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This was the final decision to bind my book because I liked how it held my pages and portrayed my visual essay

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I feel it turned out well however, it needed more accuracy and more holes for the book to hold better. I did like this techniquee

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Now looking at different ways to bind the book together. I wanted to test sowing as it isn't something that I have done before.

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Testing on cartridge paper. This experiment determined my final outcome the most because I liked the feeling of the paper and how my essay appeared so clear when printed.

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Brown v. Board of Education

Full case name
Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al.

Citations

347 U.S. 483 (more)

Decision
Opinion

Prior

Judgment for defendants, 98 F. Supp. 797 ( D. Kan. 1951); probable jurisdiction noted, 344 U.S. 1 (1952).

Subsequent

Judgment on relief, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) ( Brown II); on remand, 139 F. Supp. 468 (D. Kan. 1955); motion to intervene granted, 84 F.R.D. 383 (D. Kan. 1979); judgment for defendants, 671 F. Supp. 1290 (D. Kan. 1987); reversed, 892 F.2d 851 ( 10th Cir. 1989); vacated, 503 U.S. 978 (1992) ( Brown III); judgment reinstated, 978 F.2d 585 (10th Cir. 1992); judgment for defendants, 56 F. Supp. 2d 1212 (D. Kan. 1999)

Segregation of students in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because separate facilities are inherently unequal. District Court of Kansas reversed.

Chief Justice

Earl Warren

Associate Justices

Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed
Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas
Robert H. Jackson · Harold H. Burton
Tom C. Clark · Sherman Minton

Majority

Warren, joined by unanimous

U.S. Const. amend. XIV

This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (in part)
Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899)
Berea College v. Kentucky (1908)

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as " separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.

The case originated in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, refused to enroll local black resident Oliver Brown's daughter at the school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas rendered a verdict against the Browns, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, then appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court.

In May 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of the Browns. The Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in ( 349 U.S. 294 (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

In the Southern United States, especially the " Deep South", where racial segregation was deeply entrenched, the reaction to Brown among most white people was "noisy and stubborn". Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as " massive resistance", created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. Four years later, in the case of Cooper v. Aaron, the Court reaffirmed its ruling in Brown, and explicitly stated that state officials and legislators had no power to nullify its ruling.

Background

Educational segregation in the US prior to Brown. Racial segregation was required throughout the states in the Southern United States (in red). Kansas where Topeka is located allowed local school districts to enforce segregation (blue).

For much of the 60 years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. Such state policies had been endorsed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that as long as the separate facilities for separate races were equal, state segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause ("no State shall ... deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws"). Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. Beginning in the 1930s, a legal strategy was pursued, led by scholars at Howard University and activists at the NAACP, that sought to undermine states' public education segregation by first focusing on the graduate school setting. This led to success in the cases of Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950), suggesting that racial segregation was inherently unequal (at least in some settings), which paved the way for Brown.

The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that the system of racial separation in all schools, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. Brown was influenced by UNESCO's 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled The Race Question. This declaration denounced previous attempts at scientifically justifying racism as well as morally condemning racism. Another work that the Supreme Court cited was Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal had been a signatory of the UNESCO declaration.

The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism were doing to America's international image. When Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India in 1950, the first question he was asked was, "Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?" Douglas later wrote that he had learned from his travels that "the attitude of the United States toward its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with India." Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, echoed Douglas's concerns in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, proclaiming that "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad, ... the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."

District court case

Filing and arguments

In 1951, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas, in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children.

The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated separate elementary schools due to a 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in 12 communities with populations over 15,000. The plaintiffs had been recruited by the leadership of the Topeka NAACP. Notable among the Topeka NAACP leaders were the chairman McKinley Burnett; Charles Scott, one of three serving as legal counsel for the chapter; and Lucinda Todd.

The named African-American plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, as well as an assistant pastor at his local church. He was convinced to join the lawsuit by a childhood friend, Charles Scott. Brown's daughter Linda Carol Brown, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.

As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and redirected to the segregated schools.

The case "Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" was named after Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster. The lawyers, and the National Chapter of the NAACP, also felt that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court justices. The 13 plaintiffs were: Oliver Brown, Darlene Brown, Lena Carper, Sadie Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirley Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, Vivian Scales, and Lucinda Todd. The last surviving plaintiff, Zelma Henderson, died in Topeka, on May 20, 2008, at age 88.

District court opinion

The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson. Judge Walter Huxman wrote the opinion for the three-judge District Court panel, including nine "findings of fact," based on the evidence presented at trial. Although finding number eight stated that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on negro children, the court denied relief on the ground that the negro and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers. This finding would be specifically cited in the subsequent Supreme Court opinion of this case.

Supreme Court arguments

The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington, D.C.).

All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Davis case, the only case of the five originating from a student protest, began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized and led a 450-student walkout of Moton High School. The Gebhart case was the only one where a trial court, affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court, found that discrimination was unlawful; in all the other cases the plaintiffs had lost as the original courts had found discrimination to be lawful.

The Kansas case was unique among the group in that there was no contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools' physical plant, curriculum, or staff. The district court found substantial equality as to all such factors. The lower court, in its opinion, noted that, in Topeka, "the physical facilities, the curricula, courses of study, qualification and quality of teachers, as well as other educational facilities in the two sets of schools [were] comparable." The lower court observed that "colored children in many instances are required to travel much greater distances than they would be required to travel could they attend a white school" but also noted that the school district "transports colored children to and from school free of charge" and that "no such service [was] provided to white children." In the Delaware case the district court judge in Gebhart ordered that the black students be admitted to the white high school due to the substantial harm of segregation and the differences that made the separate schools unequal.

Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court. The NAACP's chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall-who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967-argued the case before the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. Assistant attorney general Paul Wilson-later distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas -conducted the state's ambivalent defense in his first appellate argument.

In December 1952, the Justice Department filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief in the case. The brief was unusual in its heavy emphasis on foreign-policy considerations of the Truman administration in a case ostensibly about domestic issues. Of the seven pages covering "the interest of the United States," five focused on the way school segregation hurt the United States in the Cold War competition for the friendship and allegiance of non-white peoples in countries then gaining independence from colonial rule. Attorney General James P. McGranery noted that "the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills." The brief also quoted a letter by Secretary of State Dean Acheson lamenting that "the United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country."

British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester has written that "Although the Court's opinion in Brown made no reference to these considerations of foreign policy, there is no doubt that they significantly influenced the decision."

Consensus building

The members of the U.S. Supreme Court that on May 17, 1954, ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

In spring 1953, the court heard the case but was unable to decide the issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and blacks.

The court reargued the case at the behest of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who used reargument as a stalling tactic, to allow the court to gather a consensus around a Brown opinion that would outlaw segregation. The justices in support of desegregation spent much effort convincing those who initially intended to dissent to join a unanimous opinion. Although the legal effect would be same for a majority rather than unanimous decision, it was felt that dissent could be used by segregation supporters as a legitimizing counter-argument.

Conference notes and draft decisions illustrate the division of opinions before the decision was issued. Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, Harold Hitz Burton, and Sherman Minton were predisposed to overturn Plessy. Fred M. Vinson noted that Congress had not adopted desegregation legislation; Stanley F. Reed discussed incomplete cultural assimilation and states' rights, and was inclined to the view that segregation worked to the benefit of the African-American community; Tom C. Clark wrote that "we had led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should let them work it out." Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson disapproved of segregation, but were also opposed to judicial activism and expressed concerns about the proposed decision's enforceability. Chief Justice Vinson had been a key stumbling block. After Vinson died in September 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren had supported the integration of Mexican-American students in California school systems following Mendez v. Westminster. However, Eisenhower invited Earl Warren to a White House dinner, where the president told him: "These [southern whites] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes." Nevertheless, the Justice Department sided with the African-American plaintiffs.

While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the judicial restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the court the power to order its end. The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment did give the necessary authority and were pushing to go ahead. Warren, who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate confirmed his appointment.

Warren convened a meeting of the justices, and presented to them the simple argument that the only reason to sustain segregation was an honest belief in the inferiority of Negroes. Warren further submitted that the court must overrule Plessy to maintain its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must do so unanimously to avoid massive Southern resistance. He began to build a unanimous opinion. Although most justices were immediately convinced, Warren spent some time after this famous speech convincing everyone to sign onto the opinion. Justice Jackson dropped his concurrence and Reed finally decided to drop his dissent. The final decision was unanimous. Warren drafted the basic opinion and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion endorsed by all the members of the court. Reed was the last holdout and reportedly cried during the reading of the opinion.

Chief justice Earl Warren, the author of the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion in Brown

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of the Brown family and the other plaintiffs. The decision consists of a single opinion written by chief justice Earl Warren, which all the justices joined.

The Court's opinion began by discussing whether the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, had been meant to abolish segregation in public education. The Court said that it had been unable to reach a conclusion on the question, even after hearing a second round of oral arguments from the parties' lawyers specifically on the historical sources.

The Court said that the question was complicated by the major social and governmental changes that had taken place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Court observed that public schools had been uncommon in the American South in the late 1860s. At that time, Southern white children whose families could afford schooling usually attended private schools. The education of Southern black children had been "almost nonexistent", to the point that in some Southern states any education of black people had been forbidden by law. The Court contrasted this with the situation in 1954: "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of our local and state governments." The Court concluded that, in making its ruling, it would have to "consider public education in light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation."

During the segregation era, it was common for black schools to have fewer resources and poorer facilities than white schools despite the equality required by the "separate but equal" doctrine. The Brown Court did not address this issue, however, probably because some of the school districts involved in the case had made improvements to their black schools to "equalize" them with the quality of the white schools. This prevented the Court from finding a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause in "measurable inequalities" between all white and black schools and forced the Court to look to the effects of segregation itself. The Court therefore framed the case around the more general question of whether the principle of "separate but equal" was constitutional when applied to public education.

In answer, the Court held that it did. The Court ruled that state-mandated segregation, even if implemented in schools of otherwise equal quality, is inherently unequal because of its psychological impact upon the segregated children.

The Court supported this conclusion with citations-in a footnote, not the main text of the opinion-to several psychological studies purporting to show that segregating black children made them feel inferior and interfered with their learning. These studies included those of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose experiments in the 1940s had suggested that black American children from segregated environments preferred white dolls over black dolls.

The Court then concluded its relatively short opinion by declaring that segregated public education was inherently unequal, violated the Equal Protection Clause, and therefore was unconstitutional:

The Court did not close with an order to implement the integration of the schools of the various jurisdictions. Instead, it requested the parties re-appear before the Court the following Term to hold arguments on what the appropriate remedy should be. This became the case known as Brown II, described below.

Reaction and aftermath

Although Americans generally cheered the Court's decision in Brown, most white Southerners decried it. Many Southern white Americans viewed Brown as "a day of catastrophe-a Black Monday-a day something like Pearl Harbor." In the face of entrenched Southern opposition, progress on integrating American schools moved slowly. The American political historian Robert G. McCloskey described:

The reaction of the white South to this judicial onslaught on its institutions was noisy and stubborn. Certain "border states," which had formerly maintained segregated school systems, did integrate, and others permitted the token admission of a few Negro students to schools that had once been racially unmixed. However, the Deep South made no moves to obey the judicial command, and in some districts there can be no doubt that the Desegregation decision hardened resistance to integration proposals.

In Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd organized the Massive Resistance movement that included the closing of schools rather than desegregating them.

For several decades after the Brown decision, African-American teachers, principals, and other school staff who worked in segregated Black schools were fired or laid off as Southerners sought to create a system of integrated schools with White leadership. According to historian Michael Fultz, "In many ways the South moved faster, with more 'deliberate speed' in displacing Black educators than it did in desegregating schools."

Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd organized a campaign to generate legal obstacles to the implementation of desegregation.

In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas Army National Guard to block the entry of nine black students, later known as the " Little Rock Nine" after the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by asserting federal control over the Arkansas National Guard and deploying troops from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell to ensure the black students could safely register for and attend classes.

Also in 1957, Florida's response was mixed. Its legislature passed an Interposition Resolution denouncing the decision and declaring it null and void. But Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, though joining in the protest against the court decision, refused to sign it, arguing that the attempt to overturn the ruling must be done by legal methods.

In Mississippi, fear of violence prevented any plaintiff from bringing a school desegregation suit for the next nine years. When Medgar Evers sued in 1963 to desegregate schools in Jackson, Mississippi, White Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith murdered him. Two subsequent trials resulted in hung juries. Beckwith was not convicted of the murder until 1994.

In June 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace personally blocked the door to the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium to prevent the enrollment of two black students in what became known as the " Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" incident. Wallace sought to uphold his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" promise he had given in his 1963 inaugural address. Wallace moved aside only when confronted by General Henry V. Graham of the Alabama National Guard, whom President John F. Kennedy had ordered to intervene.

Native American communities were also heavily impacted by segregation laws with native children also being prohibited from attending white institutions. Native American children considered light-complexioned were allowed to ride school buses to previously all white schools, while dark-skinned Native children from the same band were still barred from riding the same buses. Tribal leaders, having learned about Martin Luther King Jr.'s desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, contacted him for assistance. King promptly responded to the tribal leaders and through his intervention the problem was quickly resolved.

Upper South

In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it. On May 18, 1954, the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling. This was the result of the initiative of D. E. Hudgins Jr., a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school board. This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South, to announce its intent to comply. However, others in the city resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles[how? ] to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation.

In Moberly, Missouri, the schools were desegregated, as ordered. However, after 1955, the African-American teachers from the local "negro school" were not retained; this was ascribed to poor performance. They appealed their dismissal in Naomi Brooks et al., Appellants, v. School District of City of Moberly, Missouri, Etc., et al.; but it was upheld, and SCOTUS declined to hear a further appeal.

Virginia had one of the companion cases in Brown, involving the Prince Edward County schools. Significant opposition to the Brown verdict included U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, who led the Byrd Organization and promised a strategy of Massive Resistance. Governor Thomas Stanley, a member of the Byrd Organization, appointed the Gray Commission, 32 Democrats led by state senator Garland Gray, to study the issue and make recommendations. The commission recommended giving localities "broad discretion" in meeting the new judicial requirements. However, in 1956, a special session of the Virginia legislature adopted a legislative package which allowed the governor to simply close all schools under desegregation orders from federal courts. In early 1958, newly elected Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed public schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than comply with desegregation orders, leaving 10,000 children without schools despite efforts of various parent groups. However, he reconsidered when on the Lee-Jackson state holiday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled the closures violated the state constitution, and a panel of federal judges ruled they violated the U.S. Constitution. In early February 1959, both the Arlington County (also subject to a NAACP lawsuit, and which had lost its elected school board pursuant to other parts of the Stanley Plan) and Norfolk schools desegregated peacefully. Soon all counties reopened and integrated with the exception of Prince Edward County. That took the extreme step of choosing not to appropriate any funding for its school system, thus forcing all its public schools to close, although Prince Edward County provided tuition grants for all students, regardless of their race, to use for private, nonsectarian education. Since no private schools existed for blacks within the county, black children in the county either had to leave the county to receive any education between 1959 and 1963, or received no education. All private schools in the region remained racially segregated. This lasted until 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Prince Edward County's decision to provide tuition grants for private schools that only admitted whites violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, in the case of Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.

Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem, New York, for example, not a single new school had been built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist, even as the Second Great Migration caused overcrowding of existing schools. Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Northern officials were in denial of the segregation, but Brown helped stimulate activism among African-American parents like Mae Mallory who, with support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and State of New York on Brown's principles. Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the boycott, some of the first Freedom Schools of the period were established. The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high-quality, historically white schools. (New York's African-American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however.)

Judgment and order of the Supreme Court for the case

The Topeka junior high schools had been integrated since 1941. Topeka High School was integrated from its inception in 1871 and its sports teams from 1949 onwards. The Kansas law permitting segregated schools allowed them only "below the high school level".

Soon after the district court decision, election outcomes and the political climate in Topeka changed. The Board of Education of Topeka began to end segregation in the Topeka elementary schools in August 1953, integrating two attendance districts. All the Topeka elementary schools were changed to neighborhood attendance centers in January 1956, although existing students were allowed to continue attending their prior assigned schools at their option. Plaintiff Zelma Henderson, in a 2004 interview, recalled that no demonstrations or tumult accompanied desegregation in Topeka's schools: "They accepted it ... It wasn't too long until they integrated the teachers and principals."

The Topeka Public Schools administration building is named in honor of McKinley Burnett, NAACP chapter president who organized the case.

Monroe Elementary was designated a National Historic Site under the National Park Service on October 26, 1992, and redesignated a National Historical Park on May 12, 2022.

The intellectual roots of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation in 1896 under the doctrine of " separate but equal" were, in part, tied to the scientific racism of the era. However, the popular support for the decision was more likely a result of the racist beliefs held by many whites at the time. In deciding Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rejected the ideas of scientific racists about the need for segregation, especially in schools. The court buttressed its holding by citing (in footnote 11) social science research about the harms to black children caused by segregated schools.

Both scholarly and popular ideas of hereditarianism played an important role in the attack and backlash that followed the Brown decision. Mankind Quarterly was founded in 1960, in part in response to the Brown decision.

Legal criticism and praise

U.S. circuit judges (from left to right) Robert A. Katzmann, Damon J. Keith, and Sonia Sotomayor at a 2004 exhibit on the Fourteenth Amendment, Thurgood Marshall, and Brown v. Board of Education

William Rehnquist wrote a memo titled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued: "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." Rehnquist continued, "To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minorities are." Rehnquist also argued for Plessy with other law clerks.

However, during his 1971 confirmation hearings, Rehnquist said, "I believe that the memorandum was prepared by me as a statement of Justice Jackson's tentative views for his own use." Jackson had initially planned to join a dissent in Brown. Later, at his 1986 hearings for the slot of Chief Justice, Rehnquist put further distance between himself and the 1952 memo: "The bald statement that Plessy was right and should be reaffirmed, was not an accurate reflection of my own views at the time." In any event, while serving on the Supreme Court, Rehnquist made no effort to reverse or undermine the Brown decision, and frequently relied upon it as precedent.

