To mark Black History Month, the Institute of Race Relations has published a Black History section – including personal memoirs of Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ed Scobie.
Published in the October 2004 issue of Race & Class, the Black History section also includes original research on Britain’s continued involvement in the slave trade after abolition in 1807.
- Jan Carew, Guyanese novelist, historian and political activist, who lived in London in the late 1950s, writes for the first time about his meetings here with Paul Robeson and Dr W.E.B. Du Bois.
- Val Wilmer, photographer and chronicler of Black music history, recalls Ed Scobie, the pioneering Black historian and journalist who went largely unappreciated in his own life time.
- Marika Sherwood, founder member of the Black and Asian Studies Association, examines original documents to shed light on the British economy’s continuing semi-covert involvement in the slave trade in the 19th century, concentrating on the Pedro Zulueta case, one of the few (even if ultimately unsuccessful) prosecutions of a British company.