Len Garrison, Archives and Self-Esteem – by Hannah Ishmael

How can archives fight racism? How can progressive educational resources tackle the harm of discrimination? Why have millennia of British history so often been presented through a reductive and harmful white gaze? Hannah Ishmael – lecturer in Digital Culture and Race at King’s College London – introduces Len Garrison, an activist, archivist and determined educationalist who worked to improve education, particularly for minoritised populations – and to disprove and displace assumptions about the history of Black presence in the UK. Garrison was central in creating ACER – the African Caribbean Education Resource project – and became a leading founder of BCA – the Black Cultural Archives – in Brixton, where, with others, he enacted his conviction that archives have the power to change the reality and representation of people’s lives.

After hearing Hannah’s essay, you’ll be led to rethink the very meaning and value of archives – as well as the nature and potential of anti-racist education today. Featuring reflection also on the work of Bernard Coard and Stuart Hall, and the importance of attending deeply to what people do as well as what they write.

Find out more at thesociologicalreview.org

Readings

• How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System – by Bernard Coard (1971)
• More about the life and work of Stuart Hall
• The early Black Education Movement (BEM) and the Black Supplementary Schools Movement (BSSM)
• More about the African-Caribbean Educational Resource project and the Black Cultural Archives
• Obituary of Len Garrison – by Mike Phillips (The Guardian, 2003)
• More about Audre Lorde and the American civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore
• The National Archives introduction to The Brixton Uprisings of 1981
• British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour – by Karen Sands-O’Connor (2022)
• Benjamin Zephaniah reads Len Garrison's poem “Where Are Our Monuments”

Episode Credits

• Author: Hannah Ishmael
• Producer: Alice Bloch
• Sound: Emma Houlton
• Music: Joe Gardner
• Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Transcript

Alice Bloch  0:12  
Hello and welcome to Sideways Sociology, which is a special short series of audio essays from The Sociological Review Foundation. In each one of these we're looking at a key figure in the story of anti-racism in the UK, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it actually takes – but also showing how their work and ideas speak to sociology, too, and should be better known. I'm Alice, the producer of this series, and in what you're about to hear, Hannah Ishmael – a lecturer in Digital Culture and Race at King's College London – talks to us about Len Garrison, an activist, archivist and determined educationalist who worked to improve education, particularly for minoritised populations, and to disprove and displace assumptions about the history of Black presence in the UK. After hearing Hannah's take on Garrison's life and work, you'll hopefully be led to rethink the very meaning and value of archives, as well as the nature and potential of anti-racist education today. Thanks for listening.

Hannah Ishmael  1:20  
Hi. I'd like to introduce you to a game I made up: Archives Bingo. I used it in workshops I ran with young people back when I worked at Black Cultural archives (BCA) in Brixton, south London. It's meant to work as a bit of an icebreaker, calling out stereotypes around archives and archivists, because, let's face it: there are lots. So, dusty, old, books, cardigans, secrecy, silence, spies. I could go on. And okay, the cardigan one is true, but most of those others are just wrong. Well-cared for archives are rarely dusty, and not all of them are old. They're also increasingly not about tangible things; they're about digitised or even born digital. But the word I want to focus on from that list today is silence, and I don't mean the hush one expects to find in libraries and archives, or the idea that things in them are typically classified and firewalled. By silence, I guess I'm really thinking about gaps and absences, because for many of us there's this feeling that archives typically belong to and speak to and for other people, especially the rich and powerful (and that it's impossible for them to contain everyone's truth, I guess – everyone's story). It can make archives feel exclusive and alienating. But for marginalised communities, attending to these gaps and silences – and the histories that might yet be told – is a key area of anti-racist activism. That is what I want to show you here, by talking about Len Garrison, a Jamaican-born educationalist and anti-racist activist who refused to accept these absences, these silences (you could say, for him, they were deafening) and developed a vision of what archives could truly be and do. 

