Gerlin Bean and Black British Feminist Socialism – by A.S. Francis

What did Black radical politics look like in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s? What was its relation to the Black women’s movement, which urgently highlighted the multiple oppressions faced by Black women? How, in studying such movements, can we celebrate brilliant activists, without erasing the importance of whole movements and collectives? Here, A.S. Francis – author of Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – introduces us to Gerlin Bean, the Jamaican-born activist who came to the UK as a student nurse and became central to Black British Feminist Socialism. They describe Bean, who passed away in early 2025, as a radical listener and mediator who applied to her entire way of living an acute awareness of how race and gender intersect to create particular types of disadvantage – and spoke to those she helped, on the ground, with a skillset that sociologists and others could learn a lot from.

Through Bean’s determined activism and networking, argues A. S. Francis, we see concepts like intersectionality come alive and be used to inform action. And in studying her life, we also confront urgent questions about why some figures from history are canonised, while others risk obscurity.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Episode Readings

• Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – by A. S. Francis (2023)
• The History Matters journal
• UK Parliament information on The Race Relations Act of 1965
• The Young Historians and their film “We Are Our Own Liberators”
• The Black Liberation Front in the UK, the Black Unity and Freedom Party and the Black Panther Party
• Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later (Law School, Columbia University, 2017)
• Introductory notes on the concept of Triple Oppression Analysis
• In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance – by Shirin Hirsch (2020)
• The archival records for “Black Women Speak Out” (1971) at the George Padmore Institute
• Towards Black Unity – Black Panther Newsletter about the National Conference on the Rights of Black People in Britain (1971)
• The Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD)

Episode Credits

• Author: A.S. Francis
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardiner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Transcript

Alice Bloch  0:12  
Hi. Welcome to Sideways Sociology, a special short series of audio essays from The Sociological Review Foundation. In each, we're looking at a key figure in the history of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it takes – but also how their work and ideas – and in fact, their methods – speak to sociology too, and should be better known. I'm Alice the producer, and here, A.S. Francis – an editor of the History Matters Journal, a consultant on the Young Historians Project, and author of Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement – introduces us to the Jamaican-born activist who came to the UK as a nurse and became central to Black British Feminist Socialism. Gerlin Bean, who as we learn here, was a radical listener and a radical mediator, through whose determined activism and networking we see concepts like intersectionality come alive and used to inform action. And through whose life we come to questions about why some figures from history are canonised while others risk being forgotten. You'll find recommended readings in our show notes. Thanks for listening.

A.S. Francis  1:27  
Have you ever come across someone's story and thought, why have I not heard about you? Your biography deserves a book or a film. As someone with a background in history – and activism around youth empowerment and anti-racist education – I can think of many people who've triggered this thought in me, and I've come to understand that the acclaim someone gets can have little to do with how deserving they are. Instead, it can be a lot of things to do with politics, the way things do or don't come together in a given moment, and whether there is – or isn't – a machinery behind that person to help push them into the public eye in the right place, at the right time. It's for that reason that uncovering the stories of people beyond the mainstream, beyond the canon, can be not just personally rewarding (giving us a chance to feel closer to history; holding up a mirror to see ourselves) but also politically and intellectually crucial. It offers the chance for alternative narratives to be explored and shows the potential for other worlds to be created and celebrated. 

A.S. Francis  2:35  
As an oral historian, that matters to me; bringing those who we might call everyday heroes to the fore, and decentring established histories. So today I want to introduce someone whose story is long overdue to be told more widely, and whose life spans Jamaica, the UK and Zimbabwe: Gerlin Bean. She once described herself, with a typical humility, as a "Committed Black Woman". And that's true. But others have called her a political leader, a mother figure, a mentor, a community advocate. I'd call her a leading architect of Britain's Black women's movement and Black socialist feminism. She applied intersectional analysis – an awareness, basically, of how things like race and gender intersect to create particular disadvantage – she applied it to her whole way of working and living (way beyond any kind of academic space like the university library where I first encountered Black Feminism) and who spoke with those who she helped on the ground, with a skillset that sociologists and others could certainly learn from. Today, I want to explore her work and legacy and highlight the lessons that she offers. 

