Speak Out: The Brixton Black Women’s Group

“The bour­geoisie is fear­ful of the mil­i­tan­cy of the Black woman, and for good rea­son.” –Clau­dia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Prob­lems of the Negro Woman! (1949)

The project of free­dom is often imag­ined as a lin­ear, for­ward march towards an unde­fined future. The offi­cial record of his­to­ry index­es the rad­i­cal poten­tial for imag­in­ing what free­dom might be by mea­sur­ing soci­ety in silos of ​‘progress’. In this nar­ra­tive, the impor­tance of award­ing the colonised and the nom­i­nal­ly free with a seat at the table of pow­er becomes a place­hold­er for lib­er­a­tion. The struc­tures of pow­er that dis­trib­ute lim­it­ed life choic­es, gra­tu­itous vio­lence, eco­nom­ic repres­sion and expo­sure to pre­ma­ture death to the colonised and the nom­i­nal­ly free remain intact. The ver­ti­cal hier­ar­chy of life con­tin­ues; the future falls out of reach. Rev­o­lu­tion is deferred once more. 

The pre­vail­ing arrange­ment of social life has attempt­ed to erode the crit­i­cal labour of trans­form­ing our cur­rent con­di­tions, erad­i­cate our capac­i­ty for love and care, and fore­close the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a world beyond the bru­tal entan­gle­ment of con­quest and empire. Yet, even as the forces of anti-Black racism, free mar­kets and state-engi­neered pre­car­i­ty have sought to with­er away the belief that anoth­er set of arrange­ments is pos­si­ble, ​‘free­dom’ is a word that con­tin­ues to form the nucle­us of the Black rad­i­cal imag­i­na­tion. The long his­to­ry of Black resis­tance has been marked by the insur­gent long­ings of those whose lives are ren­dered sur­plus and dis­pos­able under the régime of racial cap­i­tal­ism. ​‘Free­dom’ names that which remains out of reach even as we endeav­our to cre­ate it in the here and now, and ​‘free­dom’ brings togeth­er a set of prac­tices that allow us to imag­ine what might be. Liv­ing with­in the ​‘inter­minable cat­a­stro­phe’ that struc­tures Black life, polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion, mutu­al aid, gen­er­al strikes and riot have pro­vid­ed tracts for sur­vival, a dis­course of dis­sent, a love lan­guage for a live­able future, and a rehearsal of a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent world.

At the heart of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideals that emerged under the press of death on the plan­ta­tion, in the colony and in the metro­pole is the sus­tained labour of Black women. In ​‘The Bel­ly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors’, Saidiya Hart­man notes that the rit­u­al theft and reg­u­la­tion of Black women’s sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive capac­i­ties ​‘defined black women’s his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ences as labour­ers and shaped the char­ac­ter of their refusal of and resis­tance to slav­ery’. Describ­ing the acts of sub­terfuge and auton­o­my that enslaved women engaged in – such as poi­son­ing slave­hold­ers, util­is­ing abor­ti­fa­cients, giv­ing birth, com­plet­ing sui­cide, and dream­ing of destroy­ing the mas­ter and his house – Hart­man draws an atlas of a world that con­tin­ues to be shaped by the dis­pos­ses­sion of Black women. Under a death­ly cal­cu­lus that ren­ders our lives expend­able, the col­lec­tive refusal of Black women has been crit­i­cal to both the for­ma­tion and the sur­vival of Black life through­out the diaspora. 

In the mid- to late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, Black women in Britain drew upon the tra­di­tions of rebel­lion cul­ti­vat­ed by the enslaved and the colonised to fight back against a ​‘Moth­er Coun­try’ that had only ever been hos­tile to their pres­ence. Rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies such as Clau­dia Jones, Althea Jones-Lecointe, Olive Mor­ris, Liz Obi, Ger­lin Bean and count­less oth­ers whose names remain unrecord­ed were foun­da­tion­al in hon­ing an analy­sis of the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions that made Black peo­ple vul­ner­a­ble to both state and inter­per­son­al vio­lence. Under­stand­ing that to be Black in Britain was to be posi­tioned out­side the bound­aries of the nation and that, in its cor­po­re­al­i­ty, the state was antag­o­nis­tic to Black life, Black women rad­i­cals endeav­oured to find ways of being in the world that were not teth­ered to the ruse of cit­i­zen­ship, the fal­lac­i­es of the nation-state or the hori­zon of empire. 