Chief Justice Warren's reasoning was broadly criticized by contemporary legal academics with Judge Learned Hand decrying that the Supreme Court had "assumed the role of a third legislative chamber" and Herbert Wechsler finding Brown impossible to justify based on neutral principles.

Some aspects of the Brown decision are still debated. Notably, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, himself an African American, wrote in Missouri v. Jenkins (1995) that at the very least, Brown I has been misunderstood by the courts.

Brown I did not say that "racially isolated" schools were inherently inferior; the harm that it identified was tied purely to de jure segregation, not de facto segregation. Indeed, Brown I itself did not need to rely upon any psychological or social-science research in order to announce the simple, yet fundamental truth that the Government cannot discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race. ...

Segregation was not unconstitutional because it might have caused psychological feelings of inferiority. Public school systems that separated blacks and provided them with superior educational resources making blacks "feel" superior to whites sent to lesser schools-would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, whether or not the white students felt stigmatized, just as do school systems in which the positions of the races are reversed. Psychological injury or benefit is irrelevant ...

Given that desegregation has not produced the predicted leaps forward in black educational achievement, there is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment. (...) Because of their "distinctive histories and traditions," black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.

Some Constitutional originalists, notably Raoul Berger in his influential 1977 book "Government by Judiciary," make the case that Brown cannot be defended by reference to the original understanding of the 14th Amendment. They support this reading of the 14th Amendment by noting that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not ban segregated schools and that the same Congress that passed the 14th Amendment also voted to segregate schools in the District of Columbia. Other originalists, including Michael W. McConnell, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in his article "Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions," argue that the Radical Reconstructionists who spearheaded the 14th Amendment were in favor of desegregated southern schools. Evidence supporting this interpretation of the 14th Amendment has come from archived Congressional records showing that proposals for federal legislation which would enforce school integration were debated in Congress a few years following the amendment's ratification.

In response to Michael McConnell's research, Raoul Berger argued that the Congressmen and Senators who were advocating in favor of school desegregation in the 1870s were trying to rewrite the 14th Amendment in order to make the 14th Amendment fit their political agenda and that the actual understanding of the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 (which is when the 14th Amendment was actually passed and ratified) does, in fact, permit US states to have segregated schools. Berger criticized McConnell for being unable to find any reference to school segregation-let alone any reference to a desire to prohibit it-among supporters of the 14th Amendment in the congressional history of this amendment (specifically in the recordings of the 39th United States Congress, since that was the US Congress that actually passed the 14th Amendment) and also criticized McConnell's view that the 1954 view of "civil rights" should be decisive in interpreting the 14th Amendment as opposed to the 1866 view of "civil rights." Berger also argues that McConnell failed to provide any evidence that the state legislatures who ratified the 14th Amendment understood it at the time as prohibiting school segregation and that whenever the question of school segregation's compatibility with the US Constitution (as opposed to the separate question of school segregation's compatibility with US state law and/or US state constitutions, where courts have often ruled against school segregation) reached the judiciary in the couple of decades after the passage and ratification of the 14th Amendment (whether in Ohio, Nevada, California, Indiana, or New York), courts have always affirmed the constitutionality of school segregation-as did Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas M. Cooley in his 1880 treatise The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America. In addition, Berger argues that the views of the draftsmen of the 14th Amendment in 1866 are decisive-as opposed to the views of later readers of the 14th Amendment (including the views of supporters of the 14th Amendment after this amendment's passage and ratification due to the fact that even their views and beliefs about the meaning and scope of this Amendment could and sometimes did change over time-like with Nevada U.S. Senator William Morris Stewart, who initially opposed school desegregation but later changed his mind and supported it). To back up his view about original intent being decisive, Berger cites-among other things-an 1871 quote by James A. Garfield to John Bingham where Garfield challenged Bingham's recollection of a statement that Bingham had previously made in 1866-with Garfield telling Bingham that he can make but not unmake history.

The case also has attracted some criticism from more liberal authors, including some who say that Chief Justice Warren's reliance on psychological criteria to find a harm against segregated blacks was unnecessary. For example, Drew S. Days III has written: "we have developed criteria for evaluating the constitutionality of racial classifications that do not depend upon findings of psychic harm or social science evidence. They are based rather on the principle that 'distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,' Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943). . . ."

In his book The Tempting of America (page 82), Robert Bork endorsed the Brown decision as follows:

By 1954, when Brown came up for decision, it had been apparent for some time that segregation rarely if ever produced equality. Quite aside from any question of psychology, the physical facilities provided for blacks were not as good as those provided for whites. That had been demonstrated in a long series of cases ... The Court's realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

In June 1987, Philip Elman, a civil rights attorney who served as an associate in the Solicitor General's office during Harry Truman's term, claimed he and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter were mostly responsible for the Supreme Court's decision, and stated that the NAACP's arguments did not present strong evidence. Elman has been criticized for offering a self-aggrandizing history of the case, omitting important facts, and denigrating the work of civil rights attorneys who had laid the groundwork for the decision over many decades. However, Frankfurter was also known for being one of court's most outspoken advocates of the judicial restraint philosophy of basing court rulings on existing law rather than personal or political considerations. Public officials in the United States today are nearly unanimous in lauding the ruling. In May 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the ruling, President George W. Bush spoke at the opening of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, calling Brown "a decision that changed America for the better, and forever." Most Senators and Representatives issued press releases hailing the ruling.

In a 2016 article in Townhall.com, an outlet of the Salem Media Group, economist Thomas Sowell argued that when Chief Justice Earl Warren declared in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education that racially separate schools were "inherently unequal," Dunbar High School was a living refutation of that assumption. And it was within walking distance of the Supreme Court." In Sowell's estimation, "Dunbar, which had been accepting outstanding black students from anywhere in the city, could now accept only students from the rough ghetto neighborhood in which it was located" as a detrimental consequence of the SCOTUS decision.

In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their decision, which became known as " Brown II" the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with orders that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed," a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson's poem " The Hound of Heaven".

Supporters of the earlier decision were displeased with this decision. The language "all deliberate speed" was seen by critics as too ambiguous to ensure reasonable haste for compliance with the court's instruction. Many Southern states and school districts interpreted "Brown II" as legal justification for resisting, delaying, and avoiding significant integration for years-and in some cases for a decade or more-using such tactics as closing down school systems, using state money to finance segregated "private" schools, and "token" integration where a few carefully selected black children were admitted to former white-only schools but the vast majority remained in underfunded, unequal black schools.

For example, based on Brown II, the U.S. District Court ruled that Prince Edward County, Virginia did not have to desegregate immediately. When faced with a court order to finally begin desegregation in 1959 the county board of supervisors stopped appropriating money for public schools, which remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964.

White students in the county were given assistance to attend white-only "private academies" that were taught by teachers formerly employed by the public school system, while black students had no education at all unless they moved out of the county. But the public schools reopened after the Supreme Court overturned "Brown II" in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, declaring that "...the time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out" and that the county must provide a public school system for all children regardless of race.

In 1978, Topeka attorneys Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson and Charles Scott Jr. (son of the original Brown team member), with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded Linda Brown Smith-who now had her own children in Topeka schools-to be a plaintiff in reopening Brown. They were concerned that the Topeka Public Schools' policy of "open enrollment" had led to and would lead to further segregation. They also believed that with a choice of open enrollment, white parents would shift their children to "preferred" schools that would create both predominantly African-American and predominantly European-American schools within the district. The district court reopened the Brown case after a 25-year hiatus, but denied the plaintiffs' request finding the schools "unitary". In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit on a 2-1 vote found that the vestiges of segregation remained with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court denied the appellant School District's request for certiorari and returned the case to District Court Judge Richard Rodgers for implementation of the Tenth Circuit's mandate.

After a 1994 plan was approved and a bond issue passed, additional elementary magnet schools were opened and district attendance plans redrawn, which resulted in the Topeka schools meeting court standards of racial balance by 1998. Unified status was eventually granted to Topeka Unified School District No. 501 on July 27, 1999. One of the new magnet schools is named after the Scott family attorneys for their role in the Brown case and civil rights.

A PBS film called Simple Justice retells the story of the Brown vs. Board of Education case, beginning with the work of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund's efforts to combat 'separate but equal' in graduate school education and culminating in the historical 1954 decision.

Linda Brown Thompson later recalled the experience of being refused enrollment:

...we lived in an integrated neighborhood and I had all of these playmates of different nationalities. And so when I found out that day that I might be able to go to their school, I was just thrilled, you know. And I remember walking over to Sumner school with my dad that day and going up the steps of the school and the school looked so big to a smaller child. And I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went into the inner office with the principal and they left me out ... to sit outside with the secretary. And while he was in the inner office, I could hear voices and hear his voice raised, you know, as the conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office, took me by the hand and we walked home from the school. I just couldn't understand what was happening because I was so sure that I was going to go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates.

Linda Brown died on March 25, 2018, at the age of 75.

References

1. ^ Harald E.L. Prins. "Toward a World without Evil: Alfred Métraux as UNESCO Anthropologist (1946-1962)". UNESCO. As a direct offshoot of the 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," it sought to dismantle any scientific justification or basis for racism and proclaimed that race was not a biological fact of nature but a dangerous social myth. As a milestone, this critically important declaration contributed to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.'(in English)

2. ^ Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.

3. ^ Dudziak, Mary L. (June 2004). "Brown as a Cold War Case". Journal of American History. Archived from the original on December 7, 2014.

4. ^ "Last surviving Brown v. Board plaintiff dies at 88 - TwinCities.com". May 24, 2008. Archived from the original on May 24, 2008.

5. ^ Boyle, Kevin (November 21, 1995). The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968. Cornell University Press. p. 121. ISBN 978-1-5017-1327-9.

6. ^ Neier, Aryeh (May 14, 2014). "Brown v. Board of Ed: Key Cold War weapon". Archived from the original on July 16, 2014.

7. "Anthony Lester, "Brown v. Board of Education Overseas" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 148, No. 4, December 2004" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 1, 2015.

8. See ^ Smithsonian, Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education Archived June 30, 2015, at the Wayback Machine

9. Quoted in part in Chemerinsky (2019), § 9.3.3.1, p. 765.

10. ^ Hartford, Bruce. ""Massive Resistance" to Integration". Civil Rights Movement Archive. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline, 1954.

11. ^ Fultz, Michael (Spring 2004). "The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown: An Overview and Analysis". History of Education Quarterly. 44 (1): 14. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5959.2004.tb00144.x. S2CID 143127021.

12. ^ Howell, Mark C., John Ben Shepperd, Attorney General of the State of Texas: His Role in the Continuation of Segregation in Texas, 1953-1957, Master's Thesis, The University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Odessa, Texas, July 2003.

13. ^ Michael Klarman, The Supreme Court, 2012 Term - Comment: Windsor and Brown: Marriage Equality and Racial Equality 127 Harv. L. Rev. 127, 153 (2013). Archived March 25, 2015, at the Wayback Machine

14. ^ Id. citing Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality at 352-354 (2004).

15. ^ "De La Beckwith v. State, 707 So. 2d 547 - Miss: Supreme Court 1997 - Google Scholar".

16. ^ ""Summary of 'Civilities and Civil Rights': by William H. Chafe" George Mason University website". Archived from the original on April 2, 2015.

17. ^ Weiner, Melissa F. (2010). Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City. Rutgers University Press. pp. 51-66. ISBN 9780813547725.

18. ^ Back, Adina (2003). "Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth: The Harlem Nine and New York City Schools" in Freedom north: Black freedom struggles outside the South, 1940-1980" (PDF). Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 65-91. Archived from the original on February 27, 2017.

19. Erin Adamson, "^ Breaking barriers: Topekans reflect on role in desegregating nation's schools" Archived April 27, 2004, at the Wayback Machine, The Topeka Capital-Journal (May 11, 2003)

20. ^ "Topeka Public Schools - About McKinley Burnett". September 24, 2006. Archived from the original on September 24, 2006.

21. ^ Sarat, Austin (1997). Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education. Oxford University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-19-510622-0. What lay behind Plessy v. Ferguson? There were, perhaps, some important intellectual roots; this was the era of scientific racism.

22. ^ Lofgren, Charles A. (1988). The Plessy Case. Oxford University Press. p. 184. ISBN 978-0-19-505684-6. But he [ Henry Billings Brown ] at minimum established popular sentiment and practice, along with legal and scientific testimony on race, as a link in his train of reasoning.

23. Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education By Austin Sarat. Page 55 and 59. 1997. ISBN 0-19-510622-9

24. ^ Schaffer, Gavin (2007). ""'Scientific' Racism Again?": Reginald Gates, the Mankind Quarterly and the Question of "Race" in Science after the Second World War". Journal of American Studies. 41 (2): 253-278. doi:10.1017/S0021875807003477. S2CID 145322934.

25. ^ Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education. By John P. Jackson. ISBN 0-8147-4271-8 Page 148

26. William Rehnquist, ^ "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" Archived June 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, S. Hrg. 99-1067, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States (July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986).

27. Peter S. Canellos,^ Memos may not hold Roberts's opinions, The Boston Globe, August 23, 2005. Here is what Rehnquist said in 1986 about his conversations with other clerks about Plessy:

I thought Plessy had been wrongly decided at the time, that it was not a good interpretation of the equal protection clause to say that when you segregate people by race, there is no denial of equal protection. But Plessy had been on the books for 60 years; Congress had never acted, and the same Congress that had promulgated the 14th Amendment had required segregation in the District schools. . . . I saw factors on both sides. . . . I did not agree then, and I certainly do not agree now, with the statement that Plessy against Ferguson is right and should be reaffirmed. I had ideas on both sides, and I do not think I ever really finally settled in my own mind on that. . . . [A]round the lunch table I am sure I defended it. . . . I thought there were good arguments to be made in support of it.

S. Hrg. 99-1067, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States (July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986).

28. ^ Schwartz, Bernard (1997). Decision: How the Supreme Court Decides Cases. Oxford University Press USA. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-19-511800-1. Justice William O. Douglas wrote: "In the original conference there were only four who voted that segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. Those four were Black, Burton, Minton, and myself."
Likewise, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote: "I have no doubt that if the segregation cases had reached decision last term, there would have been four dissenters-Vinson, Reed, Jackson, and Clark." Id. Justice Jackson's longtime legal secretary had a different view, calling Rehnquist's Senate testimony an attempt to "smear the reputation of a great justice."
Dershowitz, Alan (September 4, 2005). "Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist". Archived from the original on April 2, 2019.

29. ^ Cases where Justice Rehnquist has cited Brown v. Board of Education in support of a proposition Archived June 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, S. Hrg. 99-1067, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States (July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986).

30. ^ Rosen, Jeffery (April 2005). "Rehnquist the Great?". Atlantic Monthly. Rehnquist ultimately embraced the Warren Court's Brown decision, and after he joined the Court he made no attempt to dismantle the civil-rights revolution, as political opponents feared he would.

31. ^ Michael Klarman, The Supreme Court, 2012 Term - Comment: Windsor and Brown: Marriage Equality and Racial Equality, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 127, 142 (2013) Archived March 25, 2015, at the Wayback Machine citing Learned Hand, The Bill of Rights at 55 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture, 1958).

32. ^ Id., Pamela Karlan, What Can Brown Do For You: Neutral Principles and the Struggle Over the Equal Protection Clause, 58 DUKE L.J. 1049 (2008) citing Herbert Wechsler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 HARV. L. REV. 1 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture, 1959).

33. ^ Berger, Raoul. "Original Intent-As Perceived by Michael McConnell 91 Northwestern University Law Review 1996-1997". Northwestern University Law Review. Heinonline.org. 91: 242.

34. ^ Days, III, Drew S. (2001), "Days, J., concurring", in Balkan, Jack; Ackerman, Bruce A. (eds.), What 'Brown v. Board of Education' should have said, New York: New York University Press, p. 97, ISBN 9780814798904

35. ^ Sowell, Thomas (October 4, 2016). "Dunbar High School After 100 Years". townhall.com. Archived from the original on May 24, 2019.

36. ^ Chen, James Ming (May 3, 2012) [2007]. "Poetic Justice". Cardozo Law Review. University of Louisville School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 2007-01. 29.

37. ^ Topeka Public Schools Desegregation History: "The Naming of Scott Computer Technology Magnet" Archived October 1, 2007, at the Wayback Machine

38. ^ "Brown v. Board of Education". PBS NewsHour. May 9, 2014. Archived from the original on May 9, 2014.

39. ^ Romo, Vanessa (March 26, 2018). "Linda Brown, Who Was At Center Of Brown v. Board Of Education, Dies". NPR.

Works cited

Chemerinsky, Erwin (2019). Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (6th ed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer. ISBN 978-1-4548-9574-9.

Lofgren, Charles A. (1987). The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-505684-6.

McCloskey, Robert G. (2010). The American Supreme Court. Revised by Sanford Levinson (5th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-55686-4.

Nowak, John E.; Rotunda, Ronald D. (2012). Treatise on Constitutional Law: Substance and Procedure (5th ed.). Eagan, MN: West Thomson/Reuters. OCLC 798148265.

Schauer, Frederick (1997). "Generality and Equality". Law and Philosophy. 16 (3): 279-297. doi:10.2307/3504874. JSTOR 3504874.

Further reading

Keppel, Ben. Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture (LSU Press, 2016). xiv, 225 pp.

Kluger, Richard (1975). Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf. ISBN 9780394472898.

Ogletree, Charles J. Jr. (2004). All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393058970.

Patterson, James T., and William W. Freehling. Brown v. Board of Education: A civil rights milestone and its troubled legacy (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Raffel, Jeffrey. Historical dictionary of school segregation and desegregation: The American experience (Bloomsbury, 1998) online

Tushnet, Mark V., ed. (2008). "Chapter 11: 'Our decision does not end but begins the struggle over segregation': Brown v. Board of Education, 1954: Justice Robert H. Jackson". I Dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 133-150. ISBN 9780807000366.

