Since 1987, the United Kingdom has formally celebrated Black History Month each October. Realising how school curricula, local authorities, and other institutions failed to tell Black history, Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, a Ghanaian activist then working for the Greater London Council, organised a series of lectures and concerts in 1985 and 1986 celebrating people of African descent. Participants included Angela Davis, Winnie Mandela, Jesse Jackson, Marcus Garvey Jr., Ray Charles, and many more.
Addai-Sebo then selected 1987 as the ‘African jubilee year’ because it coincided with the anniversaries of Marcus Garvey’s birth, the Organisation of African Unity, Ghanaian independence, and Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. Addai-Sebo wrote a declaration for the Greater London Council announcing October 1987 as Black History Month.
In a recent Guardian interview, Addai-Sebo explained his thinking: ‘I spent about a month or two wondering what has to be done as I observed the state of young Black children in this country. When asked about their heritage and background, I saw how they shrank and how embarrassed they were.’ Black History Month aims to empower Black people by sharing their contributions in the face of racism and discrimination.
The theme of this year’s Black History Month is ‘Saluting our Sisters’, highlighting the achievements of Black women. UCL is running a series of Black history events this month, as is Students’ Union UCL.
In October, it is also meaningful to focus on Black women’s history at UCL. As I conduct research for a more inclusive and diverse campus history tour, two UCL alumnae in particular stand out: Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia (BA 1948) and Trinidadian scientist and activist Altheia Jones-Lecointe.
Goveia was born in Guyana, which was then a British colony, in 1925. After becoming the first woman to win Guyana’s territorial scholarship, Goveia came to UCL to study History as one of the first West Indian students to enter the department. At the time, there were very few West Indian students attending university in Britain—in 1947-8, the year Goveia graduated from UCL, there were just 17 students from the West Indies at UCL and 929 enrolled in higher education across Britain.
Despite the barriers she faced, Goveia’s work earned her the prestigious Pollard Prize for English history in 1947—she was the first West Indian student to receive the award. Goveia graduated with her PhD from the University of London in 1952, and then returned to the Caribbean.
She became the first female professor at the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and the first professor of West Indian history to hail from the Caribbean. Goveia was a pioneering scholar in Caribbean history, producing foundational work in the history of slavery in the region. Historiography of the British West Indies, published in 1956, traced the contributions of previous West Indian historians.
In 1965, Goveia published her doctoral thesis as her second major work, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century. In the book, she coined the idea of ‘slave societies’, accounting for the ways that slavery shaped all aspects of life in the West Indies, with legacies that continue to echo. Goveia focused on enslaved people as more than just economic agents, and studied the often-overlooked experiences of free people of colour during slavery. Goveia argued that enslaved people and free people of colour dismantled slavery by recognising ‘that human beings could change what human beings had made.’ It is an idea we can embrace as we challenge unjust systems in our own time.
Although health challenges limited Goveia from 1961 until she died aged 55 in 1980, her work was monumental. Goveia’s scholarship centred Caribbean history as a discipline in its own right, rather than a derivative of British history. Her work was also rooted in the projects of Caribbean independence struggles and identity formation. She wrote in 1964 that ‘intellectual and political liberation are complementary aspects of a new nation’s development.’
Despite her achievements, UCL has long neglected Goviea’s story. In 2022 the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery began an annual lecture series in Goveia’s name. While this measure represents an important step, we can all take the time to learn more about a remarkable alumna of our university.
Altheia Jones-Lecointe, born in Trinidad in 1945, is a physician and scientist. Both of her parents were active in the People’s National Movement, the political party founded by Eric Williams in 1955. Williams was a Trinidadian historian who studied at Oxford and became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago when the islands gained independence in 1962. Jones-Lecointe grew up attending marches and campaign events about independence and a post-colonial Trinidad.
Jones-Lecointe attended UCL from 1965, earning her PhD in biochemistry. She found the move to London ‘mind-shattering’ because of the racism and scrutiny she felt. She recalled UCL having two housing lists, ‘one for landladies who would take black students and one for [those] who wouldn’t take black students.’
Searching for community, Jones-Lecointe became connected to the British Black Panthers. The Special Branch unit of the Metropolitan Police described Jones-Lecointe as ‘the brains behind the Black Panther Movement.’ She insisted, however, on the collective nature of the organisation.
Jones-Lecointe was among a group of Black Londoners arrested and tried in 1970 for inciting a riot during a protest against police raids of The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill. The restaurant was a gathering place for the Caribbean community in London and attracted famous visitors including Nina Simone, Bob Marley, and Marvin Gaye. The ‘heavy mob’, a unit of the Metropolitan Police known for patrolling Notting Hill, had raided The Mangrove 12 times between January 1969 and July 1970.
The Mangrove Nine, as Jones-Lecointe and her fellow activists came to be known, used the trial to highlight the racism that Black Britons faced, particularly in the form of police violence. Jones-Lecointe was one of two of the defendants (along with writer Darcus Howe) who represented herself at the 55-day trial. The jury acquitted the group of the most serious charges and the case prompted the first judicial acknowledgement of “evidence of racial hatred” by the Metropolitan Police.
The case remains an important episode in British history, and is compellingly dramatised in Mangrove, one of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series.
Both Goveia and Jones-Lecointe are alumnae who during and after their studies at UCL worked to advance racial justice, yet their legacies remain under-recognized here. Their stories are worth telling this Black History Month and every day.