A.S. Francis  4:00  
I first heard of Gerlin Bean (and I'm going to call her Gerlin) after working on a documentary with the Young Historians Project, a group working to uncover underrepresented aspects of Black British History. This film was about the Black Liberation Front, or the BLF, for short, one of Britain's foremost Black Power organisations active from the early Seventies up to the Nineties. Yes, Britain had its own Black Power movement. The BLF did lots of significant things to empower Black communities, including providing alternative education at a time when racism was rife. The film itself was great, but for reasons around material and access, we couldn't really centre the important role of women in the movement. So I chose to do some solo research on women in the BLF, specifically. And soon, I met Zainab Abbas, who'd been the group's international secretary and a founding member of one of the first Black Feminist organisations in Britain: The Brixton Black Women's Group. She urged me to look up her friend Gerlin, calling her "the most underrated woman in the black women's movement". And soon I was inspired to help cement Gerlin's space in history and shine light on her story. But doing so meant confronting questions that we all face, in the social sciences or humanities, when trying to represent a whole life: what aspects of her work were more important to highlight? How would she want to be documented? And how could I do this with care? Also, how do we celebrate individuals without erasing the significance of movements and collectives? Some of these questions I'm still grappling with, and they don't all have clear answers. 

A.S. Francis  5:58  
So, Gerlin was born in Jamaica in 1939 and she came to London in the late 1950s. Like many Caribbean women of her generation, she was recruited as an NHS student nurse. It was a time of increasingly hostile immigration policy, a rise in fascist movements like the National Front and ignorance about people from places like the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Gerlin's first reaction to life in London, where she was based in Bethnal Green hospital, wasn't of the type often romanticised in films about immigration. Simply: she wanted to go back. The city felt cold and dark, and it seemed racial discrimination was getting worse. Still, she stayed and after a while, turned to youth work, having seen the challenges facing young people – police harassment, trouble at school, generational clashes with parents, the influence of different subcultures. It's key to remember here that this move toward youth work happened at a time of significant public racism (not least Enoch Powell's famous Rivers of Blood speech of 1968, the continual pushing through of racist immigration policies, and more). Let's also not forget that racism in Britain only became actually illegal in 1965, or at least, The Race Relations Act of that year was the first piece of legislation in the UK to address racial discrimination. So, it's not surprising that alongside youth work, Gerlin also got involved in Black radical politics – joining organisations advocating for Black people's rights here and abroad, and for their liberation from forces like colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy. 

A.S. Francis  7:54  
Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black Power – as promoted and celebrated in the US by more famous names like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and their Black Panther Party – was all the rage among Black youth in Britain. It encouraged Black people to feel beautiful in their skin, wear their natural hair, read Black literature, study African history and be united against racism, capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. Soon, Gerlin was a central figure in London's Black Power network. She traversed groups including the BLF, which I mentioned before, but also the Black Unity and Freedom Party, which was interested in the link between race and class and revolutionary traditions like Marxism, Leninism and Maoism. But an often overlooked feature of Black Power politics, in general, was the movement's concern for Black women's issues and their liberation – things women like Gerlin strove to ensure stayed strictly on the agenda. To do this, she did things like set up women's study groups within existing organisations, sowing the seeds for the Black Women's Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. It was a movement gradually built by Black women UK wide, many of whom had been active in the Black Power movement, and all were versed on revolutionary politics. And Gerlin was one of its major architects. 

A.S. Francis  9:28  
One of her early initiatives, for example, was creating the Black Women's Action Committee, a group within the Black Unity and Freedom Party. A lot of what it did hasn't yet been properly recorded or recovered, but in 1971 it published a pamphlet. In Black Women Speak Out, aimed at an audience including fellow activists, Gerlin and her peers demanded more recognition of the myriad challenges facing black women on account of what was called their triple oppression. "Black women", the pamphlet read, "suffer in three ways: 1) we are poor, 2) we are Black, 3) we are women". This statement laid out the three pillars of the multi-faceted and interrelated layers of oppression experienced by Black women, which included – all at once, and overlapping – their status as members of the working class due to racialised capitalism, their experience of racism due to their racialised identity, and their oppression as women in a patriarchal system. Not only did Black Women Speak Out declare this, it also gave examples such as the exploitation of Black women workers from Commonwealth countries, concentrated in roles where they were underpaid and overworked (including in the NHS). 