Primary sources

Whitman, Mark, ed. Brown v. Board of Education : a documentary history (2004) online

External links

Case Brief for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka at Lawnix.com

Case information and transcripts on The Curiae Project

Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park (US Park Service)

A copy of Florida's 1957 Interposition Resolution in Response to the Brown decision, with Gov. Collin's handwritten rejection of it. Made available for public use by the State Archives of Florida.

U.S. District Court of Kansas: Records of Brown v. Board of Education, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library Archived May 2, 2019, at the Wayback Machine

Online documents relating to Brown vs. Board of Education, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library

Documents from the district court, including the original complaint and trial transcript, at the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse

60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education curated by Michigan State University's Diversity of Excellence through Artistic Expression

Brown v. Board of Education, Civil Rights Digital Library.

"Supreme Court Landmark Case Brown v. Board of Education" from C-SPAN's Landmark Cases: Historic Supreme Court Decisions

Galloway, Russell W. Jr. (1989). "Basic Equal Protection Analysis". Santa Clara Law Review. 29 (1).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brown v. Board of Education Full case name Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. Citations 347 U.S. 483 (more ) Decision Opinion Prior Judgment for defendants, 98 F. Supp. 797 ( D. Kan. 1951); probable jurisdiction noted, 344 U.S. 1 (1952). Subsequent Judgment on relief, 349 U.S.

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In 2010, Chastity Jones eagerly accepted a job offer from Catastrophe Management Solutions as a customer service representative. The offer, however, came with one caveat-she had to cut off her locs. Jones refused, and the company rescinded its job offer. The company's hiring manager reportedly told Jones, "They tend to get messy." The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a suit on Jones's behalf in 2013 and lost. In 2016, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's ruling and dismissed the case.

Jones' case is not unique. Cases filed by black workers alleging discrimination against their natural hair in the workplace have filled courthouses for more than forty years, yielding mixed results. These judicial rulings, intertwined with changing social and cultural mores, have created a contentious and uncertain legal situation, with courts and other governmental entities ruling on both sides of the debate.

How Did We Get Here?

Anti-black hair sentiment on U.S. soil has existed for centuries. In the 1700s, enslaved women who worked in the fields usually covered their hair in head-rags due to the harsh demands of their work. Enslaved Africans who worked in the "big house," however, sometimes mimicked the hairstyles of their enslavers, either by wearing wigs that had become popular during that era or shaping their kinky hair to emulate them. In cities like New Orleans, however, where free Creole women of color donned elaborate hairstyles that displayed their kinks and coils with an air of regality, the city implemented laws- the Tignon Laws -that required these women to wear a tignon (scarf or handkerchief) over their hair to signify that they were members of the slave class, regardless of whether they were free or enslaved.

The end of the 19th century saw the invention of the hair-straightening comb, which would be used to "tame" black hair. Madam C.J. Walker, a black woman, popularized the comb, and "by the mid-1920s, straight hair had become the preferred texture to signal middle class status." As a result, Walker became the first female African American millionaire. Although some historians have lauded Walker's business acumen, others have chided her for perpetuating the idea that straight hair leads to social and economic advancement. For better or worse, she offered black women an avenue for increased societal acceptance in an era when minstrel songs mocked the hair texture of African Americans, " comparing it to wool and often describing it as nappy."

"Don't remove the kinks from your hair! Remove them from your brain!"

The first wave of the natural hair movement emerged during the tumultuous 1960s. The "Black Is Beautiful" movement assured black women and men that their skin, facial features, and natural hair were admirable-as is. The activist Marcus Garvey encouraged black women to embrace their natural kinks, arguing that copying white eurocentric standards of beauty denigrated the beauty of black women: " Don't remove the kinks from your hair! Remove them from your brain! "

The activist Angela Davis sported an afro as a sign of black power and rebellion against white American beauty standards. Wearing an afro became a weapon in the fight for racial equality, as well as a public declaration of self-love and solidarity within the black community. A 1972 study of black teens living in St. Louis revealed that 90 percent of young men and 40 percent of young women in the city sported their natural kinks, an uptick from the 50s and 60s. Although small in scope, this study captured the larger national trend.

Whether rocking afros or pressed hair, black protesters demanded the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which " ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination." The Act also created the EEOC, which operates " as the lead enforcement agency in the area of workplace discrimination." When the EEOC was founded fifty-five years ago, the federal government's primary concern was that black people be granted equal access to public workplaces. It didn't foresee that black hair would need equal access as well.

Meanwhile, public protests and pop culture pushed the Black Is Beautiful and civil rights movements forward. Released in 1968, James Brown's "Say It Loud!" became a rallying anthem that encouraged black folks to embrace their blackness and fight against unequal treatment:

Say it loud! I'm black and I'm proud
Say it louder! I'm black and I'm proud
Some people say we got a lot of malice, some say it's a lotta nerve
But I say we won't quit movin' until we get what we deserve

The first natural hair discrimination cases wouldn't appear until the next decade. In the 1976 case of Jenkins v. Blue Cross Mutual Hospital Insurance, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a race discrimination lawsuit against an employer for bias against afros. The appeals court agreed that workers were entitled to wear afros under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

While afros were technically allowed in workplaces, the social pressure to emulate eurocentric hair permeated American society, impacting black women's hair grooming decisions. In "Hey Girl, Am I More Than My Hair?," the communications scholar Tracey Owens Patton wrote that "the progressive changes made during the Black Power movement eroded as assimilation became more dominant in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s."

The 1980s and 1990s ushered in more black women sporting pressed and permed hair, thanks to prevalent hair-care ads on TV and in magazines that encouraged black women to alter the texture of their hair. However, this time period also witnessed the popularization of styles like braids and cornrows. Images of black women celebrities showcasing braids-like Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice -encouraged black women to braid their tresses. Wearing these styles came with a price, as they created a legal firestorm. In 1981, a black woman took American Airlines to court because the company demanded she not wear her hair in braids. The court sided with the airline, stating that braids were not an immutable racial characteristic-unlike the afro. Less than a decade later, the Hyatt Regency used this ruling to make employee Cheryl Tatum resign after she refused to take out the cornrows she wore to work. The American Airlines ruling established the standing legal precedent.

Finally, the 2000s welcomed the second wave of the natural hair movement. Spurred by films and the advent of social media, the movement fueled a cultural shift that has caused legions of black women to abandon their perms and pressing combs. Director Regina Kimbell's My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage traced the history and politics around natural black hair in the U.S., thus raising consciousness in the African American community. This was one year before comedian Chris Rock would release Good Hair, a similarly themed documentary that focused on the economics of black women buying weaves and perming their hair. One of the most famous lines of the film was delivered by comedian Paul Mooney, who said, " If your hair is relaxed, they are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they are not happy."

While both films raised social consciousness, prompting many black women to ditch their pressing combs, perms, and weaves, YouTube and other social media platforms empowered these women to act on their new awareness. YouTube and natural hair blogs allowed black women to discuss their hair-care journeys, share hair tutorials, and connect with other women-many of whom were learning to care for their natural hair for the first time. In " YouTube Communities and the Promotion of Natural Hair Acceptance Among Black Women," Cameron Jackson wrote that the social media platform not only enabled newly minted naturalistas to "disseminate information about natural hair" but also caused "a shift in the cultural understanding of natural hair."

Today, natural hair communities abound on YouTube and Instagram. With one million subscribers, Naptural85 is an acclaimed natural hair guru, while Instagram shows 21.8 million "natural hair" posts. These numbers suggest that natural hair is officially "in." So "in" that natural hair clip-ins are now available, offering buyers an assortment of "natural" kinks and curls. Hair product sales stats reflect this trend. According to the global research firm Mintel, spending on perm relaxers fell 30.8 percent between 2011 and 2016. Estimates suggest that by 2020, relaxers will become the smallest segment of the market.

Preferring natural crowns isn't a passing fad, writes Kamina Wilkerson in " The Natural Hair Movement:" "It signifies an attempt at a healthier lifestyle, a more authentic existence and a redefinition of the meaning of beauty." According to Wilkerson, it's also "revolutionary as a self-created, self-perpetuating female-led movement." The proliferation of natural hair expos and festivals exemplifies this reality. The leaders of this revolution are natural hair evangelists who preach the good news of organic hair products to their loyal followers and the newly converted-while flaunting fierce manes, the same hairstyles worn in countries in Africa in the seventeenth century.

As natural hair care practices have gained increased acceptance in mainstream society, many corporations- and the U.S. government-have welcomed natural styles, even as courts decided they didn't have to. Last year, for example, the U.S. Navy changed its grooming policy to include braided styles and locs, which follows a similar decision by the Army in 2017.

However, the debate about what's professional, presentable, and thus acceptable looms, affecting black children as well. In 2017, a preparatory academy in Montverde, Florida, asked a black teenage girl to change her natural hair because it violated the school's dress code; and in 2018, a middle-school student in Gretna, Louisiana was removed from school due to her braided extensions.

Undeterred, artists continue to propel the culture forward. In 2018, Netflix turned Trisha R. Thomas's Nappily Ever After book series into a film, while Gillian Scott-Ward's Back to Natural documentary (which hit the festival circuit in 2017) influenced the NYC Commission's release of its groundbreaking guidelines.

Where Are We at Now?

In 2006, the EEOC issued its Compliance Manual on Race and Color Discrimination, which details guidelines around what constitutes discrimination based on physical characteristics in the workplace. The manual protects against "employment discrimination based on a person's physical characteristics associated with race, such as a person's color, hair, facial features, height and weight." The manual states that employers can impose neatness and grooming standards, as long as racial differences are taken into account and the rules are applied equally across racial lines. Employers cannot discriminate against an employee wearing an afro, for example, because that is black hair in its natural state. While employers might be able to request that an afro be groomed, they cannot demand that it not be worn at all. Neither can they apply hairstyle rules more stringently to hairstyles worn by blacks.

At the center of the current debate around natural hairstyles like locs is whether the style is a racial characteristic protected by the law.

The EEOC's guidelines, however clear, still leave room for judicial interpretation, with the EEOC and federal courts disagreeing. At the center of the current debate around natural hairstyles like locs is whether the style is a racial characteristic protected by the law.

In Jones' case, the Eleventh Circuit held that the employer did not discriminate against Jones based on race because the locs hairstyle is a "mutable-or changeable-characteristic." The EEOC, however, maintained that race is a social construct that isn't strictly limited to immutable characteristics. The Commission insists that race can also include "cultural characteristics related to race or ethnicity," including grooming practices. The circuit court disagreed, ruling that although locs are traditionally associated with people of African descent, the employer did not engage in any race-based disparate treatment.

Although the EEOC opted not to take the case to the Supreme Court and the NAACP's subsequent request that the court hear the case was rejected, other government entities have drawn more stringent legal lines in the sand. In early 2019, the New York City Commission on Human Rights declared its commitment to protect residents' legal right to wear their hair in locs, afros, braids, and other culturally specific styles, granting the city's residents more protection than the federal government provides. The Commission argues that natural hair-and by extension any natural hairstyle-is inextricably tied to race and thus protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which "prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin."

The Commission wrote: "Bans or restrictions on natural hair or hairstyles associated with black people are often rooted in white standards of appearance and perpetuate racist stereotypes that black hairstyles are unprofessional. Such policies exacerbate anti-black bias in employment, at school, while playing sports, and in other areas of daily living." The Commission's statement mirrored the EEOC's position and implemented on the local level what the EEOC hopes to implement on a federal level.

Two months after NYC released its guidelines, the California legislature passed a bill that would ban discrimination against natural black hairstyles in the workplace. The bill awaits the Governor's signature. If it's approved, California would become the first state to ban discrimination against all natural hairstyles in the workplace.

Where Do We Go from Here?

While NYC residents can don any natural hairstyle they want in public schools and in workplaces, and California residents may soon join them, many African Americans aren't afforded that same legal protection. Black citizens like Chastity Jones are still being denied jobs. Unless the Supreme Court reverses the Eleventh Circuit's ruling, this judicial and legislative free-for-all will continue. Caught in the crosshairs, many African Americans will be forced to choose between embracing their identities and economic advancement.

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How Natural Black Hair at Work Became a Civil Rights Issue - JSTOR Daily

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On the 55th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, U.S. courts are still divided about African Americans' right to wear their natural hair in the workplace.

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Our major new exhibition explores notions of beauty across time and cultures.

Around the world, beauty is constantly seen as an ideal worthy of going to great lengths to achieve. But what are the driving forces that lead us to believe in a myth of universal beauty, despite its evolving nature?

Featuring over 200 items, including historical objects, artworks, films and new commissions, the exhibition considers the influence of morality, status, health, age, race and gender on the evolution of ideas about beauty. We invite you to question established norms and reflect on more inclusive definitions of beauty.

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Our major new exhibition explores notions of beauty across time and cultures.

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Artist demographics research summary. Zippia estimates artist demographics and statistics in the United States by using a database of 30 million profiles. Our artist estimates are verified against BLS, Census, and current job openings data for accuracy. Zippia's data science team found the following key facts about artists after extensive research and analysis:

There are over 10,600 artists currently employed in the United States.

54.8% of all artists are women, while 45.2% are men.

The average artist age is 40 years old.

The most common ethnicity of artists is White (67.8%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (14.1%), Asian (7.6%) and Unknown (5.6%).

Artists are most in-demand in Los Angeles, CA.

San Rafael, CA pays an annual average wage of $79,430, the highest in the US.

In 2022, women artists earned 93% of what men earned.

Oregon is the best state for artists to live.

Artists are 70% more likely to work at private companies in comparison to public companies.

Artist gender statistics

Artist gender pay gap

Women earn 93¢ for every $1 earned by men

Artist gender ratio over time

This data breaks down the percentage of men and women in artist positions over time.

Artist gender ratio by year

Artist related jobs gender ratio

We compared artists with similar job titles to see how gender ratios vary. As you can see, exhibit builder and senior industrial designer have the biggest gender ratio gaps.

Artist demographics by race

The most common ethnicity among artists is White, which makes up 67.8% of all artists. Comparatively, 14.1% of artists are Hispanic or Latino and 7.6% of artists are Asian.

Artist wage gap by race

Asian artists have the highest average salary compared to other ethnicities. Black or african american artists have the lowest average salary at $57,105.

Browse Most In Demand Jobs

Artist age breakdown

The average age of artists is 40+ years years old, representing 47% of the artist population.

Artist educational attainment

The most common degree for artists is bachelor's degree, with 59% of artists earning that degree. The second and third most common degree levels are associate degree degree at 14% and associate degree degree at 12%.

Artist Jobs You Might Like

Artist wage gap by degree level

Artists with a Master's degree earn more than those without, at $81,005 annually. With a Bachelor's degree, artists earn a median annual income of $78,583 compared to $64,886 for artists with an Associate degree.

Artist employment statistics

Most artists work for a private in the media industry.

Company size where artists work

Below, you can see the size of companies where artists work.

Artist jobs by employer size

Artist jobs by company type

Employees with the artist job title have their preferences when it comes to working for a company. For instance, most artists prefer to work at private companies over public companies.

Artist jobs by industry

The most common industries for artists are media, technology and retail.

Artist industry statistics

Artist turnover and employment statistics

Artist unemployment rate over time

The unemployment rate for artists between 2008 and the most recent data has varied, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Artist unemployment rate by year

Average artist tenure

The average artist stays at their job for 1-2 years, based on the 32,412 artists resumes in Zippia's database.

Artist LGBT ratio compared to similar jobs

Review the percent of artists that are members of the LGBT community. You can see how this compares to similar jobs in the chart below.

Similar artist jobs LGBT demographics

Foreign languages spoken by artists

The most common foreign language among artists is Spanish at 49.7%. The second-most popular foreign language spoken is French at 12.7% and Italian is the third-most popular at 6.1%.

Artist location demographics

Where do artists earn the most?

Artists earn the most in California, where the average artist salary is $75,539. The map here shows where artists earn the highest salaries in the U.S. The darker areas across the 50 states highlight the highest salaries.

Which city has the most Artists?

By looking through more than 32,412 resumes, we found that the most popular places for artists are New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA.

Artist jobs by state

Where are artists in high demand?

Artists are in high demand in Los Angeles, CA. There are currently 21 job openings for artists here. We looked over job openings to determine where in the country artists are in the most demand.

Artist Demographics FAQs

54.4% of artists are female in the United States. This is 1.6 percentage points higher than last year. Additionally, the percentage of female artists has increased by 6.7 percentage points since 2010. That means there are a total of 6,511 female artists in the U.S. and 5,459 male artists in the United States. Note that Zippia's estimate accounts only for the 11,970 people with the specific job title of artist and doesn't include grouping similar job titles, or people with potentially similar credentialing.

How many Artist are there in the US?

There are over 10,600 Artists in the United States.

What percentage of Artists are black?

4.3% of Artists are Black or African American

What race are most Artists?

Most an are White, with 67.8% of Artists belonging to this ethnicity. 14.1% of Artists are Hispanic or Latino, 7.6% of Artists are Asian, 5.6% of Artists are Unknown, 4.3% of Artists are Black or African American, and 0.6% of Artists are American Indian and Alaska Native

Are Artist jobs male - dominated?

No, Artist jobs are not male - dominated. 54% of Artists are female, and 45% are male, so there are more female Artists than male Artists in the United States.

How old is the average Artist?

The average Artist is 40 years old. 47% of Artists are 40+ years old or older, 38% are between the ages of 30-40 years, and 16% are between 20-30 years old

Browse arts, entertainment, sports, and media jobs

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Artist Demographics and Statistics [2023]: Number Of Artists In The US

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How many Artists are in US? More than 10,600. Learn more about 2023 demographics based on factors such as age, race, sex, salary and location.

