africa and the Middle East and a subsequent significant movement from Eurasia east and west, displacing and forcing other nations and peoples to migrate, fight or flee. It should also be possible to identify verifiable facts and different experiences, conquests and conflicts without identifying the European as uniquely expansionist or war-like: lest we offend The Mongol Horde, the Blackamoor’s of Islamic Spain and Shaka Zulu’s ruthless armies.
Two years before the Black Country Living Museum event, I had attended Black Britain On Film as part of the Birmingham Black History Month, and I was not that impressed. The turnout was paltry, in a small art cinema lecture room, not even a quarter full. It was, however, an evocative series of TV news items from the ATV and Central news shows, some of which I recalled watching at the time. Effectively three decades of local TV news reporting had been collected into perhaps a 50-minute, poorly edited and disjointed montage from the late 50s, 60s and 80s; notably, there was no mention of West Indies cricket tours, nor coverage of the Handsworth riots or National Front anti-racist confrontations of the mid to late 70s.
The film mainly consisted of interviews with the first arrivals, issues of private housing, employment, and the inclement weather; it did not shy away from the conflicts over jobs and home ownership with white natives and finished with the British-born blacks and the emergent musical and dance scene. There was also a section on the Rastafarian movement, which took off in the UK in the mid-seventies - a couple of my school friends had become Rastas and virtually dropped out of all society, upsetting their black parents and families.
But the strangest feature of the evening was the two-person panel discussion that followed the film. The two organisers were a left-liberal middle-aged African Caribbean man, probably from Birmingham, and an African American woman, perhaps in her early 40s, recently appointed to head up the newly established Birmingham University Black Studies course. After the film ended, she explained what we had just seen. She claimed that the images reflected an ongoing series of migrations of black people, which she linked to the Middle Passage of the Trans Atlantic slave trade, and her recent migration from America to Birmingham to join her partner after fleeing intolerance and abuse back in the United States of America in 2016.
This framing seemed a bit wooden. Black people that were invited to come to the UK and fill labour shortages in the 1960s & 70s were being compared to the transatlantic slave trade, which purchased and exported Africans, depositing them mostly in Latin America, with perhaps 10-15% forced into plantation work in the Caribbean and the Southern states of America, many, particularly initially were brutally worked to an early grave.
At one point, the man commented on the “…innocence of the interviewers…” (referring to the way the white interviewers knew next to nothing about the black individuals they were interviewing- hence the interviews, their basic questions, and their plumy BBC accents were slightly amusing - one interview with Jamaican railway workers, recorded in the late fifties focused on how cold the UK winter was, and neither side in the exchange had anything approaching the familiarity and relaxed air of today’s TV interviews).
But our Neo-Marxist lecturer was getting into her stride and did not care for the observation. He immediately backed down as she continued with her narrative about “… cinematographical colonialism…” that the white views of black people were “…essentially, if unconsciously, imperial and racist…” and that Black people who were “…moderate…” were “…unconscious…”.
She was particularly unhappy with the absence of women interviews in the late fifties and 60s sections, obviously completely unaware that the majority of black immigrants were men who only sent for wives, fiancées, and girlfriends once they were established, and most expected to make good money and then return to their home islands.
The section on the Rastafarians, where Rasta women explained that the Rastafarian religion was rightly biblical, their movement patriarchal and that men should be in charge, did not unsurprisingly go down well. The Angela Davis wannabe droned on about “…internalised patriarchy…and misogyny…” and then, with no sense of irony, complained of how the mostly white interviewers were imposing their narratives.
She thought it was inexplicable that black people invited to work in the country experienced rejection when they arrived. Then there was some attempt to link the films to an “…complex intersectional narrative…” during which she returned to her own experience earlier in the same year of flying into the UK, trying to find suitable accommodation, and commencing at the local university, adding the revelation that her wife was a white woman in the audience. What we had seen in the film had been completely overwritten by her mish-mash of ahistorical pseudo-Marcuse queerifying narcissism.
I eventually made a couple of contributions in defence of the uniqueness of the encounter between black and white in 1962, that all sides had authenticity and dilemmas imposed on them; the comments of the individuals captured in the albeit edited film clips had an integrity that did not accord with a retrospective narrative. Those second-generation native blacks featured in the 1980s clips had no formula or model. Therefore, much of how people described the events necessarily required innovation and varied points of view.
I pointed out the omission of the real racists of the National Front in the mid-70s and into the eighties, and tried to explain that cheap black migrant labour was invited into the country by the political class. This involved no conversation or preparation of the white native working-class population competing for jobs, housing and girlfriends, partly at the root of the conflicts in the montage.
I could have said more, but I had already spoken twice. The “discussion” petered out. And I left reflecting on how an entitled black lesbian academic, flying over to England to set up her home with her white wife, funded no doubt by generous relocation expenses and position in a local university, paid for by the UK taxpayers, could associate her experiences of “… micro aggressions…” to the catastrophic and often fatal middle passage of chattel slavery. Multiple cultural appropriations were being deployed to erase a key episode in the black Caribbean and white community relations 50 years earlier. It was frankly offensive if I took the charade too seriously. Two years later, Marva Nesbitt had restored my faith - and on reflection, I wonder what she would have made of the exchange.
The original Black History events had been funded by councils and required to be decidedly non-party political, educative, cultural and open to all, emphasising local history and community archiving.
Four years on, and in the wake of Covid lockdowns, I thought I'd check out Black History Month in 2022. The so-called local events seemed most digital and often national, and the month became almost an all-year-round event. Eventbrite.com’s online offering suggested that Black Studies African American takeover had reached the endgame. There was nothing on the Caribbean, Asia, or any celebration of these communities’ past, present or future contributions. No recent history, nothing local, no excellence or achievement or progress: Here is the selection:
1. Black London Women’s Voices: At this online Black women’s group, women can join together to discuss the harm racism, chronic stress, and racialised trauma has had on them. This monthly circle is designed as a safe space for Black women to build community.
2. Black All Year: Anti-Blackness & Colourism: What is anti-Blackness? How does it impact Black people’s lives, and how does colourism play a part in the Black community?
3. "Call of Duty" Black History: Breakdown of the links to Hollywood, the military-industrial complex, racialisation in gaming, and recruitment through propaganda.
4. Black Abolitionist Tour of London: Take in the key sites in London where African American (sic) activists made an important impact. The tour will highlight those freedom fighters who educated 19th Century audiences on the horrors of slavery.
5. The British Black Panthers
The Black Abolitionists were not inspiring and seemed to continue the African American takeover; Michael X, British Black Panthers, were a storm in a teacup and showed a biased focus away from the mainstream black community experience. Presumably, CLR James is out of fashion. I have no desire to explore my trauma of racism, but luckily, as a man, I was not invited.
Marva Nesbitt would probably be too generous, but for me, Black History Month seems to have been wholly culturally appropriated by Feminist and Marxist activism, trigger warning trauma group think and a leftist self-selecting group of predominantly black women with “well-being issues” who probably would benefit from competent counselling. But this is perhaps another case of powerful and divisive funders overlaying the real, lived, congruent, non-race-obsessed and diverse historical contribution of Black people in Britain. We can at least hope.