Hannah Ishmael  3:04  
In a broad sense, Garrison wanted to highlight the gaps in the UK's idea of it's own national heritage and to change that situation. He was driven by a conviction in the value of dismantling racism through recentring African history and creating new narratives for Black and White communities. And so he worked to provide educational resources based on concrete historical evidence of Black presence in this country. He worked to create anti-racist resources so that young people could see themselves in British history, not as footnotes but central agents in its making and as masters of their own futures. Like the better-known cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Garrison understood the importance of representation and difference, of using educational activism and archive creation to counter the noise of whiteness. A noise that had become so mainstream that few even heard it anymore. 

Hannah Ishmael  3:53  
Among the organisations he created – from the 70s to the 90s – was ACER, the African Caribbean Education Resource project, which worked to create teaching materials, develop curricula and train teachers. And then, most famously, in the 80s, he was a leading founder of the Black Cultural Archives I mentioned. He stayed involved until his death in 2003 and it was, and still is, an organisation born from his belief in the importance of representing communities without filtering that representation through the prism of whiteness and the white gaze. In its collections, you'll find replica Benin Bronzes, West African drums and archival records documenting people ranging from the previously neglected Edwardian composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor to Black Power and Black feminist activists and much more besides. I'll talk more about those institutions later. 

Hannah Ishmael  4:41  
But unfortunately, like the narratives and stories Garrison worked to preserve, his own status as a key anti-racist activist is yet to be cemented. I think this is partly because he didn't regularly publish his ideas or theories, as academics would, but was instead committed to practical intervention. Garrison understood at his core what needed to be done to address racism, even if he didn't often engage in publishing high theory. Recently, education researchers – people like Lauri Johnson and Karen Sands O'Connor – have identified his work as in between what you might call multicultural and anti-racist action. Multiculturalism is, of course, a complex term. I'd say it refers not just to the recognition of difference in society, but to the creation of community and institutional spaces that allow differences to thrive. And it's been discussed critically, pretty much across the political spectrum. We'll put a few pieces in the notes accompanying this essay. But my point here is that the challenge of pinning down Garrison's exact political framework has contributed, I think, to his relative neglect today in the humanities, the social sciences and beyond. 

Hannah Ishmael  5:50  
And yet, Garrison's own life – with its dedication to action and an impact many academics can only dream of – raises crucial questions for us all, like: what and who are archives for, and how can we make them better? Or, how do and how would we write about history and the biographies of activists who are critical of such history? How do we move away from the noise of theory and focus on the activity of ordinary activists like Garrison, work that has lasting impacts on individuals, communities and nations? And how do we tend to what people do and create, not just what they publish or post? Well on that, I now want to dig into Garrison's biography more deeply, before turning to the lessons it offers for today, not only for researchers engaging with stories like his, but for all of us striving for an anti-racist present and future. 

Hannah Ishmael  6:42  
So, Lenford – Len – Alphonso Kwesi Garrison was born in Jamaica in 1943, coming in '54 to join his parents as a child of what's now often called the Windrush period, a term that's become synonymous with the post-war migration of Black, mainly Caribbean communities to the UK. He went on to have a British education – I guess, with all the connotations – and became a medical photographer at the Royal Free Hospital and then the Maudsley in the 60s and early 70s, becoming head of the Media and Photographic Unit there. That might not sound like an obvious career path for an activist, but this understanding of the power of representation and gaze, along with a desire to create historically accurate educational resources, I think is what inspired Garrison to create ASA and then BCA. Curiously, Garrison wasn't the only key figure to understand, in practical terms, the link between anti-racist activism and representation. Working with historical information also influenced other activists such as Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Audre Lorde – both in fact one-time librarians – who would have no doubt thought about such issues as they worked, all the while developing their critical consciousness. 

Hannah Ishmael  7:53  
While photography gave Garrison his main income, he was also passionate about furthering his own education. He completed a diploma in Development Studies at Oxford's Ruskin College and a BA in African and Caribbean History at the University of Sussex. As if that wasn't enough, he also did an MA in Local History at the University of Leicester. All of this combines to show him as what you might call a kind of glocal thinker. He understood that the global played out locally, that the macro and micro were intertwined, and that Black British history started way before 1948, before the start of the Windrush era I mentioned. What's more, he understood how what appeared to be local history was rarely bounded or distinct, and how an awareness of such history, such deep entanglements, could help to contest ideas of Britishness that excluded diverse communities, as evidence for Black presence in Britain was easily found once you started looking. Again like Stuart Hall, Garrison saw how much post-war racism was wrapped up in claims about presence and belonging. His mission was to disprove and displace such assumptions. Indeed, in the 70s he grew increasingly interested in African history here in the UK, and thought more about the need for a truly multicultural and anti-racist framework for education and archival collecting. With others, he saw the need to reframe the history of Black people in Britain, moving it away from post-war migration alone to include deeper histories of enslavement, colonialism and empire that led to this migration. 