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Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism is a 1981 book by bell hooks titled after Sojourner Truth's " Ain't I a Woman?" speech. hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. She argues that the convergence of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to Black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. White female abolitionists and suffragists were often more comfortable with Black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, while southern segregationalists and stereotypes of Black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever Black women spoke. hooks points out that these white female reformers were more concerned with white morality than the conditions these morals caused Black Americans.

Further, she argues that the stereotypes that were set during slavery still affect Black women today. She argued that slavery allowed white society to stereotype white women as the pure goddess virgin and move Black women to the seductive whore stereotype formerly placed on all women, thus justifying the devaluation of Black femininity and rape of Black women. The work which Black women have been forced to perform, either in slavery or in a discriminatory workplace, that would be non-gender conforming for white women has been used against Black women as a proof of their emasculating behavior. hooks argues that Black nationalism was largely a patriarchal and misogynist movement, seeking to overcome racial divisions by strengthening sexist ones, and that it readily latched onto the idea of the emasculating Black matriarch proposed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose theories bell hooks often criticizes.

Meanwhile, she says, the "feminist movement", a largely white middle and upper class affair, did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism. She suggests this explains the low numbers of Black women who participated in the feminist movement in the 1970s, pointing to Louis Harris' Virginia Slims poll done in 1972 for Philip Morris that she says showed 62 percent of Black women supported "efforts to change women's status" and 67 percent "sympathized with the women's rights movement", compared with 45 and 35 percent of white women (also Steinem, 1972).

Since its publication, Ain't I a Woman has been critically acclaimed as groundbreaking in the study of feminist theory for discussing the correlation between the history of oppression Black women have faced in the United States and its lingering effects in modern American society. Ain't I a Woman is praised for tackling the intersection of race and gender that marginalizes Black women. hooks' writing has also opened the door for other Black women to write and theorize about similar topics. The book is commonly used in gender studies, Black studies, and philosophy courses.

The work has led to some criticism of her being "ahistorical, unscholarly (there were many complaints about the absence of footnotes), and homophobic". She does not provide a bibliography for any of her work, making it difficult to find the editors and publication information for the pieces listed under the "notes" section of her work. In "Theory as Liberatory Practice," hooks explains that her lack of conventional academic format was "motivated by the desire to be inclusive, to reach as many readers as possible in as many different locations as possible".

In a book review of hooks' Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Nicole Abraham criticizes hooks' unconventional format rationalization. Abraham suggests that, if her rationalization for not providing footnotes and bibliographic information in her writing is that it will help her reach a broader, presumably less academic audience, hooks either assumes that the average person is uninterested in pursuing her sources and ideas or implies that her readers are too lazy or unsophisticated for proper endnotes.

1. ^ Guy-Sheftall, Beverly; Ikerionwu, Maria K. Mootry; hooks, bell (1983). "Black Women and Feminism: Two Reviews". Phylon. 44 (1): 84. doi:10.2307/274371. JSTOR 274371.

2. ^ Cooke, Claire (2012). "Violently Silenced? The Role of Violence in bell hooks' Development as a Writer". Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies. 18.

3. ^ Pettis, Joyce (1986). "A Review of Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center". Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 11 (4): 788-789. doi:10.1086/494279.

4. ^ Abraham, Nicole (1999). "Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work; by bell hooks; Mother to Mother; by Sindiwe Magona". Southern African Feminist Review. 3 (2): 101.

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Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism is a 1981 book by bell hooks titled after Sojourner Truth's " Ain't I a Woman?" speech. hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s.

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Unveiling Narratives: How do different mediums shape perceptions of Black culture, identity, and experience?

The word “Medium’ is confusing. What do you mean? Can you be more specific? The Media? Print Media? Social Media? Magazines? Graphic Design?

I’m also wondering if it is the right question… or if you need to rewrite it slightly to suit the content of your essay.

So –

Could you work on the question / title.

Could you write a new, or rewrite the first paragraph. Try to introduce the title of the essay.

Start with a quote that backs up your question.

or

This essay tries to understand how……

or

I have observed that…..

Perhaps this section of the essay should come earlier as it feels like this what the heart of the essay is about

Throughout my research journey, I have researched the different mediums that shape perceptions of black culture, identity, and experience. As a black woman, I have built both understanding to influence my design, and parts of my culture which has enabled me to know about my identity. From my findings, I can comprehend historical and contemporary challenges shaping the black experience, especially where the voices are silenced. During my research, I noticed the disparity in the representation of black female artists which made navigating references and ideas to influence my work challenging. As highlighted by Zipia, most female artists, unfortunately, aren’t Black or African American (see chart 1) (Zipia, Inc. (2022, March 10). So, as a Black artist myself I was becoming aware of the limited resources from those who have experienced what I am exploring first hand. I intended to use other black artists to see how they represent their community however, this resulted in being difficult

Make sure you answer your question: Unveiling Narratives: How do different mediums shape perceptions of Black culture, identity, and experience?

Both in the body of the essay, and then again in the conclusion.

Overall the language, spelling, and grammar of this essay is good. Your references are good. The structure of the essay and how it reads as a whole, could still do with some work. It feels like it is missing a body – or the main content of the essay.

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Stuart Hall Cultural Identity and Diaspora

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Stuart Hall Cultural Identity and Diaspora

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Armet Francis: Beyond The Black Triangle

Armet Francis, Fashion Shoot, Brixton Market, London, 1973. Credit: © and courtesy the artist

Location and opening times

Rivington Place
London
EC2A 3BA

Wed 11am-6pm, Thu 11am-9pm, Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 12.30-6pm

020 7749 1240
[email protected]
autograph.org.uk

Overview

For more than four decades, Armet Francis's mission in photography has been to document the African diaspora. A Jamaican-British photographer with an acute understanding of black consciousness, his images are life-affirming moments that celebrate the resilience and survival of African diasporic cultures.

Francis immigrated as a young child from Jamaica to Britain in the 1950s. This experience of being unrooted, and politically alienated produced a profound sense of dislocation and impact on his life. Feeling culturally displaced, Francis turned to photography as an aid to share his desire to connect with the rich and diverse Pan-African world.

He later developed the idea of 'The Black Triangle' to guide his photographic practice from 1969. In the artist's own words the concept was forged through a "personal need to discover the dimensions of the experiences of Black people...the triangle first came to me in thoughts of the slave trade route, that is how I came to live in the Triangle: Africa, the Americas and Europe...I had to capture it through my camera, through my work...A man reacting to his destiny."

Francis' photographic journey over 40 years encapsulates the fragmented experiences of diasporic communities. His 1970s Brixton Market fashion shoots are playful and rare frames of black joy and celebration. His 2008 portraits of those who arrived on the Empire Windrush are critical interventions that gave names to the faces of those who journeyed on that historic voyage that changed Britain forever. He photographed young black Londoners who took to the streets in protest at the lack of justice for those that perished in the New Cross Fire of 1981, and political activists such as Angela Davis. Critically, when viewed through the canon of British photography Francis has dedicated his long career giving visibility to a proud, radical individuality.

2023 marks 35 years since Autograph began working as a vanguard organisation within the visual arts. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice. Francis was one of the founding signatories of Autograph, and Armet Francis: Beyond the Black Triangle commences a yearlong celebration highlighting Autograph's ongoing commitment to curate and preserve the legacy of practitioners, like Francis, who have recorded important narratives that have contributed to British history.C
Book now

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Armet Francis: Beyond The Black Triangle

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Black British history finally appears to be making the slow transition from academia to the mainstream. Black History Month may have been and gone but there's still plenty going on, and our media seems to have a current fascination with all things black. Radio 4 aired Britain's Black Past in October, the BFI's Black Star season is running till the end of December, and this November the BBC launched their Black and British season, which includes Black is the new Black , and Black and British: A forgotten history , in which David Olusoga explores the relationship between Britain and people of African origin. As part of this programme, the BBC are unveiling a series of plaques across the UK, the Caribbean and Africa to commemorate this history.

"The idea that a person, or history, can be both black British, is a new one. For a long time, the two were mutually exclusive"

Last year, the award-winning Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners , based on research by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at UCL , began to tell some of our forgotten history. Britain was made rich by the transatlantic slave trade, but also by the huge amounts of compensation money slave owners were given by our government when the trade was abolished. Many other black history projects which haven't reached the mainstream have been taking place across the UK for years. Researchers have shown that even in rural places like Devon, Dorset, and Cumbria there is a fascinating multicultural history - rural Britain has many historical global links, and communities from a wide range of countries have settled all across the UK.

The idea that a person, or history, can be both black British, is a new one. For a long time, the two were mutually exclusive. Black voices have traditionally been "whitewashed" out of British historical narrative in many ways, including a lack of inclusion in education and history books. The contributions of people from the former colonies have until recently been largely ignored. Where these stories were touched on, they were done so from a Eurocentric perspective, which justified the oppression of non-white peoples. Black history has also been whitewashed out of literature, the arts, and the media. (Although for hundreds of years black people have been, and continue to be, accepted as entertainers by white society).

The effect of this whitewashing has manifested itself in multifarious ways. It perpetuates the myth that black people are not a part of British history, and therefore cannot be truly "British" - they are "other", from elsewhere. But the effects widen out into other areas - black people continue to be underrepresented in other fields, and this "othering" of the black community has led to great inequality, overrepresentation in the criminal justice and mental health systems, and a stereotyping of black men in particular as "big, bad and dangerous".

"I, like many others, was taught in school that Empire was A Good Thing, and those pink parts of the global map (like a diluted blood watercolour wash) represented our success"

Recently I spoke to novelist Joanna Traynor, who suggested that when we look at our past through a different "lens" everything changes. In this instance, our history has become more truthful and inclusive. We are beginning to acknowledge the contributions black people have long been making to the UK.

I, like many others, was taught in school that Empire was A Good Thing, and those pink parts of the global map (like a diluted blood watercolour wash) represented our success in taking parts of the world. I learned about white kings and queens, and wars, and it was boring. What did this have to do with me? For a large part of my life, I had no clue about our rich, diverse heritage, or that black people have been coming to Britain since at least as far back as Roman times. I had no clue about the atrocities committed by "heroic" explorers and colonisers. I honestly believed I was one of the first of my kind, with one African and one English parent.

My interest in black history began when I studied racism and migration at university. I read books such as Peter Fryer's Staying Power , an important contribution to black British history (and life-changing for many). I found a whole new world, waiting to be discovered. Black people had been here for centuries; they hadn't all arrived on the Empire Windrush. They had been servants, sailors, soldiers, teachers, writers, rich and poor. They had suffered, and a few had prospered. They had fought alongside English soldiers in the Great Wars. They had lived, and loved, and died here. They had intermarried with white British people, and often "disappeared". They were part of the very fabric of British society.

There had been thousands - estimates vary but it's thought that between 10,000 and 20,000 black people lived in eighteenth century London. When I began to learn this, I walked around, imagining my country peopled with these black ghosts. I thought of African slaves when I saw coffee shops, and banks. Sugar suddenly had a dark, bloody history. The things I'd taken for granted as being English had come from other countries, and were tainted with oppression. If you take away a people's history, it has often been said, you strip them of their identity. Learning about the interconnectedness of "black" and "white" history - or a shared, global history - gives us our identity back. We have a place in history, here. We .

"Black history is often like this - a stitching together of scraps of information and fleshing out the details"

Some key moments in black British history recently include the erection of the memorial Mary Seacole statue, thought to be the first statue of a black woman in the UK. An appeal for funds for the statue led by Professor Elizabeth Anionwu raised £500,000 during the 12-year campaign. Mary Seacole's story was explored in a recent ITV documentary . Recent projects such as The John Blanke Project have taken someone from the archives, in this case an infamous "blacke trumpeter", and brought him to life. Black history is often like this - a stitching together of scraps of information and fleshing out the details. Michael Ohajuru, who has been involved in the project, says, "John Blanke was the Black trumpeter to the English Tudor courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. The project celebrates his presence as the first person of African descent for which we have both written records as well as visual images from the national archives. It is an arts project inspiring visual artists and illustrators, musicians and poets to interpret John Blanke in their chosen media, complimented by written responses from historians and cultural commentators."

Historic England is asking the public asked to add their own memories, pictures and information about black history to the record of all listed buildings and places. The Heritage Lottery Fund are highlighting black heritage projects, and in the media there has been a political push for increased diversity in TV and film with the BBC, Channel 4 and the BFI making "diversity pledges" and promising to do better, in light of #OscarsSoWhite. According to Dr Miranda Kaufman, historian and author of the forthcoming Black Tudors People in the creative industries tend not to be aware of black British history. It's either that or they're racist, and don't want to tell these stories."

Miranda is one of the What's Happening in Black British History co-organisers, and runs biannual workshops, along with Michael Ohajuru and Professor Philip Murphy. WHBBH5 took place in London in October. One particularly powerful presentation, Miranda says, was given by several teachers on their personal experiences of black history, and how it affected them. "It's encouraging to know they're in our classrooms." "But," she says, "there's still a lot of ignorance, and we have a long way to go".

is the author of several books and a prominent voice in black British history. He points to the fact that the BHM movement started in North America in 1926 as Black History Week by Carter Woodson (strongly influenced by Marcus Garvey). BHM in the UK started in 1987 under the aegis of the Greater London Council. "My interest in black history began," he says, "in the early 1980s while leafing through a book of Hogarth's prints of London in the 1730s. I wondered who the black characters were. Tracking down their stories grew into an obsession and led to the publication of my first book."

His favourite projects over the last year have been the Black Georgians exhibition at Black Cultural Archives, and the work currently being done at the National Archives looking at the 1919 Race Riots. "Both these pieces of work go a long way in demonstrating the resilience and longevity of black communities in Britain and the breadth of their activities and experiences They serve as great correctives to popular narratives about African populations," he says.

"It's not good enough to simply talk about the slave trade, as this is only part of the story and can portray black people as victims who were rescued by white saviours"

However, S.I Martin feels that "black British history is still locked away in the academy". Apart from the appearance of Mary Seacole, and occasionally Olaudah Equiano (an 18th century freed slave), the National Curriculum is still populated almost exclusively by African-American narratives. 'There is hope on the horizon with the screening of David Olusoga's programme, but still a long way to go," he adds. Martin believes that black history in Britain can't be separated from majority community histories as they are part of it -"literally no part of the nation's post 1560s narrative is unaffected by it".

So are we moving in the right direction, and how can we keep the momentum going? Many argue that education is key. Schools need to be encouraged to teach black history in a way that is meaningful and inclusive. As Martin has pointed out, we need a range of black people included in the curriculum. It's not good enough to simply talk about the slave trade, as this is only part of the story and can portray black people as victims who were rescued by "white saviours". Black history needs to be explored in depth. It needs to be community-led and owned, and not seen as the preserve of academics. It needs an ongoing presence in the British media. White historians need to take responsibility in addressing the issues, and not shy away from the reality of our shared past.

Black history is an important part of a counter-argument against a post-Brexit, post-Trump racist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic rhetoric. When we change the lens through which we view our history, we begin as a nation to see that black history is for all of us, and through exploring it, we will grow richer, wiser, more compassionate, and less focused on the ideas of "race".

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Seeing our past through a different lens: the rise of black British history

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Black British history finally appears to be making the slow transition from academia to the mainstream. Black History Month may have been and gone but there's still plenty going on, and our media seems to have a current fascination with all things black.

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Trigger warning: mentions of assault and abuse
In the first few episodes of I May Destroy You, Greentea Peng's 'Mr. Sun (miss da sun)' leaks through my speakers during one of Arabella's (played by Michaela Coel) introspective moments. The soothing sounds of Greentea Peng's voice caresses my ears as she repeatedly sings, "I can't lie, I need you, Mr. Sun/chasing after you, I'm on the run," and I completely resonate. About a month and a half into lockdown, I started seeing a therapist - black woman therapist - and like most black women seeking therapy, it wasn't an easy feat.

Over the last few weeks, black woman therapist figures have been creeping their way into visibility on our screens, from Molly's gentle dragging by her therapist in Insecure, to Arabella's tender, growing relationship in Michaela Cola's new drama, I May Destroy You.

From the BAFTA Award-winning Chewing Gum to her starring role in romantic musical Been So Long, Michaela Coel has been a champion of black coming-of-age stories throughout her career.

This month, she's back with another helping of black British storytelling that's set to make our hearts sing and challenge our thinking. I May Destroy You features Michaela as Arabella, a popular writer working on the follow-up to Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial when she is drugged and assaulted after a night out. After the attack, Arabella seeks therapy to help piece together the chunks of her fragmented memory and overcome her experience. Throughout, we witness the difficulties and joys of Arabella's therapeutic rehabilitation - a journey that's mirrored by many black women in the UK.

Seeking therapy generally has its own challenges: the long NHS waiting list, the pricey investment of going through private practices, the seemingly never-ending search for "the right" one. As a process, it can be debilitating and emotionally exhausting. However, for black women seeking a black woman therapist specifically, the hurdles increase tenfold, and resources straddle the line between scarcity and non-existence.

For black communities in the UK, access to mental health services and appropriate treatment and care are statistically lower than for our white counterparts, despite being among the top demographics to be diagnosed (and often misdiagnosed) and four times more likely to be sectioned. The therapeutic space isn't tailored towards black communities, and black women and girls in particular are left hanging in the balance. "One of the key things is that racism compounds everything," says Jahnine Davis, co-director of Listen Up Research, a research hub exploring the lived experiences of underrepresented young people, and Ph.D. researcher. "You can't talk about the challenges black women and girls face accessing support without talking about racism."

The idea of the "strong, black woman" defines the way black women are treated within mental health services and often leads to the adultification of adolescent black girls. In 2019, Jahnine published the research " Where are the Black girls in our CSA services, studies, and statistics?", which explored the ways black girls are neglected by child sexual abuse services and further racialised in their experiences of sexual abuse and violence. "Black girls are perceived as less in need of protection, support, and nurture," she tells me. "When we see a black girl crying, we don't see their tears - we see an assumption of anger"

"My therapist helped me break down the notion of a 'strong black woman' and rebuilt it in line with my personal experiences"

Even in the valid expression of anger, black women with white women therapists still may find it difficult to express themselves without being tone-policed. Karen, a 23-year-old consultant, knows this feeling all too well, noting that her sessions felt "mechanical" and like "being interrogated". "I felt like she wouldn't let me feel angry," she says. "I didn't get the chance to be mad. My answers felt really rehearsed. I felt like if I didn't articulate myself perfectly, they wouldn't understand me."

