Kerry Pimblott and Kennetta Perry
On Friday 31 January 2025, we were honoured to host a symposium, Black Power at the Grassroots: Documenting, Preserving and (Re)presenting Histories of Black Struggle in Britain, in partnership with the Race, Roots & Resistance Collective. Nearly a hundred people assembled at the University of Manchester to discuss how histories of Black Power in Britain are being made, preserved, taught, passed on and reimagined by scholars, activists, community historians, heritage practitioners, teachers and students of the movement.
The symposium grew out of a community-engaged research project, Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power 1964-1985 , that we have been working on with a wider team of researchers and collaborators supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In that project we’ve been inspired by the emergence over the past decade of a growing body of scholarship and other cultural and heritage projects related to British Black Power. These accounts have deepened our understanding of the movement and situated Black Power as a key conjuncture in modern British history when, in the afterlives of empire, people of African, Caribbean, and Asian heritage forged new and potent political alliances, identities and movements to confront racism, imperialism and state sanctioned violence.
Our project aims to build on this work, but with a real interest in surfacing accounts of grassroots activism in places beyond London with a particular focus on the places we have lived, studied, and worked – Greater Manchester in the North West and Leicester in the East Midlands. We are interested in the origins, character, and significance of local Black Power struggles; their relationship to each other and wider national and international movements; and the insights their decline and legacy offers from understanding the terrain we occupy today. You can learn more about our ongoing work over on the project webpage here.
The symposium provided an opportunity to showcase some of the research undertaken by members of our research team and collaborators, but also to bring together a much wider cross section of people who are active in the important work of preserving, teaching and reimagining this history in communities across the country. The final programme included a combination of spatial and thematic panels with significant coverage of Greater Manchester, Leeds, the East and West Midlands and topics including Black Power and education, trade unionism, Black women’s groups, funding, and legacies. Presentations took many forms with participants delivering traditional research papers as well as roundtable discussions and documentary film screenings.
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