A.S. Francis  10:53  
Of course, with this example, Gerlin would have been able to channel her own experience of nursing, but overall, the pamphlet was written in a way to make it as relatable as possible and to present a collective approach. And in highlighting how different aspects of Black women's Identities and positioning interacted to compound their oppression, you could say that Gerlin and her peers were applying an awareness of intersectionality, a term coined by feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in the late 1980s, to highlight how race and gender intersect to yield a particular kind of discrimination and disadvantage. And today, one might – like Gerlin and her peers – rightly point to the overrepresentation of Black women in underpaid, undervalued care jobs. One might equally note, say, the disproportionate maternal mortality rate of Black women in the UK. The point is that while the examples might vary over time, many of the issues persist, as do their root causes. Hence why it's important to recover the legacies of women like Gerlin, to keep the struggle alive and connect the present to the past. 

A.S. Francis  12:15  
Black Women Speak Out was presented at the National Conference on the Rights of Black People in Britain, held at London's Alexandra Palace in May of 1971. Excerpts were also republished in Black political newsletters, which were sold on the streets and distributed at meetings and demos on things like police violence, and racist legislation and school practices. The point it made – essentially that Black women had a specific position in society, sitting on the intersection of three major power systems – had a big impact on approaches to women's liberation in Britain's Black Power movement, by providing a clear line of argument on what the issues were and why activism was needed. But this small but powerful publication made another important point. It acknowledged those women who'd historically contributed to Black liberation, and Black women's liberation more specifically. Among them was Claudia Jones, whose life has many parallels to Gerlin's. Jones was born in 1915 in Trinidad, and died in 1964 in London. But in that short life, she devoted herself to revolutionary politics and helped pioneer the triple oppression analysis that I just mentioned, harnessed by Gerlin and women of subsequent generations, who in doing so weren't building something from scratch but expanding on existing political traditions. Jones is often mentioned in relation to her work organising the UK's first Caribbean Carnival celebration, campaigning for Civil Rights and founding the West Indian Gazette. But, unlike Gerlin, Claudia, Jones is pretty well known these days. And while she should be even more widely recognised than she is, you're way more likely to find her, rather than Gerlin Bean, mentioned by sociologists, historians and in school curricula. 

A.S. Francis  14:16  
It's perhaps because Jones was a journalist, writing often on issues around the struggles against capitalism, racism, colonialism and patriarchy. And by contrast, although Gerlin was dedicated to the same struggles, she and her peers, in the Black Power years, often didn't put their names to their writings; didn't have individual bylines. Instead, they credited their wider collective, used pseudonyms or stayed anonymous. This was for reasons including encouraging non-hierarchical structures of organising, but also protecting themselves from the threat of repercussions from state surveillance in. Still, I guess with this imbalance comes a reminder, not only to be alert to why people we research seem silent or invisible to us, but also that in the history of anti-racism, activism and Black Feminism, there are still big gaps to be identified and filled in. Gerlin Bean is one of those who's dwelled in such a gap for too long, which seems ironic, given she was so active in working to fill those gaps in her activist days as she raised the profiles of her peers. With Black Women Speak Out, and its highlighting of past Black revolutionary women, Gerlin and her peers offered a crucial lesson in how to provide a historical narrative that places leading individual figures within a wider context and lineage. And it's an approach that I think we could learn from, not least because Eurocentric approaches to and within my main subject of study, history, often prioritise individualism, and in doing so risk removing celebrated figures from the collectives of which they are or were a part. 

A.S. Francis  16:11  
But here, I want to turn to another side of our subject: Gerlin the mentor. Because, as well as elevating the legacies of Black women activists, and playing a big role in what essentially served as Britain's Black Feminist Manifesto, Gerlin was determined to work alongside others and build a distinctive and everyday Black Women's Movement to empower Black women to see themselves as agents of political change and to centre the kind of thinking we saw with that triple oppression analysis approach. As the 1970s progressed, Gerlin inspired Black women to bring politics to the fore. For example, in '73 she co-founded the Brixton Black Women's Group, whose members soon confidently defined themselves as Socialist Black Feminists, arguing that capitalism was either the root of, or exacerbated, racism in its various manifestations. And then in 1978 she co-founded the Organisation of Women of Asian and African descent, or OWAAD, which served as the umbrella group for the national Black women's movement. OWAAD organised the first National Black Women's Conference in 1979 where Gerlin's speech expressed hope that those who were there that day would share their experiences and report back on the different ways they'd been organising to fight back. The idea was, she suggested, that those present might "learn from each other, exchange ideas and, in the course of the day, genuinely attempt to increase the unity" among Black sisters. 