Black women being reaffirmed, especially when it comes to sexual abuse and sexual violence, is an often unspoken part of the intersectionality of blackness and womanhood. The oversexualisation of black women and girls' bodies adds to the stigma of sexual abuse and can keep some from speaking out about their experiences. Karen adds, "Whether my white therapist believed me or not seemed to not matter. I don't know if they did believe me. I wasn't affirmed enough in that way. That affirmation was important. It's like another way of being seen."

In the conversations surrounding the dreaded D-word, "diversity", the need for black women to be able to access black women therapists goes beyond representation politics. Rather, there's a shared context of black womanhood that alleviates the pressure to constantly explain ourselves into oblivion. "I knew a non-black therapist wouldn't give me what I needed - I needed an understanding of my womanhood and culture," says Tolani*, 25, a civil servant, who has been seeing her therapist since September after being assaulted at her home. "This was so specific to my body, and I needed a black woman therapist that I could trust would get it... I blamed myself a lot, and she helped me break down the notion of a 'strong black woman' and rebuilt it in line with my personal experiences."

Illustration by Naomi Gennery

These subtle cues can be the pillars of the therapeutic space and it's often the main reason for seeking a black women therapist in the first place. The feeling of someone just "getting it" creates room for vulnerability and authenticity.

"When we see a side-eye, or see someone point with their mouth, or make noises, [those] that are whole non-verbal languages that we all understand," says Dawn Estefan, a leading psychodynamic psychotherapist specialising in trauma, spirituality, culture and tradition. "The hums, the growls, that laughter from a black woman means a thousand things - there is so much richness and quality in the work."

For some black women therapists, having black women clients equally impacts the fluidity of the space. "Some people would argue if you are a good therapist you can work with anyone, and to an extent, I agree. However, when a black person is faced with another black person in the therapeutic space, it can do a lot of brilliant things. Working with black women is a joyful experience and we both experience our blackness in the room that gives us a certain freedom."

Although the demand for black therapists is clear, public bodies are still lacking, forcing black therapists to set up their own practices and acquire funding or go private. The implications of costs keep many black women from accessing the support they need, and the few spaces designed explicitly for black women are underfunded and oversubscribed.

"The only time I've had a therapist that was a black woman was when I paid for it myself," says Sage, 25, who found their former therapist through the Black African and Asian Therapy Network, but had to stop seeing them due to costs. "I am non-binary but still experience misogynoir and black womanhood has very much shaped my life. My current therapist is a white woman that I got through the NHS. I find myself never speaking about my experiences of being non-binary and gay. I feel like I have to pick and choose which part of my identity I want to speak about whenever I have a session. I don't want to have to explain."

But when independent practices are set up, what happens to them? As well as working for the NHS, Dawn also runs her own practice, but this isn't without its problems. "I developed a group called The Black Women's Psychotherapy Group, which took ages to get funding for," she says. "With one of the funders I went to, I was told, 'A room full of black women? How scary.'" Likewise Sistah Space, a bespoke volunteer-led service for black women affected by domestic violence, is currently at risk of being evacuated from their current premises in Hackney in the midst of a pandemic, while organisations like The Maya Centre remain at risk due to government funding cuts, which have already eliminated many black women-specific subsidised sessions.

"When a black person is faced with another black person in the therapeutic space, it can do a lot of brilliant things. Working with black women is a joyful experience"

Alongside the lack of culturally specific spaces for black women to seek therapy, discussions around sexual abuse and violence often centre white women, which in turn shapes policies and data. "Our voices and experiences are missing in research, and how services are identifying and responding is a problem, especially for adolescent black young women," says Jahnine. In 2013, the NSPCC commissioned " No one noticed, no one heard ", a study of disclosures of childhood abuse, in which a staggering 92% of participants came from white backgrounds. "The policies, assessments, and tools that come from these studies are based around a Eurocentric lens, completely erasing the experiences of adolescent black young women," Jahine adds.

The trickle-down effect of the lack of research on sexual abuse and violence against black women and girls manifests before we even step into the therapeutic space. Training and educational institutions often centre their teaching around white Eurocentric studies or African-American research, which is conflated with, and simultaneously decontextualises, the experiences of black women and girls in the UK. "I felt like I wasn't represented in the clinical material we were studying," Dawn tells me, reminiscing on the responsibility she felt of being "the black one" on a course of predominantly white women. "The training failed to address the complex needs of African and Caribbean people and fell short of ethical planes of social justice and practice within therapy."

The lack of cultural literacy within the academic space not only devalues the work of black women, but also creates impossible grounds for black women therapists to carry out this work and continues to do black people seeking therapy a disservice on extraordinary scales. "My black woman therapist was the only one to give me a correct diagnosis," Sage tells me. "The other therapists seemed to shrug my issues off and kept giving me anti-depressants and counseling I wasn't benefitting from. I entered the mental health service when I was 18 and only got the correct diagnosis when I turned 25." Unfortunately, Sage isn't alone in their experience: studies show black communities are likely to be misdiagnosed of affective disorders, but underdiagnosed of depression and anxiety.

In the workplace, black women therapists still experience the same microaggressions as black women in any other field. Dawn recalls moments of being asked whether she is "qualified enough" or having to state her qualifications to clients. These are some of the experiences that bond black women together.

"My current black therapist has reassured me about what it means to be the only black woman in your field and the stereotypes and assumptions that come with that" says Onyi, 33, an agile tech lead. "She can speak to my experiences and give me the room to break down and be vulnerable in a way I can't do with other white therapists."

The role of the black woman therapist on screen has been contentious and criticised, with black women being paraded as "mammy figures" in white majority-cast shows. But it is clear that black women therapists play an integral role in the lives of many black women working through pain, trauma, and hardship, and in the journey towards healing, we shouldn't have to chase the sun to the edges of the earth. We shouldn't have to fight so hard to be heard.
*Names have been changed to protect identities This article is part of a paid partnership by gal-dem for the new BBC drama I May Destroy You, written by and starring Michaela Coel, currently streaming on iPlayer

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'We don't see black girls' tears': I May Destroy You and being a black woman in therapy

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Trigger warning: mentions of assault and abuse In the first few episodes of I May Destroy You, Greentea Peng's 'Mr. Sun (miss da sun)' leaks through my speakers during one of Arabella's (played by Michaela Coel) introspective moments.

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54.4% of artists are female in the United States.

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FKA twigs on Instagram: "AVANTgarden issue 1. ROOTS ∙ SHOCK ∙  BEAUTY 
Creative Director: FKA twigs @fkatwigs
Editor: Suzannah Pettigrew @suz_p
Styling: Matthew Josephs @matthew_josephs
Hair: Rio Sreedharan @rio_hair
Casting: FKA twigs @fkatwigs and Olivia Kaifa @livokai
Photography and post production: R + D @reecendean
MUA: Bea Sweet @beasweetbeauty
Set Design: Suzannah Pettigrew @suz_p
Models: Chanel @chanellygirl / Naomi @_flowerchildx / Olivia @livokai / James @j_magz / Malick @ssandroidx / Kaner @kanerflex / Vanessa @vanessaohenlen / Jourdan @jourdancopeland / Rachellé @rachellehollandxx
Logo: Matt de Jong @go_dejong
Layout: FKA twigs @fkatwigs / Suzannah Pettigrew @suz_p / Matt de Jong @go_dejong
Illustrations: Roxie Warder @roxiepandora"

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45K likes, 668 comments - fkatwigs on October 13, 2017: "AVANTgarden issue 1. ROOTS ∙ SHOCK ∙  BEAUTY 
Creative Director: FKA twigs @fkatwigs
Editor: ..." 

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by FKA twigs (@fkatwigs)

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An error, which was quite interesting. The paper folded in the printing resulting in some writing missing but it still wasn't something I wanted to repricate.

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This was a digital zine, which demonstrated a clear narrative of black hair and culture posted on Instagram. I was interested by this because I liked how it told a story of black culture and represented black people through imagery.

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She says "AVANTgarden" is "a way for me to express myself without any rules or guidelines"

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Autograph is a place to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.

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beyond the black triangle: mark sealy & gary younge in conversation

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Documenting Joy, Resilience and Resistance in the African Diaspora

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Mark Sealy and Gary Younge discuss photographer Armet Francis' significant contributions to British culture over the past forty years

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As much as I liked this idea, the further along I started to experiment, I noticed a clear problem that the writing was beginning to get hard to read because the paper was tracing paper.

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Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

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Moving to physical experimentations and how the contrast between the black card could perhaps work with tracing paper. I liked this experimentation because I liked how it was transparent (as explained in the essay), it represented the transparency of the black community's experiences.

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Black women have a complicated relationship with our hair.

On one hand, there was a time when coiler textures' ability to grow towards the skies was seen as a symbol of high status, and portrayed closeness to the divine. But in contemporary times, despite the vast influence of the second wave natural hair movement, the texture caste system we were forced to conform to - where straight hair is seen as "good," while tighter coils are seen as "bad" - during the colonial era still persists today. And there are several parallels when it comes to wearing wigs.

"Black women's relationships with wigs began in ancient Egypt," says hair historian and head of psychology at the University of the District of Columbia Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka. "There's a lot of research suggesting that wigs were supposed to show rank in society in this culture. A lot of the royal families had these very decorated wigs with gold and lace and other adornments to show that they had nobility."

Styles would range from curly to coily, and some would even be braided or in locs.

The upper class would also choose to shave their natural hair off in order to have the option to only wear hair when they wished, which was a true privilege, considering the scorching temperatures at the time. However, those of a lower rank were not permitted to wear wigs during this era, the expert explains.

Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka

Another interesting fact is that some ancient Egyptian queens wore wigs not only on their head, but also on their chin. " Queen Hatshepsut was known for her great work as a pharaoh, but she would actually wear a beard wig to show her status," says Dr. Mbilishaka.

The royals of ancient Egypt would have others care for their wigs by using essential oils to help groom the hair, and they would even be mummified and buried with the pieces on their head.

But the use of wigs during this time to represent royalty or those of high status is a stark contrast to why Black women in the United States wore them during desegregation throughout the '60s.

VIDEO: Gabrielle Union Has Never Worn an Asymmetrical Bob Like This Before

"Wigs had been used to address employment," explains Dr. Mbilishaka. "There were actually certain hair requirements when a Black woman had to integrate her job, and she had to comply with a style that her natural hair maybe couldn't do. So whether it was a flight attendant, or a nurse, it was a part of the uniform to wear the wig. It justified the respectability of that person."

On the other hand, Black doo-wop girl groups from the '50s and '60s also wore elaborately styled wigs, many of which featured a signature bump at the crown. And it wasn't necessarily about covering their natural strands, but rather using these wigs for creative expression.

"It was a part of performances," Dr. Mbilishaka shares. "With all the variations of Black hair, these wigs were used to create hair uniformity. There was a theatrical element. Even if we look at some of the movies from the 1970s, we knew that they were wearing afro wigs."

But regardless of whether or not Black women are on stage, wigs have always had a place in our culture and in our homes for a variety of reasons. One of the most major being hair loss.

Dr. Crystal Ugochi Aguh, the director of the Ethnic Skin program and assistant professor of dermatology at John Hopkins has found that nearly half of Black women will experience some form of hair loss in their lifetime, with traction alopecia being a common cause. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of wigs Black women purchase do not replicate their natural pattern.

"There's still is a sector that's paying to fit into this beauty ideal that's perpetuated by Euro-American culture," explains Dr. Mbilishaka. "There's still a caste system related to hair where it may be challenging for some Black women to accept their hair texture and length because of systems of white supremacy and racism that makes them feel as though their natural hair is not acceptable. Or, people have given them the feedback that their hairstyle and texture are not acceptable."

Still, the way a Black woman chooses to wear her hair, or whether or not she wants to put on a wig, is completely her choice. And regardless of if the hair we wear grows from our own scalp or it was purchased at a store, we're past due for the freedom to be able to do what we want with our hair, when we want, without the assumption or judgement we've become so used to having to accept.

This is All Natural. From the kinkiest coils to loose waves, we're celebrating natural hair in its many forms by sharing expert tips for styling, maintenance, and haircare.

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Black Women's Deep Relationship With Wigs Isn't What You Think It Is

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Black women's relationship with wigs is deep rooted and sometimes complex. Learn more about the history here.

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I was lucky to grow up in a home where the politics of the Black struggle was discussed morning noon and night and as a result I am very politically aware. At Island Records we have always sought out artists who share that commitment to truth in art, to an understanding of the struggle, not just in the political sense, but in our everyday lives. I believe music and politics can combine to become a powerful force for change and for good. Like my dad always said 'I'm not a member of Renegades, I am a Renegade'.

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I was lucky to grow up in a home where the politics of the Black struggle was discussed morning noon and night and as a result I am very politically aware. At Island Records we have always sought out artists who share that commitment to truth in art, to an understanding of the struggle, not just in the political sense, but in our everyday lives.

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For people of colour in the UK, certain spaces are more comfortable to exist in than others.

If you walk into a pub and you are the only person of colour in there, you might feel the need to make subtle adjustments to your behaviour and manner of speaking in order to be less conspicuous.

Code-switching is a survival technique, a tool to help someone seamlessly blend into different social and professional situations - particularly where you are a minority. It can be used consciously, or it can happen without even noticing that you're doing it.

But, frequently code-switching can be mentally taxing. It can be exhausting and demoralising to feel as though you have to hide or adjust parts of who you are.

What is code-switching?

The term code-switching was originally created to refer specifically to linguistics - the way we speak.

In this sense, code-switching is where the speaker alternates between two or more languages, language varieties, or informal mixtures of language - all within a single conversation.

But language is just one element of the concept. The wider understanding of code-switching now includes any behaviour of adapting to fit a new set of rules - and that is not limited to speech.

For example, you would speak to a potential employer differently than you would to your best mate, you would shake their hand rather than high five, you might wear different clothes in their presence - there are different sets of social rules orchestrating these interactions.

People of colour feel the need to code-switch in more situations than white people because the unwritten rules of many social situations are dictated by white experiences.

Examples of code-switching
Rochelle, 30 Louie, 23 Sam, 36
An American study last year found that black and Hispanic people are more likely than their white counterparts to say they 'feel the need to change the way they express themselves when they are around people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds.'

'Because dominant culture is white, whiteness has been baked into institutions as natural, normal and legitimate,' explains Chandra D.L. Waring from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

'So there's much more incentive for people of colour to code-switch,' she writes in The Conversation. 'To adapt to the dominant culture to improve their prospects.

'White people rarely, if ever, feel this same pressure in their daily lives.'

What does code-switching look like?

Michelle Obama relayed her own experience of code-switching in her bestselling memoir, Becoming.

The former First Lady recalled 'talking white' to girls in her neighbourhood, and explained how code-switching became a feature of her career.

It doesn't matter where you get to in the pecking order, for many people of colour, code-switching will be a persistent reality.

It could manifest as a black woman removing her braids or changing her natural hairstyle before starting a new job, choosing to eat sandwiches at lunchtime rather than bringing traditional food from home, or changing the tone and volume of your voice and using different slang terms.

Sometimes, code-switching can manifest as a feeling. A subtle and internal switch of outlook, or an attempt to see the world from the perspective of the majority.

But usually, code-switching is more than an abstract feeling - it is a performative form of self-censorship and the point is to make life a little bit easier.

An inability or reluctance to code-switch can lead to negative comments, discrimination and even overt punishment - as we have seen with black pupils excluded from schools for wearing traditional hairstyles.

Code-switching can also be seen in the way we treat others, and it can be life-saving.

A black doctor recently posted a thread on Twitter highlighting just how important it can be to have an awareness of when ethnic patients aren't connecting with what the doctors are telling them.

Why we need more black men in medicine. I had a patient this week who came in with left leg weakness over the last week. Younger black guy in his 30s. Brain MRI clearly indicates multiple sclerosis. So we all go in during morning rounds to give my man his diagnosis.
- The Medical M.A.B. (@Oga_DoctorBlue) August 23, 2018

The medic - who is black - said doctors assumed that a black patient was apathetic and didn't care about his diagnosis, he was the only one to realise that the patient hadn't understood.

Without a doctor with the ability to code-switch, this patient might have remained in the dark about crucial information about his own health.

Code-switching wouldn't need to happen if people of colour weren't penalised for their social and cultural differences in the UK.

Despite the fact that many people code-switch unconsciously, it is still an additional burden and a source of discomfort for many.

Creating spaces that are genuinely accessible and welcoming for diverse groups of people is the best way to reduce the psychological impact of having to self-police your own behaviour.

And code-switching can only ever protect people of colour to a point.

Ultimately, no matter how meticulously you attempt to assimilate or emulate the behaviour of the majority - it doesn't change your 'otherness' in the eyes of many.

So, while the ability to code-switch can be useful, it is a flimsy shield against systemic, institutional and personal racism. And the onus shouldn't be on people of colour to develop strategies to counter this problem.

The State of Racism
Do you have a story to share? Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@Metro.co.uk. Share your views in the comments section below.
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People of colour have to 'code-switch' to fit in with white norms

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Most people of colour in the UK code-switch on a regular basis - it's all about switching between different sets of social rules.

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What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society - from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between.

