Barbara Beese News Today

DARCUS BEESE, OBE, has always understood ‘the importance of using your voice,’ and he’s done just that by penning his debut book, ‘Rebel With A Cause’.

While the precise context may have been different, Britain’s own fight for equality drew inspiration from events across the pond

Small Axe tells of these tensions among the families and communities forged in this cauldron of racial prejudice and harassment.

As the planet burns and pandemics rage, Selma James’s work with the Wages for Housework movement shows that we ignore the labor of care at our own peril.

Small Axe: What you need to know about the Bafta-nominated series 28/04/2021, 11:01 am John Boyega as police officer and anti-racism reformer Leroy Logan in Sir Steve McQueen’s anthology series Small Axe (BBC/PA) Directed, written and created by Sir Steve McQueen, the Small Axe collection is made up of five original films which aired on the BBC in 2020. The films – Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Red, White and Blue, Alex Wheatle and Education – are set in the time period from the late 1960s to t...

Beverley Bryan: the British Black Panther who inspired a generation of women Tobi Thomas In the mid-60s, Beverley Bryan was a prefect at Lavender Hill secondary modern in south London. One of her responsibilities was to stand at the school gates and scribble down the name of any student who was late. One such girl was Olive Morris, who would become one of the country’s leading anti-racism activists. Bryan, meanwhile, would follow in the younger girl’s footsteps, becoming a B...

Mangrove Nine: justice in the dock To complement a Steve McQueen Small Axe film, an online account of the momentous trial can now be viewed, writes Bronwen Weatherby Ian Macdonald, Altheia Jones-LeCointe and Selma James in How the Mangrove Nine Won A FIRST-HAND account of the momentous court case that saw nine black men and women exonerate themselves despite the full force of the Met Police being against them is now available to watch online. How the Mangrove Nine Won was launched the day after...

Death of a Headmaster | BBC Sounds OTHERtone with Pharrell, Scott and Fam-Lay | Google Podcasts Twenty-five years ago last week, Philip Lawrence was stabbed. He was the headteacher at St George’s school in Maida Vale, north-west London, and had stepped in to protect a pupil who was being attacked at the school gates by teenagers from another school. Lawrence died later the same day. One of his former pupils, broadcaster Edward Adoo, presents Death of a Headmaster, a touching and fair-minded ...

In the first two episodes of Steve McQueen’s quintet of films, collectively titled Small Axe, the artist and film-maker points his lens at two distinct but related spaces of Black social pleasure: a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill in the late 1960s, and a house party in the same area a decade later. Both of these are, to varying degrees, embattled, from without and within. The first film , Mangrove, takes its title from the historic Mangrove Restaurant, established on All Saints Road in...