A.S. Francis  17:56  
I think these instances say a lot about Gerlin's thinking, and the ideas that fueled a whole generation of activists. We see her attentiveness to steering the movement towards both recognising the productive power of solidarity and also locating the systems that oppress Black people and working classes in general, and Black working class women in particular – something many thinkers, from Ambalavaner Sivanandan to Angela Davis also did, but that Gerlin did from a really practical perspective. As she and her OWAAD peers saw it, things like a racist education system, exploitative working conditions and poor housing were shared issues that Black women faced, and so in their responses needed a shared perspective and collective action. Indeed, an unprecedented 300 women attended that National Black Women's Conference, some from far beyond London – and subsequently, other local Black women's groups grew across England. 

A.S. Francis  19:01  
So it's fascinating to consider how, in facilitating a space for Black women to meet with each other, discuss their experiences and grow stronger through unity, Gerlin and OWAAD were essentially putting to use the power of storytelling, listening and conversing – all skills and practices ethnographers or oral historians might, at least ideally, employ – to build a political movement that positioned Black women as agents of change; of their own liberation. And I want to emphasise here that Gerlin's skills in organising, listening to and uniting people weren't confined solely to conference halls and activism with a capital A. They were also found at the coffee bar she headed up on the Harrow Road in West London, where she offered a safe space for young people – Black and White – having trouble at home,school and on the street. There, she entered into dialogue with young people but also their parents, often mediating between them to forge shared understanding. And here we find lessons in listening and are led to ask ourselves, whether we value listening in our own lives; do we sufficiently listen to, and celebrate, the listeners and mediators who don't shout so loudly from our history books? And if not, can we do better? 

A.S. Francis  20:25  
I think Gerlin Bean's life and work teaches us a lot about the real world nature of effective activism, and shows how theory can be – and historically already has been – applied to address real issues on the ground, including racism. But I think that her story also offers a set of more abstract lessons around research and representation. My own journey to finding out about and documenting Gerlin's story was inspired by knowing I didn't know enough, and running towards that instead of running scared. And I've since learned about the importance of not being put off by lack of archival material, but seeing that as an invitation to make new knowledge. And I learned not to run from acronyms and initialisms that can seem confusing (I've thrown lots of them at you just now, from the BLF to OWAAD!). But the reality is that these things are the reality of everyday activism, whether we're sociologists, anthropologists, historians or readers and viewers, we can't understand our past if we shun away its complexity. 

A.S. Francis  21:38  
And what's more, Gerlin was very much a leader, but she had a style of leadership that aimed to involve others, enable them to see their own potential. And as I've said, it leads me to wonder whether we need to do better at celebrating listeners and mentors. But it also prompts us to ask what duty we, as readers or researchers, have to remedy this imbalance? Should we think more critically about the kinds of lives that get turned into books and films, and why they're chosen? And, if we work as researchers: how do we represent individual stories while doing justice to the power of collectives and communities that are often harder to pin down and package; but which are often the reality of forging historical change? 

A.S. Francis  22:27  
For me, recovering and celebrating Gerlin's legacy has taken a couple of forms. My PhD is about Black women radicals in the late 20th century in Britain, but it's not focused on Gerlin alone or any one figure. It's an exploration of a whole generation, something I hope that she'd approve of. And separately, my book on Gerlin is a political biography, and it came out in 2023. Much of the story in the book is held together by testimonies from friends, family, ex-colleagues, mentees and more – and in this way, the book is itself a testament to the power of the collective. It's reminded me how oral history can be a tool for salvaging the stories of everyday heroes, and a weapon against exclusion from history. The same goes for things like ethnography and, more broadly, storytelling. These give us the power to democratise knowledge production and illuminate the people who consider themselves ordinary, who are too busy to advertise the fact that it is them who are doing the work in supporting their communities and advocating for the marginalised. Gerlin shows the importance of fostering community, empowering those around us, turning theory into action and sharing our knowledge with others. To me, she is the Mother of the Black Women's Movement in the UK, to this day. 

Alice Bloch  24:03  
You were listening to A.S. Francis talking about Gerlin Bean for Sideways Sociology. You can find a reading list for this episode in our show notes, and via the podcast page over at thesociologicalreview.org. Do share this essay far and wide, whether with friends, family, colleagues, or – if you teach – your students. Thanks for listening.