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- Photographs of Windrush exhibition on Windrush Square, Brixton, c1998

ItemIdentifier: BCA/6/13/9

- Palmer's Black & Beautiful Spray for Women, 1987

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/44

- Dark and Lovely Hair Care Spray, 2001

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/6

- African Dream hair extensions, 2001

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/48

- 'Picture This: Representations of Black People in Advertising' (May-September 2002), 2002

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/102

- Poster "Race, Culture and Representation", undated[c2000]

FileIdentifier: BCA/6/5/10

- Magazine. 'The West Indian Review', January - December 1960

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/51

- Magazine. 'Ebony', February 1996

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- Ebony Magazine, November 1989

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/53

- Postcard, 1927

FileIdentifier: ADVERT/4

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Inside One Of The First Black Hair Salons In London

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When Black men and women began migrating from across the Caribbean to Britain between 1948 and 1971 - The Windrush Generation - they were told to bring a selection of afro hair products and tools such as "pressing combs", because there would be absolutely no hair salons able to cater for their hair. As my grandmother, who travelled to Manchester from Antigua in the 1950s, remembers it, when she first arrived on British soil the cold weather was so shock-inducing it reduced her to tears. Her head of long coily brown hair (her much-beloved crown) was never the same again and wigs styled in ways popular with white women became her saving grace. It's a common story. According to The National Archives, it was so difficult to manage afro hair in Britain, some Caribbean women would simply cut their hair off.

It was in 1955, as Black women struggled to live up to white beauty standards, when entrepreneur Carmen Maingot opened what's believed to be Britain's first salon in London's North Kensington, offering hair-straightening services to Black women. A few years later, Winifred Atwell, a renowned pianist from Trinidad, set up The Winifred Atwell salon in Brixton, South London - an area with the highest population of Caribbean people in the country.

Atwell, born in 1914, was already raking in accomplishments after moving to England from Tuna Puna, Trinidad, via the US, in 1946. As Refinery29 detailed for Black History Month, Atwell, also a trained pharmacist, followed her musical passions to prestigious The Royal Academy of Music, where she was discovered when singing in London clubs. Atwell soon released a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, becoming the first Black musician on UK charts, selling over 20 million records. And in 1952, her recording of "Black And White Rag" propelled her to stardom. In total, she had 11 UK top 10 hits including " Britannia Rag", " Let's Have Another Party" and " The Poor People of Paris".

It was during the height of her fame and glamorous TV performances, that Atwell's Black fans would reportedly send her letters asking her where she got her hair done in the UK. Canadian actress Isabelle Lucas, who played Norman Beaton's wife in the hit Black British TV series The Fostersand featured in longstanding soap Eastenders, was among the Black women looking for hair guidance. Per various archives, Lucas wrote, "In those days there were no Black salons for Black women in this country. Black women styled their hair in their kitchens. I needed advice on how to straighten and style my hair, but I didn't know any Black women in Britain. I had only heard about Winifred Atwell." After looking Winifred up in London's directory, Lucas was invited to the star's home in Hampstead where she gifted hair straightening irons.

Atwell identified the lack of Black hairdressing in England (after reportedly experiencing a botched hairstyle herself) and opened her salon in South London where she had "business connections." The salon was a luxurious space near to Brixton railway station that caught the eye of the local press. Atwell taught English hairdressers how to treat Black hair, and reportedly, using her pharmaceutical background helped design new treatments for Black haircare, as well as makeup that matched Black skin tones.

The Winifred Atwell salon caught fire during the Brixton riots in 1981, and Atwell passed away in 1983 shortly after her move to Sydney. Today, a plaque remembering both Winifred Atwell's achievements and services to her community remains in the salon's place, and Brixton is a hot spot for Black hairdressers and services. Researchers suggest that Atwell's salon was a catalyst in the move from amateur domestic hairdressing to public Black salons in the area and across England. As of 2021, the UK only has 314 afro-hairdressing salons out of almost 45,000 registered hair and beauty salons and Black women's calls for better services for Black hair types still ring out across the United Kingdom. Still, the legacy of Black British hairstyling and entrepreneurship has long continued through the UK's African braiders and modern hair stylists, who make sure our hair is catered for.

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Inside One Of The First Black Hair Salons In London

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In 1956, renowned Trinidadian pianist, Winifred Atwell, opened one of the first Black hair salons in Brixton, South London. The Winifred Atwell Salon catered for the Windrush community who arrived in England to find no salons catered for their hair.

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ACTIVATED RESEARCH ESSAY_CHARDONNAY NALTY# draft2 for feedback

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Visiting this exhibition was a huge experience for me because I have never had an up-close experience with work that addresses the same issues that I am. The Black Cultural Achieve is located in Brixton and during my visit there were two parts of the exhibit: Challenging the Narrative - Black Resistance to Scientific Bias and the Brilliant Black British History.

I was inspired by the work, especially in the Challenging The Narrative part of the exhibition. On entry, Sash Henriques shared ‘Science has, in the past, incorrectly linked behaviours and characteristics to the way we look. As a result, historical and current injustices are tied to flawed ideas of race and ethnicity.’ This part of the quote she left was interesting to me because I too feel like we live in a world where there are stereotypes and ideologies based on the past. Sasha Henrique then goes on to say ‘I am keen to understand and challenge these labels and support the cultural pride that helps us dismantle those dangerous and incorrect ideas’, this part of the quote in particular allowed me to understand the deeper meaning for the work which was shared in the exhibition.

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Working digitally to start with, making prototypes on Photoshop of ideas that I could later start to print. So, for this example, I was imagining a black card with white text that would be clear to read and limited text on the page to limit distractions.

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At this stage of experimentation, I knew that I wanted the design outcome to be a book. I wanted to use a book to emphasize and share the story, ‘our story’. Through this book, would include my essay and any visuals that would share the findings along the way, making it more of an informative book.

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Week 9 – 24th November

WRITING WORKSHOP – WRITING ABOUT YOUR OWN WORK

Describe the piece you have chosen:

·   Does it have a title?

·   What format is it?

·   Describe how it looks, sounds, feels, or reads.

Describe the process of making it:

·   What materials did you use?

·   What skills and programmes did you use to make it?

·   What challenges did you have?

·   What successes did you have?

·   What visual influences did you have?

·   Did you develop or record these visuals in your sketchbook or padlet?

·   What other practitioners do you connect with and are they visible in your design or work?

·    What concepts and ideas have you been researching?

·   How have you communicated these in the design of your work?

·   Does the content of your work connect with the design or format you have chosen?

·   What do you find curious or interesting about what you are making?

·   What do other people think about what you are making?

·   What feedback have you had and how has it changed your work?

·   Will this work lead to any other pieces of work and what might they be?

·   What would you make if time or money were no issue?

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Structure // Define the parameters of your Activated Research by employing these key points as a guideline for your writing:

• Introduction An overview of your chosen area of research that introduces you as a designer/maker.

• Question, observation, interest. Your individual position within your chosen area of research.

• Research overview Examples of who else has explored this subject? Practitioners/historians/writers/researchers… How and where have they done this? Websites/books/articles/films/podcasts/exhibitions/products/games… Minimum 10 references. • Research Case Study A detailed example of another practitioner’s work, a reference, or an idea, that is relevant to your research. • Activated Case Study A detailed example of a piece of your work and how you have used this research to inform it or to learn from it.

• Conclusion A summary of what you have found through making and researching this subject and a reflection on the process.

• Bibliography A detailed list of references including, practitioners, titles, sources, and dates.

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- If you want to address this you need to read about the deeper topics

- What is the lexicon?

- What does the lexicon look like?

- Don’t be fearful about addressing this, it is clear that you are very passionate about this subject so address it with passion

- Identify this lexicon

- Visual culture

- Build nd develop this culture

- Research and look at how this research can be published (What medium)

- Look into Stuart Hall

- What is this in terms of a design practice?

- Think about what the design practice means

- How do we use design methology to start a conversation?

- Are you going to go back to achieves to start something new?

- Black female artists, who are they?

- Black graphic designers, who are they?

- Look at Barbara Walker, she does work around the Windrush: where she draws on huge walls. Her work is contemporary and how it is existing in society as she talks it out

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17TH NOV DESIGN RESEARCH PROJECT - FORMATIVE PRESENTATION

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My work exhibited at Kyotographie '21: 4 of my photo and photo collage series: "The Faces of Abissa" (on the annual Festival of The N'zima people of Grand-Bassam) "the Queens of Babi (on @britney9816 and @babacoeurblanc, members of the Drag Queen and LGBTQ community of Abidjan), "Metamorphosis" (A photo collage self-portrait series on Breast cancer as a Black woman, originally created for @grain_projects) and "Me, First" (a series created for @lookingglassco on self care through sexuality and pleasure).

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Why Black Women Struggle to Find Salons on the High Street

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Only 1% of 35,000 UK salons cater for afro hair

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Get to know these names.

When you think of famous Black women to look up to, your mind might wander to Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, or Beyoncé. But these contemporary role models are far from the first influential Black women in history who made lasting change in the United States.

The ground-breaking firsts stretch back centuries, beyond Rosa Parks and Katherine Johnson - one of the mathematicians for NASA who had a hand in sending Americans to space for the first time. It's important to remember these women and how they made society what it is today - during Black History Month, and all year 'round.

"One can tell a great deal about a people, about a nation, by what it deems important enough to remember," as Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, wrote in The Guardian.

Nadia Valentine, a former broadcasting major at Drake University, emphasized the importance of remembering significant Black figures from the past in an interview with Teen Vogue. Nadia, who is Black, said her mother, who is white, used to ask her to spend time looking up influential Black historical figures after school during every Black History Month.

"We're completely overlooking contributions made by people who were disenfranchised for hundreds and hundreds of years and who are still disenfranchised," she said.

That's why she said it's crucial to remember how Black women shaped the world we live in - whether they're crafting laws in Congress, fighting for the right to vote, or just inventing better ways to brush your hair. Here are some of the Black women whose advancements transformed U.S. history.

Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune knew that education was key, but she also knew it was difficult for young Black children to achieve, particularly in the segregated South. After struggling to go to school and working on a plantation to help support her family, she became an educator and, in 1904, founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Girls, according to PBS.

Her educational activism and leadership set her up to be a political activist. She went on to found the National Council of Negro Women, and worked in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, where she served as the informal "race leader at large."

Claudette Colvin

Though we've all heard the story of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, most of us don't know that Colvin did the same thing - nine months before Parks did. She was only 15 at the time, and was one of the first Black activists to openly challenge the law. As she told Teen Vogue in a 2017 interview, "The whole movement was about young people saying we want more from America."

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Chisholm made history by being the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives in 1968. She represented New York in Congress for 14 years, advocating for early education and child welfare policies.

She eventually ran for president as a Democrat in the 1972 race, becoming the first Black candidate to run for a major party nomination. Chisholm's infamous campaign slogan was "unbought and unbossed." She was also one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971, as well as the Congressional Women's Caucus in 1977.

Mae Jemison

Jemison made out-of-this-world progress for Black women. In 1992, she became the first Black woman to fly to space on the space shuttle Endeavour. She was also the first Black woman admitted to the astronaut training program, in 1987.

Octavia Butler

Thanks to Donald Trump, Americans have heard the phrase "Make America Great Again" more times than the Pledge of Allegiance. But sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler utilized the slogan, likely drawing on Reagan's 1980 campaign message, "Let's Make America Great Again" almost 20 years before Trump in her 1998 book Parable of the Talents, according to Fusion. The dystopian novel depicts a future United States in which slavery has been reintroduced and a fundamentalist Christian sect has taken control, systematically purging the country of non-Christian faiths.

Butler was also an award-winning Black writer - the first science fiction writer to be awarded the MacArthur fellowship, also known as the genius grant, among other awards, The New York Times reported.

Audre Lorde

This lesbian, Black, female poet's 1973 collection, From a Land Where Other People Live, was nominated for a National Book Award and increased America's awareness of intersectionality, or the convergence of race, gender, and class that can put particular groups at a disadvantage or lead to discrimination. Lorde's identity shaped her speeches and writings about the struggles of women, Black people, and the LGBTQ community, according to Mic.

Michelle Obama

Sadie Alexander was the first Black woman economist in the United States. This trailblazing math whiz devoted her career to challenging segregation and taking on institutions that kept Black people from advancing financially. That work included serving as the first woman secretary of the National Bar Association, fighting to desegregate the military, and serving on President Harry Truman's Special Committee on Civil Rights. "I knew well that the only way I could get that door open was to knock it down, because I knocked all of them down," she famously said.

Lucy Diggs Slowe

Serena and Naomi owe a debt of gratitude to Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first Black woman to ever win a national tennis title in 1917. Like so many famous Black women of her generation, Slowe was so much more than her job title. Yes, she was a great athlete, but she was also an educator who became Howard University's dean of women, and a champion of civil rights who helped found the nation's first Greek-lettered sorority for Black women, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA).

Johnnie Tillmon

One of the biggest influences on Martin Luther King Jr. was a former sharecropper and mother of six named Johnnie Tillmon. As chairperson of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Tillmon advocated for a guaranteed standard of living for all people, be they stay at home mothers or members of the workforce - an early push for the movement for " guaranteed income" or " universal basic income " that's seen renewed interest in recent years. This radical approach to welfare was eventually adapted by MLK and helped shape the civil rights movement.
Editor's note: This story was updated on January 27, 2023.

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There are so many famous Black women to look up to as role models, from Rosa Parks to Serena Williams to Shirley Chisholm. Get to know some iconic Black women in history.

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Bruce Conner - Intro / THREE SCREEN RAY - Art + Music - MOCAtv

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Emma Dabiri | The Blindboy Podcast on Acast

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Emma is an academic who focuses on African Studies. We chat about her bestselling book "Don't Touch My Hair" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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This is painful to talk about and difficult to write. It feels important to acknowledge that. Reliving the traumatic experiences of violence directed at black women, and dark-skinned black women in particular, doesn't get easier, no matter how much time has passed.

Over the last few days, an abundance of tweets containing targeted abuse at black women resurfaced onto the timeline. While a part of me can't believe we're back here, on the other hand, I completely understand how the road has ended up winding back in on itself; back to following threads and linking sub-tweets together to form a coherent narrative of what was going on and who we were talking about - this time - while wading through the loudness of horrific misogynoir, colourism and anti-Somali statements and the deafening silence of those who were choosing to ignore them.

Sadly, most black women will be able to map moments of misogynoir and colourism at different periods in our lives. They may be some of our earliest memories. For those of us who looked to Twitter as a new form of escapism from these moments, we quickly learnt that this space wasn't for us.

Growing up with misogynoir on Twitter

Being born in the boom of the internet era, the fast evolution of social media is something my generation has had time to closely study. From the personalisation of our MySpace profiles and the literary phenomenon of Keisha Da Sket on Bebo, through to the international conversations on Tumblr and blending of close friends and complete strangers on Facebook, social media became a vortex of self-identity. It was the soil we used to develop our tastes and form our opinions, completely transforming a generation of young people trying to find our way in the world. All of a sudden, it was at our fingertips, ready to be explored - for better or worse.

My earliest memories of Twitter contain flashbacks of misogynoiristic and colourist tweets that would leave me feeling like a hostage in my own skin. Every other tweet would be heavily lined with misogynistic, homophobic, racist, xenophobic and ableist content. Here, trawling through the barrage of trash 2009 - 2012 Twitter left behind, is where I meet my 13-year-old self again, perplexed within an era notoriously known for being ruthlessly brutal and violent.

Leonie, 23, who grew up in Barking, tells me that initially, going on Twitter was a "massive form of escapism". She would use it to connect with people with whom she shared interests. But her experiences on the site quickly became punctuated with vile tweets about black women.

"I remember seeing people 'joke' about having sex with a dark-skinned black woman and attaching a picture of this ugly, purple hedgehog saying this is what black vaginas look like. That one stuck with me," Leonie says, "I've always been comfortable in my skin but I could see the way these things would affect my friends."

"My earliest memories of Twitter contain flashbacks of misogynoiristic and colourist tweets that would leave me feeling like a hostage in my own skin"

The dehumanisation and animalisation of black women's bodies gave room for adolescent black girls to question the normality of our features. Noting that these comments were coming from black boys and men feels uncomfortable, but the swelling heap of abuse black girls and women suffered is an uncomfortable fact we have to sit with.

I remember that tweet about black women's vaginas. I remember laughing at it. I didn't find it funny. It was probably the first time I considered whether something was wrong with my body. I was learning a lot about myself - things I hated, things I wanted to change, things I had internalised from the online and offline spaces. Part of me hoped laughing at myself would uphold the masked appearance of being unphased by it all, eliminating me from being on the receiving end of an onset of online violence. Instead, I projected my internalised anti-blackness, hurting myself, and probably other black girls like me, in the process.

Alongside black boys and men, black girls and women became complicit in a culture of anti-black and colourist rhetoric. In short, black communities became agents of perpetuating harmful white supremacist ideologies against ourselves online. This internalised anti-blackness would hold storage in my body like a virus for the next decade to come, infecting my self-esteem and leading to the progression of anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. I wouldn't be the only one.

Yinks, 26, from Ireland, tells me that Twitter also triggered her first insecurities over her skin tone. "My first recollection of an anti-black tweet and the one that has stuck by me the longest was when someone tweeted an image of gorillas with a caption similar to 'Dark Skin Black Girls'," she says. "Up until this point, my skin tone had never really bothered me. The thought of being defined by my shade of blackness hadn't occurred to me. I remember so many people retweeting that gorilla picture and co-signing it. For the first time, I knew what it felt to be uncomfortable in my skin."

Desirability politics aren't the be-all and end-all of the issues associated with colourism, and the tweets didn't stop there. Black people being compared to animals is a historical anti-black pseudo-theory honed by white supremacists and regurgitated by racist trolls both online and offline. " Monkey racism " in particular has a specific link to eugenics and anti-blackness.

Bunmi Mojekwu wrote an honest and thoughtful thread of her experiences of online violence during her time playing Mercy In EastEnders, noting that she had black people liken her to apes or King Kong. "I wonder if anyone really thinks, 'if I say this, it could actually cause the subject of my "banter" to think less of themselves and form deep insecurities all in the name of getting a laugh'," she stated.

