Black History

Angela Davis is still active to this day, and her politics continue to be shaped by having once been a member of the Communist Party. Being a revolutionary socialist and a member of an organisation enabled Davis to recognise and analyse racism beyond her own experience. The party had been key in developing her understanding of the role of oppression within capitalism, placing it within the context of class and capitalism.

Angela Davis is an icon for many, a fighter for black and women’s liberation and a revolutionary to the core. But some seem to forget the revolutionary bit.

Davis’s childhood was defined by racism, violence, fear and resistance, shaping who she went on to become.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who died on 3 January, was the director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and one of the most important anti-racist activists and intellectuals in Britain.

Sivanandan talked and wrote on all aspects of racism in an anti-imperialist, Marxist framework. He spoke out strongly against the idea of celebrating fixed ethnic or racial communities as the basis for fighting racism. He said that the fight must come out of “communities of resistance” — people who came together and thus defined themselves as a community in the fight against racism.

In their introduction to this series of essays, its editors suggest that The Black Jacobins retains a “continued potential to illuminate and inspire — and contribute to the process of ‘setting the past in relation to the present in order to distil from it a politics for a possible future’.”

The black Trinidadian political radical Darcus Howe was one of the leading ideological agitators of the British Black Power Movement, and a lifelong rebel and “troublemaker” who made a critical contribution to the making and shaping of modern multicultural “post-colonial” Britain.

As part of the BBC’s Black and British season, running throughout November, historian David Olusoga presents this four-part documentary on the black presence in Britain.

The programme opens with repeated images of the quintessentially green and pleasant British landscape. Olusoga’s aim is to project black presence not onto but into this scene. In a sweep from Roman Britain to the present, he describes how black and British history are intertwined.

Black Lives Matter has had a profound affect on US politics. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes how its emergence is partly down to the inadequate response to racist police killings by existing black leaders from Barack Obama to Al Sharpton.

The book is particularly useful for readers who want to know about the subtleties of developments in US politics and racism through recent decades.

This book is a celebration of Malcolm X’s legacy: his uncompromising championing of black pride and the right to self defence; his revolutionary opposition to capitalism; his relatable and inspiring oratory talent; and his militant and tireless organising in poor black communities.

As the Black Lives Matter movement brings the fight against racist police brutality to the forefront of struggle in the US, the ideas and iconic symbol of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party are re-entering public consciousness.

We are encouraged to believe that history is made by Great White Men. It is they who are responsible for the rise and fall of civilisations, for technological advances and the development of art and culture. Black people are generally restricted to walk on parts.

That was quite literally the case in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winning biopic Lincoln. At the outset two black soldiers are seen pleading with their leader to abolish slavery. There is no sense of them fighting for their own emancipation.