Hannah Ishmael  9:19  
Garrison wasn't the only one who wanted change. In 1971, Bernard Coard's How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal, came out, selling thousands of copies in its first year. Grenadian born Coard had come to the UK to do an MA, then a PhD in development economics at the University of Sussex. To boost his income, he taught in schools – and was alarmed at what he saw. His resulting book highlighted the scandal of Black children being placed in schools then labelled ESN (a now outdated term meaning for the "educationally subnormal"), showing how what was then so wrongly seen as a culture clash between Black children and their teachers was leading to large numbers of them being labelled with that term and removed from mainstream schools. Such racism, Coard saw, stifled life chances and caused low self-esteem and low expectations among the children themselves. Basically, Coard highlighted how the UK school system was what we'd now call institutionally racist. 

Hannah Ishmael  10:14  
Garrison was, sure enough, inspired by all of this. And while there were other movements agitating to reform education (like the Black Supplementary School Movement, which provided extra learning opportunities outside mainstream schools), what's key about Garrison is he felt it vital that all children, Black and White, should find positive representation of all cultures at school. I like thinking of his rather pragmatic approach when reflecting on how those of us who are scholar activists might try to forge progress today. Ultimately, he was happy to work with mainstream institutions if it meant that change might happen. Inspired by Coard's call to action, in 1978 Garrison founded ACER – the African Caribbean Education Resource Project I introduced earlier – which went on to work with the long gone Inner London Education Authority. Its overarching aim was, and I quote, to "collect and disseminate material drawn from the African and Afro-Caribbean sources related to the Black child's cultural background for use in the multicultural classroom". Put simply, to ensure Black children could see themselves in the curriculum and in material like worksheets being used to teach them and their peers. The idea was that if they saw positive representations of themselves, this might help increase their sense of self worth, which was damaged by the wider racist culture, and boost their motivation and achievement at school. For Garrison, it wasn't just about improving self esteem. It would provide a blueprint for allowing young people to move beyond societal expectations, to triumph over what sociologists of education or criminologists working on deviants might talk about in terms of labelling. 

Hannah Ishmael  11:49  
Indeed, you might say Garrison's awareness of racism and how it worked was essentially sociological. He saw not only that the causes of racism, but its consequences, were far from personal or individual; they were structural. Like Coard, he saw how racism in education was alienating Black children from their parents, school and society in general. Such young people, as he saw it, weren't just being denied the knowledge to help them identify with their African roots. They were also left unable to identify with white culture too, left alienated you could say. It meant high numbers of children were leaving school or being removed from it, and in a time of recession. That meant unemployment and over policing in Black communities. Add to that poor housing and few prospects, you had the tinder box for the uprisings – better known as the riots – in Brixton in the early eighties. 

Hannah Ishmael  12:40  
While developing ACER and collecting and curating those educational resources I mentioned, Garrison also sought material to challenge the lay assumption that Black people in Britain only arrived with the Windrush, or that Black history was distinct from that of the wider UK. Those assumptions are something Stuart Hall recognised when he argued that what he called Britain's imagined whiteness (along with the processes of disavowal and forgetting) permanently positioned people from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia as eternal migrants in this country's idea of itself and its history. What I love about Garrison, though, is that he really set about doing the hands-on work of remedying this, right down to rummaging at secondhand book shops and car boot sales to find material to support his work. Among the things that he found was a Roman coin that bore the likeness of the Libyan born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus who, with other African soldiers, spent time in Britain defending Hadrian's Wall. Finds like this helped to prove the long standing presence of Black people in Britain and to smash stereotypes about who can be counted as belonging in Britain. 