Severely violent posts stating dark-skinned black women are "easy" to domestically abuse, and dark-skinned black women should be raped, also make up a large section of tweets directed at black women. It became a vicious game on the timeline, with people competing for who could harm us the most.

Xenophobic tweets towards Somali communities were also a part of the mix, further ostracising Somali communities from the holdall of "blackness". Though these anti-black, xenophobic and misogynoiristic statements thrived in the online world, they weren't completely detached from the offline space.

The online vs. the offline

The social media space has shifted from a personal diary to a network where businesses are built and influencer culture flourishes. And yet, we seem to compartmentalise the online and offline space to create a false world where online accounts have no affiliation with the people behind the screen. The intense vacuum of social media communities often gives the illusion of a singular voice, and though this line of thinking has often created a chasm between the online and offline space, experiences of violent colourism, misogynoir and anti-blackness belong as much to the school playground as they do the timeline.

Environmental, physical, emotional and mental developments during this time create the capacities children carry into adulthood. Research shows that the impact of bullying, both online and offline, can last for decades and that often children experiencing one are likely to also be experiencing the other. This magnitude of violence in two spaces children spend most of their time - school and online - holds a magnifying glass to the unseen issue of the ways in which violence replicates itself.

Samantha*, a 29-year-old from London says that her earliest memory of colourism is from when she was 12 and overheard some boys talking about girls they fancied. "One of them mentioned my name and I heard one of them say I was 'blick'," she says. "It's just horrible as a young girl. You just think, 'what's wrong with me?'"

"The targeted violence amplified in the bubble of social media cannot be withdrawn from the offline violence dark-skinned black girls were experiencing at the same time"

The targeted violence amplified in the bubble of social media cannot be withdrawn from the offline violence dark-skinned black girls were experiencing at the same time and oftentimes having to share physical space with the perpetrators. Being in school with somebody who would post anti-black and colourist statements online and watching them grow a popular offline status wasn't uncommon and for Jeanelle, 24, from London, her online and offline experiences were particularly close to home.

"I didn't engage with the popular account online or offline, however there was a time early in my first year of college where I clashed with him and he took to writing a series of tweets about my appearance," says Jeannelle. "After that, I stopped wearing red lipstick. I became really quiet and standoffish. I felt like that was the best way to protect myself. I didn't want to draw any attention to myself. I developed anxiety and had frequent panic attacks. I had counselling throughout my first six months of college and this would take place just before my class with the person running the account."

I have seen many black women over the years remind us of the black men who had built their large followings on the backs of the black women they had slandered back in the day while being gaslit into thinking that era of Twitter was a pure blip.

Molly, 23, from East London, was one of the women who recently spoke up about this: "I've seen some of these people grow. Seeing their platforms get bigger and them launching businesses using black women as their target audience. Black women are spending money on people that don't respect us as human beings."

Callouts and cancel culture

Over a decade later, we stand to face the same issues. Twitter may no longer be exactly the same as it was in 2011, but where are those people who partook in sharing and co-signing targeted abuse now?

In the huddle of Black Twitter, call-outs can automatically seem malicious, but it isn't always the intention to ruin anyone's opportunity at redemption. It soon became clear to me that there was a difference in the digital accountability black women like Molly who had been previously gaslit about their experiences were seeking, versus the destructive exposé-style reveals that came from anonymous accounts that seemed to enjoy sharing an abundance of anti-black women tweets, with no responsibility for care.

Seyi Akiwowo, the founder of digital citizenship organisation Glitch, has studied the patterns of online abuse and the digital space over the years. "Do we really understand what online abuse is?" she asks. "We're in danger of committing that act to each other in the name of 'banter' or becoming an echo-chamber. Where are the boundaries between true accountability and venturing into online abuse?"

"Apologies don't have to be forgiven and actions don't have to be forgotten, but what it means to hold someone to account for their actions should take into consideration substantial examples of changed behaviour"

The responses have been mixed at extreme ends; some calling for the heads of serial tweeters and others suggesting a more blasé approach in the hopes that people have "grown" out of their misogynoir. The idea that one can simply "grow" out of misogynoir like a pair of old shoes fails to recognise the evolved nature of misogynoir that still exists in the online and offline space. Misogynoiristic comments about black women's hair and bodies are still rampant. It also doesn't seem to challenge enough what digital accountability looks like when it comes to tangible, actionable change.

The doubling down on black women who co-signed misogynoiristic tweets through retweets, laughing emojis and their own personal bad takes, which is likely reflective of an internalised anti-blackness, and later apologised, while men who shared physically and sexually violent tweets towards dark-skinned women and still gaslight black women about their experiences today remain unscathed is telling. There is a question to be asked about who forgiveness is afforded to and who by and who justice is served by and who for. In the run to one-up each other or use serious topics as a means to draw out personal vendettas, we lose sight of the bigger aim.

These situations require the nuance that social media, for all the things it has given us, simply doesn't allow for. Apologies don't have to be forgiven and actions don't have to be forgotten, but what it means to hold someone to account for their actions should take into consideration substantial examples of changed behaviour. "Keeping the same energy" isn't about avoiding applying nuance, but is about understanding our core values that creates the backbone of the justice we say we seek.

Moving forward

So, where do we go from here? A call for "better dialogue" in black communities has echoed through the timeline over the last few days, but we must question whose emotional and mental labour dialogue relies on in order to be realised. Dark-skinned black women need to be at the forefront as the targets of this slate of violence, however, there cannot be a dialogue after a bout of abuse and gaslighting if it heavily relies on the perpetrators being coddled.

Equally, black men must take on some of the responsibility in educating themselves and their peers. "A lot of black men could do a lot more to tackle the abuse black women receive," says Seyi. "Black men don't know what to say. How do we equip them - without mothering - so they know how to speak to their peers and set an example for the next generation? It's OK for us to not get along. What's our responsibility to Black Twitter in order for it to be a thriving community? There's a responsibility for us to start talking about and modelling those values, especially for the next generation."

"There's a really confronting conversation we need to have about our accountability structure within our community," Seyi adds. "There's a lot of bystander activity. We don't seem to call out our peers. We should feel free to call out someone with 400 followers and someone with 40,000 followers."

"It really hurts me to hear that a decade later, my sister has gone through the exact same things I experienced"

The next generation is something I think about often. My 16-year-old sister recently uploaded a video on her YouTube channel talking about her experiences of colourism. She tells me: "The first time I experienced colourism was in Year 8, which feels like a long time ago now, but most recently, about a year ago I was in a video on my friend's YouTube channel. There were loads of comments about my skin colour - people calling me "blick" and "ugly". It wasn't just one comment - there were loads. There were so many negative comments. It really got to me at the time." It really hurts me to hear that a decade later, my sister has gone through the exact same things I experienced as a teenager and reminds me that we as a collective community are failing the next generation.

My emotions around her experiences are a reminder that we must collectively allow space for feeling. The anger, hurt and betrayal of it all is often invalidated towards those who are constantly denied the emotional right to be bruised.

I wish there was a bonafide, assured note to end on that would magic our community into emotional freedom. We have a long way to go, but that's not news to anyone. The digital space and its relationship with the offline space need to be considered in the ways we interact with each other. Incorporating care into the process of accountability in order to reach a space of healing is essential, not only for ourselves but for the generations ahead of us.

We can start today with those we love - those around us that we care for and hold close. We can kick start the flow of generational healing by having these conversations with the generations before and generations after us. We can do the personal work to heal ourselves and confront the beast eating away at us from within.

The roles white supremacist patriarchal systems have played cannot be divorced from the reality of the fall-out, but in the work of dismantling those systems, we also need to look inwards at our personal accountability.
*Names have been changed to protect identities

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How colourism and misogynoir affected a generation of dark-skinned black women on and off the timeline

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This is painful to talk about and difficult to write. It feels important to acknowledge that. Reliving the traumatic experiences of violence directed at black women, and dark-skinned black women in particular, doesn't get easier, no matter how much time has passed.

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When it comes to reclaiming my black identity in Essex, I have my mum to thank. To the public, she’s known as Elsa James, a socio-political conceptual artist and activist whose work disrupts the negative and dated stereotypes of the ‘Essex girl’, making sure black women like myself aren’t written out of history. Representation of black women and marginalised communities is a common theme running through James’ work, but she has been rooting for better representation long before her professional career as an artist.

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Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement" in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.

Mrs. Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley, February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the first child of James and Leona Edwards McCauley. Her brother, Sylvester McCauley, now deceased, was born August 20, 1915. Later, the family moved to Pine Level, Alabama where Rosa was reared and educated in the rural school. When she completed her education in Pine Level at age eleven, her mother, Leona, enrolled her in Montgomery Industrial School for Girls (Miss White's School for Girls), a private institution. After finishing Miss White's School, she went on to Alabama State Teacher's College High School. She, however, was unable to graduate with her class, because of the illness of her grandmother Rose Edwards and later her death.

As Rosa Parks prepared to return to Alabama State Teacher's College, her mother also became ill, therefore, she continued to take care of their home and care for her mother while her brother, Sylvester, worked outside of the home. She received her high school diploma in 1934, after her marriage to Raymond Parks, December 18, 1932. Raymond, now deceased was born in Wedowee, Alabama, Randolph County, February 12, 1903, received little formal education due to racial segregation. He was a self-educated person with the assistance of his mother, Geri Parks. His immaculate dress and his thorough knowledge of domestic affairs and current events made most think he was college educated. He supported and encouraged Rosa's desire to complete her formal education.

Mrs. Parks was an early activist in the effort to free the "Scottsboro Boys, " a celebrated case in the 1930′s. Together, Raymond and Rosa worked in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP's) programs. He was an active member and she served as secretary and later youth leader of the local branch. At the time of her arrest, she was preparing for a major youth conference.

After the arrest of Rosa Parks, black people of Montgomery and sympathizers of other races organized and promoted a boycott of the city bus line that lasted 381 days. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was appointed the spokesperson for the Bus Boycott and taught nonviolence to all participants. Contingent with the protest in Montgomery, others took shape throughout the south and the country. They took form as sit-ins, eat-ins, swim-ins, and similar causes. Thousands of courageous people joined the "protest" to demand equal rights for all people.

Mrs. Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1957. In 1964 she became a deaconess in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

Congressman John Conyers First Congressional District of Michigan employed Mrs Parks, from 1965 to 1988. In February 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development with Ms. Elaine Eason Steele in honour of her husband, Raymond (1903-1977). The purpose is to motivate and direct youth not targeted by other programs to achieve their highest potential. Rosa Parks sees the energy of young people as a real force for change. It is among her most treasured themes of human priorities as she speaks to young people of all ages at schools, colleges, and national organizations around the world.

The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development's "Pathways to Freedom program, traces the underground railroad into the civil rights movement and beyond. Youth, ages 11 through 17, meet and talk with Mrs. Parks and other national leaders as they participate in educational and historical research throughout the world. They journey primarily by bus as "freedom riders" did in the 1960′s,the theme: "Where have we been? Where are we going?"

As a role model for youth she was stimulated by their enthusiasm to learn as much about her life as possible. A modest person, she always encourages them to research the lives of other contributors to world peace. The Institute and The Rosa Parks Legacy are her legacies to people of good will.

Mrs. Parks received more than forty-three honorary doctorate degrees, including one from SOKA UNIVERSITY, Tokyo Japan, hundreds of plaques, certificates, citations, awards and keys to many cities. Among them are the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, the UAW's Social Justice Award, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Non - Violent Peace Prize and the ROSA PARKS PEACE PRIZE in 1994, Stockholm Sweden, to name a few.

In September 1996 President William J. Clinton, the forty second President of the United States of America gave Mrs. Parks the MEDAL OF FREEDOM, the highest award given to a civilian citizen.

Published Act no.28 of 1997 designated the first Monday following February 4, as Mrs Rosa Parks' Day in the state of Michigan, her home state. She is the first living person to be honored with a holiday.

She was voted by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most Influential people of the 20th century. A Museum and Library is being built in her honor, in Montgomery, AL and will open in the fall of the year 2000 (ground breaking April 21, 1998). On September 2, 1998 The Rosa L. Parks Learning Center was dedicated at Botsford Commons, a senior community in Michigan. Through the use of computer technology, youth will mentor seniors on the use of computers. (Mrs. Parks was a member of the first graduating class on November 24, 1998). On September 26, 1998 Mrs. Parks was the recipient of the first International Freedom Conductor's Award by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She attended her first "State of the Union Address" in January 1999. Mrs. Parks received a unanimous bipartisan standing ovation when President William Jefferson Clinton acknowledged her. Representative Julia Carson of Indianapolis, Indiana introduced H. R. Bill 573 on February 4, 1999, which would award Mrs. Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor if it passed the House of Representatives and the Senate by a majority. The bill was passed unanimously in the Senate on April 19, and with one descenting vote in the House of Representatives on April 20. President Clinton signed it into law on May 3, 1999. Mrs. Parks was one of only 250 individuals at the time, including the American Red Cross to receive this honor. President George Washington was the first to receive the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor. President Nelson Mandela is also listed among the select few of world leaders who have received the medal.

In the winter of 2000 Mrs. Parks met Pope John-Paul II in St. Louis, MO and read a statement to him asking for racial healing. She received the NAACP Image Award for Best Supporting Actress in the Television series, TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, "Black like Monica". Troy State University at Montgomery opened The Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the site where Mrs. Parks was arrested December 1, 1955. It opened on the 45th Anniversary of her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

"The Rosa Parks Story" was filmed in Montgomery, Alabama May 2001, an aired February 24, 2002 on the CBS television network. Mrs. Parks continues to receive numerous awards including the very first Lifetime Achievement Award ever given by The Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Stanford University. She received the Gandhi, King, Ikeda award for peace and on October 29, 2003 Mrs. Parks was an International Institute Heritage Hall of fame honoree. On February 4, 2004 Mrs. Parks 91st birthday was celebrated at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. On December 21, 2004 the 49th Anniversary of the Mrs. Parks' arrest was commemorated with a Civil Rights and Hip-Hop Forum at the Franklin Settlement in Detroit, Michigan.

On February 4, 2005 Mrs. Parks' 92nd birthday was celebrate at Calvary Baptist Church in Detroit, MI. Students from the Detroit Public Schools did "Willing to be Arrested," a reenactment of Mrs. Parks arrest. February 6, 2005 Mrs. Parks received the first annual Cardinal Dearden Peace Award at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Detroit, MI. February 19 - 20, composer Hannibal Lokumbe premiered an original symphony "Dear Mrs. Parks." Mr. Lokumbe did this original work as part of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's " Classical Roots Series." The beginning of many events that will commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Mrs. Parks' arrest December 1, 1955.

Mrs. Parks has written four books, Rosa Parks: My Story: by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, Quiet Strength by Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today's Youth by Rosa Parks with Gregory J, Reed, this book received the NAACP's Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, (Children's) in 1996 and her latest book, I AM ROSA PARKS by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, for preschoolers.

A quiet exemplification of courage, dignity, and determination; Rosa Parks was a symbol to all to remain free. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005.

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Rosa Parks - The mother of the modern day civil rights movement

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Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement" in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a

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This Page is [ARCHIVED CONTENT] and shows what the site page https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/rights-resistance-racism-story-mangrove-nine/ looked like on 1 Feb 2022 at 18:43:20

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For week 8 of DRP you will be having a formative assessment of your progress so far,

Attendance is mandatory for this session, please ensure you are ready to present at 10 AM.

The morning will focus on you individually presenting your ACTIVATED RESEARCH to the group and being able to convey it in a short 3-minute presentation. Consider the following for your written work and presentation:

-         An overview of your chosen area of research that introduces you as a designer/maker.

-         Your individual position within your chosen area of research.

-         Examples of who else has explored this subject? Practitioners/historians/writers/researchers...

-         How and where have they done this? Websites/books/articles/films/podcasts/exhibitions/products/games...

-         A considered draft plan of how you intend to activate this research through your practice.

-         If you have developed a film based on your work so far, please make sure it is ready to play when you are called upon.

Remember that this is a presentation to give the class / your lecturers an overview of the direction and outcome of the processes of experimentation/research you have been engaged with over T1.

Please ensure any supporting materials are relevant to your intended outcomes and consider your audience and the limit on your presentation. We will be timing you.

The afternoon will focus on 1-2-1 tutorials with your 3 tutors to give direct feedback on the writing completed.

Please upload the 1000 words you will have written and any supporting documents including a to the tab below.

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Rose Nordin’s art publication, STUART (Nordin, n.d.), I envision creating a publication that will engage with readers through both text and imagery. In a similar way to Nordin’s work, I will have pages that seamlessly integrate clear information with images supporting, inhabiting a connection between words and visuals.

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STUART ⟵ STUART is an art publishing practice and collective producing printed matter and publications. Initiated by Rose Nordin with Sepake Angiama, Priya...

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Lavett Ballard | The Original Art of Lavett B.

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This is the visual art portfolio for African Ameican Artist Lavett Ballard. Her work has been exhibited naionally and is known of her use of reclaimed fencing to convey reimagined cultural historical visual narratives.

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If you've been to your fair share of festivals or club nights, chances are you'll have a few standout memories of the last songs that were played at your favorite ones. From romantic ballads to disco anthems to Motown classics, the last tune ties the night together and leaves you with that lasting high.

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Ngadi Smart has a collection of works that I found interesting and consistently took inspiration from and referred back to throughout this whole project because I like how the representation of black people is done through her work. With Ngadi Smart, she shows black people in such a good light and illustrates how beautiful they are.

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African Female Photographer illustrator and visual artist. Mixed Media Collage artist. Artist prints and accessories for sale

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The Flagship 2019 release of #Merky Books
'Brilliant... full of the knowledge, understanding, tools and kindness that every black girl needs, through university and beyond. Plus it's funny, too.' - Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie.

A groundbreaking exploration of the problems of diversity in education, by two extremely talented young graduates. As a minority in a predominantly white institution, taking up space is an act of resistance. And in higher education, feeling like you constantly have to justify your existence within institutions that weren't made for you is an ongoing struggle for many people.

Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi, two recent Cambridge graduates, wrote Taking Up Space as a guide and a manifesto for change: tackling issues of access, unrepresentative curricula, discrimination in the classroom, the problems of activism, and life before and after university. Featuring honest conversations with students past and present, Taking Up Space goes beyond the buzzwords of diversity and inclusion and explores what those words truly mean for young black girls today.

#Merky Books was set up by publishers Penguin Random House and Stormzy in June 2018 to find and publish the best writers of a new generation and to publish the stories that are not being heard. #Merky Books aims to open up the world of publishing, and this year has launched a New Writer's Prize and will soon be launching a #Merky Books traineeship. 'I know too many talented writers that don't always have an outlet or a means to get their work seen, and hopefully #Merky Books can now be a reference point for them to say "I can be an author", and for that to be a realistic and achievable goal... Reading and writing as a kid were integral to where I am today and I, from the bottom of my heart, cannot wait to hear your stories and get them out into the big wide world.' - Stormzy

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The Flagship 2019 release of #Merky Books 'Brilliant... full of the knowledge, understanding, tools and kindness that every black girl needs, through university and beyond. Plus it's funny, too.' - Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie. A groundbreaking exploration of the problems of diversity in education, by two extremely talented young graduates.

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Craftspace on Instagram: "Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948. It brought 1,027 people from the Caribbean islands who answered Britain’s call for help to address labour shortages after World War Two.

Using transcriptions of the original landing cards, we learn what professions they had, where they were from and where they went to; 94 came to the Midlands. From a craft perspective we learn that 221 passengers cited their profession as a craft or a trade including; dressmaker, hatter, tailor, shoemaker, upholsterer, cabinet maker, joiner, carpenter, blacksmith, tinsmith, mason, potter, turner, moulder, sign painter and artist. Of these, 24 people came to the Midlands.

If you visit the Dorcas Stories from the Front Room exhibition you can see the landing cards of the craftspeople who came to Midlands on the windows. You can also search through the cards of others who arrived on the Windrush. Look out for those who came to Midlands and also for the card of Evelyn Wauchope, dressmaker and stowaway!

If you want to research your own family or find out more you can search the landing card database at www.gold.ac.uk/windrush. You can filter by name, port of embarkation, gender, marital status, age, residence and occupation.

Learn more on our website and visit the Dorcas Stories from the Front Room exhibition at the Mailbox in Birmingham until 29 October 2023 (Weds – Sun, 1-6pm).

#DorcasStories #Windrush75 #Windrush2023 #Windrush75inBrum #WindrushDayGrantScheme

@nearneighbours @cedia_bcu @bhamcitycouncil @dorcasstories"

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20 likes, 0 comments - craftspace_ on October 21, 2023: "Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948. It brought 1,027 people from the Caribb..."

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YARNING: Tales from Birmingham. Episode 1 - Sara by Craftspace

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How can making with others and learning new skills support our mental health?

Birmingham based textile artist Sara Fowles has collected five stories of heritage, knitting and textiles in Birmingham's Black community.

In this episode she talks to Sarah S. Sammy.

Sarah is from Trinidad and Tobago. She is a scientist by trade, but a maker at heart. She has always been, in her words, "fiddling with some thing or another", trying to make and create. She can't remember a time when making and creating wasn't a part of her life, in fact, she comes from a family of makers. This rich background of makers means Sarah was always encouraged to learn and try new crafts.

-

We're having a short break. We'll be back in August with episode 5 which will feature the story of a group of Caribbean women who meet to craft in the context of making to support their church. This reflects the ethos of Dorcas Clubs, a social movement and form of craftivism which came back to England with the Windrush generation. -

This podcast series marks Windrush Day which, in 2023, celebrates 75 years since the ship's arrival in the UK.

A podcast series by Sara Fowles about Black women knitters as part of 'Yarning' projects by Trevor Pitt.

This series was commissioned by ⁠ Craftspace ⁠, a charity creating opportunities to see, make and be curious about exceptional contemporary craft. We are based in Birmingham UK and work collaboratively regionally, nationally and internationally.

⁠Support us⁠.
⁠ Transcript available on the Craftspace website.⁠

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YARNING: Tales from Birmingham. Episode 1 - Sara by Craftspace

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A podcast series by Sara Fowles about Black women knitters as part of 'YARNING' projects by Trevor Pitt How can we ensure the oral histories and experiences of Black textile makers are documented and visible? Birmingham based textile artist and Windrush descendant Sara Fowles has collected five stories of heritage, knitting and textiles in Birmingham's Black community.

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In the two decades of its existence, it's hard to dispute the sheer popularity of The Black and White Minstrel Show - in numerical terms at least. In the 1960s, it was getting audiences of 16 million. Its stage-show spin-offs were breaking box-office records. At one point, it was even something of a critical success: in 1961, it won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux.

What's harder to fathom is why, in an era in which tens of thousands of black people had long been settled in Britain or were trying to make it their home, a BBC which had already managed to reflect something of the reality of black British life in documentaries such as 1955's Has Britain a Colour Bar? and dramas such as 1956's A Man from the Sun, took so little account of the offence caused by white performers blacking-up their faces on a peak-time TV show.

The traditional defence, namely that it was 'of its time', does not quite wash. Even when it launched as a regular series in 1958, old-time American 'minstrel' song-and-dance routines were hardly innocent - as this extract from an episode of BBC's Timeshift about the show clearly demonstrates:

For the best part of the next twenty years it didn't seem to occur to anyone in a position of authority at the BBC that the series really was offensive to more than just a few "killjoys". This failure to even see any racism was a measure of the BBC's real problem: the archival record of its behind-the-scenes thinking during this period is far from flattering.

In May 1967, for instance, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination submitted a petition calling for the show to be axed. The minutes of a BBC Board of Management meeting record the Corporation's head of publicity turning to the letters page of the Daily Mail to gauge the public's "general view", and, having adopted this methodology, rather predictably coming to the conclusion that "the programme was not racially offensive". Apparently satisfied with this, the Director-General, Hugh Greene, decided that "no further action was necessary".

There was at least one determined voice of opposition within the BBC. The Corporation's Chief Accountant, Barrie Thorne - who, significantly, had spent some time in the BBC's New York office and so had seen something of the Civil Rights movement - argued vociferously for the show to be pulled from the schedule. His memo to the Director-General's Chief Assistant still survives at the BBC's Written Archives Centre:

"As you may know I previously expressed my dismay about the continuance of the BLACK AND WHITE MINSTREL SHOW. The current protest has renewed the passions.

The BBC says that the Black and White Minstrels is "a traditional show enjoyed by millions for what it offers in good-hearted family entertainment". I think it was George Melly's comment that the same was said of throwing Christians to the lions. Many regard the show as Uncle Tom from start to finish, and as such in underlyingly offensive to many no matter what the outward gloss and size of the audience prove to the contrary.

Those of us who think this way may be entirely wrong. But so might the BBC.

One way of testing responsible opinion would be for the BBC to send the Black and White Minstrels book and the coloured Radio Times front cover of them to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, and ask for their opinion. The BBC might also ask the three American networks, since it is only a theatrical show, what reaction they think the series would have on responsible coloured opinion in the United States if they put it out coast to coast.

The theatrical tradition of the show could then be measured against the histicial background and the continued fight against segregation going on in the United States, here, and elsewhere in the world."

The response Thorne received from the Chief Assistant, Oliver Whitley, was no doubt intended to come across as measured. It contains a standard BBC response to complaints, namely that whatever the "rights and wrongs" in this particular case protesting was probably counterproductive. But it's hard not to be shocked by a line towards the end - the suggestion from this senior BBC figure that "coloured people" should "for Heaven's sake shut up":

"Thank you for your memo of 19th May. Much could be and has been said about this. No doubt you have read the press comment and you will be very welcome, if you wish to see but have not seen, to borrow from the Secretary or H.P. a copy of the BBC's letter to Dr. Pitt.

Forgive me for saying simply that I don't believe anything in your memo is half so relevant as the (to me) plain fact that wherever precisely the rights and wrongs might be in the matter in a community of infinitely greater kindness and consideration than, unfortunately, ours is, this protest as things are does much more harm than good. It seems to be absurd to imagine that people who are not already racially prejudiced could possible be in the some way contaminated by the Minstrels. People who are already racially prejudiced are more likely to be exacerbated by the protest itself than the object of the protest. The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: "on this issue, we can see your point, by in your own best interests, for Heaven's sake shut up. You are wasting valuable ammunition on a comparatively insignificant target"."

The BBC couldn't exactly say in 1967 that it hadn't been warned. Tucked away in another part of the BBC's written archives is an earlier memo from Barrie Thorne - one he sent five years before. In it, he told the Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, that "The Uncle Tom attitude of the show in this day and age is a disgrace and an insult to coloured people everywhere".

The problem, he went on to explain, was that so many people were simply "unaware of the offence racial guying can cause". Adam's reply came back accusing Thorne of "arrant nonsense": the show, Adam argued, belonged to that "perfectly honourable theatrical tradition of the British music hall".

Thorne's 1962 memo had gone on to suggest that "If black faces are to be shown, for heaven's sake let coloured artists be employed and with dignity". It's unlikely that what he had in mind was The Black and White Minstrel Show itself employing black British artistes. But in the 1970s, so dire were the possibilities for regular employment in television - or indeed in the entertainment industry more broadly - that this was precisely what happened.

In this clip from the Timeshift documentary, for instance, we catch a glimpse of a 1975 appearance on the show by a teenage Lenny Henry:

The presence of black performers on the Black and White Minstrel Show was less a measure of progress than a sign of just how restricted the opportunities were for regular employment.

Even so, time was running out for the series. In part, this was simply because by the late-1970s variety shows in general were proving to be less popular with television audiences than they had been in the 1950s and '60s. But there were signs, too, that those involved in making the show were slowly getting some inkling of the offence caused by it:

The very last edition was broadcast in 1978. By then, the Controller of BBC 1, Bill Cotton, realised he could defend it no longer.

There were inevitable grumbles from its most dedicated fans. Bill Cotton told them firmly that the "racist implication" of its minstrelsy was now obvious to all. "It's all very well people who are not black saying 'I didn't think about it that way'", he told them, "it's the people who are black" whose views surely needed to be taken into account.

This might not seem like a revolutionary idea now. But the fact that it was being said at all was at least some measure of the BBC's belated, faltering progress in understanding the implications of a multicultural Britain - a full three decades after the arrival of Windrush.

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The Black and White Minstrel Show, which ran from 1958 to 1978 was arguably the BBC's most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in out-dated stereotypes. So, what do the BBC's own archives tell us about how this infamous programme lasted so long?

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The jam and marmalade jar character Golly is to be ditched by its producers Robertson's after 91 years.

The controversial character is being replaced by drawings from Roald Dahl stories.

Golly hit the headlines in the 1980s when it was condemned as a racist symbol.

Robertson's, which is based in Droylsden in Greater Manchester, said the latest decision had been based on research which found children were unfamiliar with the character.

Brand director Ginny Knox, said: "We're incredibly excited about the new scheme and feel that it is a fantastic fit with Robertson's well-established values of family fun and Britishness.

"With annual UK sales of over one million books, Roald Dahl evokes strong feelings of warmth and affection with today's parents and their children."

Seven characters, illustrated by Quentin Blake, will feature including James & the Giant Peach and Willy Wonka, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

'Not offensive'

The changeover will start appearing on jars of Robertson's jams and Golden Shred marmalade from 1 September.

But the Golly will continue to feature on the company's mincemeat until Christmas.

Ms Knox denied it was because it was an offensive image.

"We sell 45 million jars of jam and marmalade each year and they have pretty much all got Golly on them.

"We also sell 250,000 Golly badges to collectors and only get 10 letters a year from people who don't like the Golly.

"Whereas we are concerned about those people and it's not our intention to be offensive with the Golly, we have to look at what our research says and what the sales say.

"The feedback has consistently been that for the vast majority of people, the Golly is a positive thing that they like," she added.

Originally called the Golliwog, the Golly first appeared on jars in 1910.

The character became one of the UK's longest running consumer loyalty schemes.

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bbc news world uk international foreign british online service

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BBC News | BUSINESS | 'Controversial' golly to be shelved

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The jam jar character Golly is to be ditched by its producers Robertson's after 91 years.

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A pub has closed a month after its collection of golliwog dolls was seized by police, with the landlady saying she is "totally and utterly gutted" amid the fallout.

Officers had removed the dolls, which are considered to be racist depictions, from the White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex, following a hate crime allegation on 24 February.

Police said they carried out the action after receiving a report that someone felt racially harassed, alarmed or distressed at the presence of the figures.

Carlsberg and Heineken had told landlady Bernice Ryley to stop selling their beer, while she claimed her maintenance company had refused to visit the premises any longer.

In an interview with the Thurrock Nub News, Ms Ryley also spoke about opposition from the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), saying: "I've had enough.

"I feel gutted, totally and utterly gutted. Hurt, upset. I've had very, very much support from many people."
'Young people these days don't understand'
"We've had a few bits of hate, which I personally don't understand because it's part of our life."

She insisted "young people these days don't understand" the history of the dolls, saying some of her "collection" were "antiques".

"I want them back," she added. "I'm going to miss the pub, I'm going to miss the people."

Camra, which is a recognition body for pubs in the UK, had previously said the venue would no longer be considered for any future awards, or inclusion in its annual Good Pub Guide.

The leaseholders Ms Ryley and her husband, Chris, have run the White Hart Inn for 17 years and now plan to retire after closing it on Monday night.

The pub was graffitied and had five windows damaged on 16 April after the seizure of the dolls.

The dolls, based on 18th century minstrels, are now considered to be racist caricatures.

She has denied she was racist and said: "If people didn't like it they didn't have to come through my door."

She said her husband was due to speak to police later this month as she tries to get her items back.

No one has been arrested or charged.

An Essex Police spokesperson said: "At this stage our investigation is still ongoing."

Camra national chairman Nik Antona said it hoped the pub would now "provide a warm welcome to all".

A Heineken UK spokesperson said: "After being made aware of the abhorrent display feature in the White Hart Inn, we advised the pub owners that we want nothing more to do with them."

A spokesperson for Admiral Taverns, which owns the pub building, said: "The licensees have made us aware of their decision to leave the pub.

"We will be looking to reopen the pub under the management of new licensees in due course."

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Essex pub that had golliwog dolls seized by police shuts its doors

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Bernice Ryley, whose dolls are widely considered to be racist caricatures, says "we've had a few bits of hate, which I personally don't understand".

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4 Things to Know About ‘Beyond the Black Triangle’

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Introducing Autograph’s new exhibition by Armet Francis

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Know their names: Black people killed by the police in the US

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Year: 2014

What she was doing: At home.

How she was killed: Rosser's boyfriend, Victor Stephens, called 911 to ask the police to escort her out of the house because of an altercation. The official report says that when the officers entered the home, Rosser was holding a knife and refused to drop it. Officer Mark Raab used his taser. Officer David Ried fired a single shot that killed her.

Action taken: Ried did not face any charges over Rosser's death. The police department and city implemented reforms, including equipping officers with body cameras.

Correction - 3/3/2021: A previous version of this profile showed an incorrect image for Aura Rosser. That illustration has been replaced with a new sketch.
These are just a few of the Black Americans killed by police. There are many, many more. Produced by:
Alia Chughtai
Illustrations by:
Christian Mugarura Mafigiri
For @AJLabs
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Know their names: Black people killed by the police in the US

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Between 2014 and 2020, police in the United States killed at least 7,680 people. Twenty-five percent of those killed were Black, although Black Americans make up just 13 percent of the population. In most cases, little or no action was taken against the officers involved.

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1. Image Focus

Create a sequence of pages using only images that communicate the themes in your 500-word text. Choose prompts from the list to edit your images:

- scale / placement / colour ways / mono / overlay / background / collage / drawing / hyperreal / Al / print distortion / abstraction.

You can work manually or in InDesign or image softaware.

2. Text Focus

Design a double page spread with bold text only statements without any images. This could be your essay title, a quote from your writing or a question. Use:

- scale / placement / colour / shape

/ impact / text as image / voice.

3. Image and text

Design a sequence of double page spreads where your image/s interact with a selected quote or short text statement. Use the juxtaposition of text and images to communicate an idea, story or message.

4. Gather

At the end of the day bring together your work into a format to share.

This could be:

A printed zine.

- Bring together your experiments into a booklet format.

Printed sheets of papers.

- Print out your designs and display on a table or wall space.

A digital zine.

- Upload a PDF to Padlet or use the online booklet maker Flipsnack to collate your pages.

Work quickly and playfully today to generate ideas. You can develop the successful ones later this term to create a visual essay or printed booklet for you hand-in.

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This is a booklet/guide which explains how zines are made and the history of them. I found this guide interesting because I wanted to develop a further understanding of how they are used and how they can be made. I have never come across zines before but I like how simplistic it is it still communicates to the user while it is positioned in their hand.

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This book communicated a lot to me even though the graphics are simple and don’t have much detail. The use of the black and white visually interests me because I am considering this as an outcome for my visual essay. I feel that with the two colours, it visually communicate enough that the use of colour isn’t needed. I also like how there are pages that don’t use as much type as other books. However, the type that is displayed is enough. Placing a singular sentence on a page could be considered spacious, however, I feel that it communicates a strong story and works well.

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Fanzine / Zine

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Understanding the Nationality Borders Bill pt3

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Understanding the Nationality Borders Bill

Fanzine / Zine

This one became of interest to me because I was interested in the use of one singular colour (green). I feel that it works well with the texture and colour of the paper used to print. In addition, this was designed in a way that was cheap but also efficient because, unlike other books, it was folded in a way where it visually told a story but it also was easily accessible. The process to make this is as simple as printing on one a4 piece of paper folding it into 6 and making a small booklet which could potentially be opened into a larger infographic.