Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life

A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialised British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers’ rights and women’s liberation activist in Britain.

Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialised injustices faced by black settlers, children, and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonisation movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L’Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop.

Based on extensive archival research and over 40 interviews with Huntley’s closest family members, associates, comrades, authors, artists, and friends, this book affords readers an opportunity to take a long-lensed view of the historical roots of the many contemporary racial injustices re-invigorated in recent debates. Tomlinson rewrites the history of a period and a struggle often told through a master discourse that is male, middle-class, and privileged. In so doing, she shows how Jessica Huntley’s fight for justice and the rights of all black people in Britain provides a useful lens into UK-based black literary and cultural expression in the 20th century.