New Educational Resource: 760 Days in Sanctuary

Written Dr Kerry Pimblott

11 October 2025

Authors note: This article is part of a series of blogs documenting activities emerging from the multi-year project, Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power, 1964-1985, led by Drs Kerry Pimblott (Manchester) and Kennetta Hammond Perry (Northwestern) as part of an effort to better document, preserve and (re)present the history of Black Power and its legacies for local traditions of anti-racist resistance in the North West and East Midlands.

As yesterday's blog explained, this weekend marks the launch of a new exhibition, 760 Days in Sanctuary: Viraj Mendis and Resistance to the Border Regime, at Ascension Church Hulme. The exhibition is part of a two-year long collaboration with the Radical Reading Room Collective focused on surfacing histories of anti-racist resistance with a special focus on the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC), an anti-deportation struggle that culminated in the longest sanctuary in modern British history.

If you are planning to attend The World Transformed festival this weekend and haven't yet had a chance visit the exhibition, please do join us in the main entrance to the Ascension Church Hulme. The exhibition is free and open to the public all weekend. The artefacts included in the exhibition are part of a new archival collection, The Viraj Mendis Anti-Deportation and Sanctuary Collection, held at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre in Manchester Central Library.

Intergenerational Dialogue

One of the key goals of our collaboration with the Radical Reading Room Collective has been to foster greater intergenerational dialogue about these local histories of resistance to racialised state violence. We recognise the 'power in the telling' of these histories for those who lived them (Ono-George, 2019) as well as the need to extend what the former director of the SNCC Freedom Schools, Staughton Lynd, described as 'the listening circle' to facilitate cross-generational dialogue and knowledge building (Kerr, 2021). In this form of radical public history, exhibitions, archives, and events are never simply an exercise in historical preservation or commemoration nor are they end products in themselves. Rather, radical public history is - in Denise Meringolo's words - 'future focused' and 'committed to the advancement of social justice' through enriching dialogue in activist spaces (Meringolo, 2021).

The 760 Days in Sanctuary Educationalist Guide

With this broader goal in mind, we have partnered with Manchester-based artist Hawwa Alam and migrant justice advocate Asli Ali to create a set of new educational resources to sit alongside the exhibition.

The first resource is the 760 Days in Sanctuary Educationalist Guide which provides a detailed overview of the origins, character, and legacy of the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign. This guide is designed for use in a variety of educational settings including schools, colleges, universities, activist and other community-based workshops, and aims to foster dialogue about the border regime and grassroots resistance in the places we live, study and work. Please download the guide now and put it to use!

760 days of sanctuary (2).pdf

Download PDF • 6.82MB

A key part of the resource is an infographic that was co-designed with Hawwa Alam called The Movement Ecology: MCR Resistance to Border Regime. We have been using this infographic in our workshops and events to foster dialogue among activists about the relationship between historical and contemporary political formations against the border regime. We invite your contributions to this particular movement ecology but also encourage its use and adaptation in your own local organising contexts.

Conclusion: Bearing Witness

The urgency of this work was apparent at a special session of The World Transformed last night that spotlighted several contemporary Manchester campaigns against state violence hosted by Dr Gargi Bhattacharyya and the Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP), Kids of Colour, Not Guilty By Association (NGbA), and the Manchester Womens Justice Collective. The speakers were unified in their assertion of the power of narratives and that by 'bearing witness' (Scraton, 2009; Clarke, Chadwick, Williams, 2017) to state violence we can support those directly affected by the interlocking harms of the policing and border regime in their fight back against potent state-sponsored discourses that serve to silence, misrepresent, and distort.