Hannah Ishmael  13:42  
And here we come full circle, back to Black Cultural Archives, BCA. After ACER had closed due to cuts to education and the abolition of the Greater London Council under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in the 1980s, Garrison co-founded BCA. I described it already, but I'll add an extra detail. BSA isn't its official name. It's officially titled the African People's Historical Monument Foundation (UK). The inspiration for that name came from a moment where, in the early eighties, Garrison and his peers met with African American activist Queen Mother Moore and were moved by her call for an international series of monuments to commemorate people murdered in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and later under colonialism. Crucially, Garrison recognised that an archive that could itself be a type of monument, that monuments weren't just found in Parliament Square, but in our everyday institutions and networks. He encapsulated these ideas in his 1982 poem, Where are our Monuments. Declaring "we are the living monument of the uprooted peoples travelling on the road to eternal Africa", it asserted that it was time to share pride in this heritage. He wrote, "for those who are afraid of who they must be are but slaves in a trance for who else will make acclaim or will sing our name". 

Hannah Ishmael  15:00  
Garrison died in 2003, long before the recent articulation of Black Lives Matter, long before attacks on so-called wokeism and long before the Windrush scandal made news here in the UK. But we can learn so much from him, as academics or otherwise. Were he alive now, he would surely enrich debates about what anti-racism is, what its scope and focus can be. In writing and speaking of BCA, he framed it as very much an anti-racist initiative, and argued that anti-racist education is not an end in itself, but is a process or activity (something worth remembering, perhaps, as work continues across educational settings, in the UK and beyond, to decolonise the curriculum). Garrison understood not only – as he described it – that historical data and artefacts couldn't alone immediately change a child's view of themselves, but that bringing together irrefutable historical evidence of Black presence would create the necessary activation that could, as he put it, "provide the environment and structure within which the Afro-Caribbean child can extend and build positive, alternative reference points for the white child in an anti-racist framework" (that quote, I should say, comes from Garrison's unpublished writings in the archives, detailed in the notes for this essay). And by this, Garrison meant that his approach would centre and celebrate the history and culture of Black children, establishing this as a normal, in the way that white culture has been, and still is, normalised in mainstream education. 

Hannah Ishmael  16:24  
Reflecting on this also makes me think about how we, or I, teach and are taught, what audiences we assume to have and what audiences we are assumed to be a part of. In fact, as a lecturer on digital culture, I feel that many of the big societal issues touched on in this piece are today still being replicated by AI and algorithms, which continue to distort and misrepresent minoritised communities. While today, some might think of anti-racist initiatives as being about targeting majoritised  – typically White – communities, I think Garrison's anti-racism speaks to a different school of thought. It reminds me of Bob Marley's Redemption Song, with that lyric about emancipating yourself from mental slavery. Garrison's work and thought are about educating ourselves and flipping the script to focus on the agency of Black communities by showing how they've historically forced change rather than waiting for it to happen. 

Hannah Ishmael  17:12  
Overall, Garrison teaches us so much, with commitment to ensuring better outcomes for young people reminding us of the potential agency and impact that we can all have. Through things like ACER and BCA, Garrison and his peers acted on their conviction that addressing the silences, gaps, in our shared heritage and its representations was – is – crucial. Without that work, quite simply, we cannot know who we truly are, both at the social level but as individuals too. Making interventions in the historical record to remedy this was a political act, but also an act of community care (a theme that's increasingly becoming salient in recent discussions across social science and the humanities). Indeed, Garrison's life's work speaks to themes like representation and self esteem, but also healing, care and repair. And as an archivist, he teaches us a key lesson: that archivists aren't passive, agency-less people shunting around heaps of resources that have already been accrued. Instead, he reminds us to look up, to think structurally and to consider how archives are actually framed and created, and how they might be better. He shows that in our own small way, each of us can shape the archive, so to speak – and perhaps in the digital era  that's never been more true.

Alice Bloch  18:36  
You've been listening to Hannah Ismael talking about Len Garrison for Sideways Sociology. You can find the reading list for this episode, this essay, in our show notes and via the podcast page over at thesociologicalreview.org. And please share this essay far and wide, whether that's with friends and family or colleagues and, if you teach, your students. Thanks for listening.