Black history matters too at this time of year
FEW sizable organisations – business, university, local council, whatever – manage to resist for long the temptation to fiddle with their corporate logos. The usual outcome is confusion, but here’s a test.
You will hopefully encounter this month a logo looking something like
against a white background. I guessed British Museum, but other Birmingham residents might well pick a Midlands building society or a certain multi-branch bargain store. And we would all be wrong. It’s October, and therefore the UK’s
Black History Month, now in its 34th year. So if, as the logo’s accompanying slogan suggests, you “dig deeper, look closer”, you’ll see it actually reads black B, white H, black M. Attention-grabbing, or confusing – your call.
No criticism from me, though, for I’m a BHM fan. There were several joint-inspirers of its London launch in African Jubilee Year (1987/88), commemorating 150 years of Caribbean Emancipation from slavery, but certainly its strong schools focus owed much to the exceptional Linda Bellos OBE, Lambeth Council Leader, for/with whom I once had the brief privilege of working.
Obviously modelled on America’s longstanding Negro History Week/ Black History Month, BHM has deservedly become a British autumnal institution in its own right – not least because of the founders’ decision to deviate from the US choice of February, birth month of President Lincoln, signee of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
One claimed reason for choosing October is that it’s harvest time, a time of plenty, in the African calendar. Really? Africa’s a biggish place. Check the International Harvest Calendar: harvesting is happening somewhere in Africa literally all year round.
My preferred explanation, therefore, is for it being the first full month of the British academic year, when schoolchildren, black and white, might be most receptive to the idea of learning about black history.
Certainly, judging by the “unexpected high demand” reported last week for the BHM Schools Resource Pack, it was a smart move. If it means morphing into BH Season, so much the better.
Of 430,000 academic staff employed in the UK’s 140 or so universities just one in 40 is black
October was a good choice too for older learners – higher education students – especially those attending the University of Birmingham (UoB), whose principal founder and first Chancellor was one Joseph Chamberlain. You don’t have to be a history student in Birmingham to become quickly conscious of the dilemma of squaring the radical Liberal social reformer and transformative mayor with the Conservative racial imperialist who at the time of the University’s actual founding in 1900 was Colonial Secretary, enthusi- astically overseeing the prosecution of the brutal Second Boer War (‘Joe’s War’), and the barbaric treatment of women and children in the resulting concentration camps.
This ‘darker side’ of Chamberlain’s ‘complicated’ role in British history, as the university’s website euphemistically puts it, will be examined in a Zoom seminar on ‘Decolonising our History’ as one of its programme of public events in this year’s BHM.
At which point it seems at least relevant to note that, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, of the nearly 430,000 academic staff employed in the UK’s 140 or so universities, just one in 40 is black, and among professorial staff less than one in 150 – with none at all recorded at the University of Birmingham.
Which means, as Sadiah Qureshi, a senior UoB modern history lecturer put it recently: “Most history undergraduates leave university never having been taught by a black professor or lecturer.”
This quote illustrates rather neatly my own evolving view of what Black HISTORY Month should ‘really’ be about – as if anyone cared. Anyway, I was once rather a purist, inclined to deprecate particularly funded events with no apparent historical dimension – vegan cooking classes, ‘White Allyship’ discussions, etc.
I was looking then to BHM to highlight and perhaps dramatise some of the events and episodes
David Olusoga covers so excellently in his book, Black and British: A Forgotten History, now happily available as A Short, Essential History for young readers. Or, put another way, the great chunks of my own country’s past that, despite somehow acquiring a history O-level, largely passed me by.
The sugar-driven colonisation of the Caribbean; the huge plantations worked by enslaved ‘non-Christian’ Africans and what that enslavement actually involved; the Royal-led and Royal Navy-policed West African slave trade; Britain becoming the largest slave-trading country in Europe, and so on. Was I absent during those lessons, is if forgetful old age, or what?
But then, just as my personal views were becoming slightly more relaxed, along in 2014 came Wandsworth Borough Council going way, way
OTT and rebranding their BHM ‘Diversity Month’. Never mind the ‘H’ – what did they think the ‘B’ was there for?
Anyway, the good news is that last year BHM was back, and this year’s BHM was launched by the council’s donation of £10,000 to raise a monument to John Archer, Mayor of Battersea in 1913 and London’s first black mayor. Now, that IS Black History.
PS: In case you were wondering, Birmingham followed just the 84 years later, with Cllr Sybil Spence.
Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of
Birmingham