As the chant for Black lib­er­a­tion rever­ber­at­ed across the globe, the labour of Black women activists was inte­gral to the bur­geon­ing Black Pow­er move­ment in Britain. Inside groups such as the Black Pan­thers, the Black Lib­er­a­tion Front and the Black Uni­ty and Free­dom Par­ty, Black women taught at sup­ple­men­tary schools, staged cam­paigns against police bru­tal­i­ty, fought racism with­in the edu­ca­tion sys­tem and strug­gled against the epi­dem­ic of sub­stan­dard liv­ing con­di­tions that defined Black life in the late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. They pro­duced lit­er­a­ture and dis­trib­uted pam­phlets that analysed the his­tor­i­cal dimen­sions of their expe­ri­ences as Black peo­ple liv­ing on the under­side of the cap­i­tal; they sus­tained their com­rades, cook­ing and clean­ing and typ­ing long after the men had fin­ished lament­ing the super-exploita­tion of the Black work­er, put their coats on and turned the lights off. 

Black women’s labours, how­ev­er, are often posi­tioned as a foot note or entire­ly writ­ten out of grand nar­ra­tives of Black strug­gle and fem­i­nist revolt. Recall­ing the lim­i­nal space in which Black women were placed in the Black Pow­er move­ment dur­ing the ear­ly 1970s, Black fem­i­nist activist and author Mel­ba Wil­son recalls that ​‘it was a strug­gle to get Black women’s voic­es to be heard in that con­text. A lot of the women who came from the Black Lib­er­a­tion move­ment were doing the ​“back­room jobs” – the typ­ing, the cook­ing … they were on the pick­ets for sure, but they were expect­ed to fol­low, not lead!’ Hav­ing been a mem­ber of the Black Uni­ty and Free­dom Par­ty (BUFP), Ger­lin Bean remem­bers the repro­duc­tive labour that sus­tained Black lib­er­a­tion organ­isa tions: ​‘We were the women, we had the respon­si­bil­i­ties, we were doing child­care, we were doing every­thing and we should be recog­nised and should have a voice in the organ­i­sa­tions, not just be their sec­re­taries … because that’s where we were relegated.’

Refus­ing to capit­u­late to a world­view that over­wrote their lives, Black women activists insist­ed that their voic­es be heard. With­in what had by then become the Black Work­ers’ Move­ment of the ear­ly 1970s, they set up a women’s cau­cus and sought to attend to the nature of Black women’s sub­jec­tion through­out the world. Reflect­ing on her par­tic­i­pa­tion in an ear­ly read­ing group, Mar­lene Bogle details the cir­cum­stances that shaped Black women’s prac­tices of con­ven­ing: ‘[The] lack of resources in the Black com­mu­ni­ty made it nec­es­sary for us to meet in each other’s homes,’ she recalls, ​‘as we had no oth­er suit­able place to do so.’

A space for polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion, the women’s cau­cus afford­ed Black women the breath­ing room to think with each oth­er, learn with each oth­er and chal­lenge each oth­er out­side of the rigid, patri­ar­chal hier­ar­chies that had come to define what had by then become the move­ment. More than fifty years lat­er, these rad­i­cal prac­tices of inti­ma­cy, com­rade­ship and care con­tin­ue to defy dom­i­nant met­rics of vis­i­bil­i­ty pre­cise­ly because of their inci­sive cri­tiques of pow­er. Black fem­i­nist labour, then, is stitched through the tapes­try of Black rad­i­cal­ism even as it falls out of the frame of representation. 

It there­fore comes as no sur­prise that when I first learnt of the exis­tence of the Brix­ton Black Women’s Group, it was through a chance encounter that would change the course of my life. It was 2014, and I was in my final year of an Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture and Span­ish degree. Hav­ing been taught every­thing from Civ­il War lit­er­a­ture to the poet­ry of the Roman­tic peri­od, I was hun­gry to read and learn about the nar­ra­tives of Black peo­ple; those who had been omit­ted and erased from the lec­tures I attend­ed but whose lives were woven with­in and beyond the white­washed nar­ra­tives that shaped the course.

More than any­thing, I was yearn­ing to find traces of Black women’s lives in Britain, long­ing for any­thing that doc­u­ment­ed the voic­es of women who were nev­er bound to appear in any of my mod­ules but who I knew must have exist­ed. This oppor­tu­ni­ty would final­ly arrive on a vis­it home to my fam­i­ly in south Lon­don in Novem­ber 2014.

Walk­ing around Brix­ton, I bumped into an old school friend who was vol­un­teer­ing at the new­ly reopened Black Cul­tur­al Archives (BCA). As we talked and I regaled him with tales about the nar­row land­scape that had been my expe­ri­ence in high­er edu­ca­tion, he invit­ed me to join him in view­ing the BCA’s inau­gur­al exhi­bi­tion, ​‘Re-imag­ine: Black Women in Britain’. Chart­ing more than four hun­dred years of Black women’s expe­ri­ences with­in the impe­r­i­al core, the exhi­bi­tion was my first taste of the rad­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties that resided with­in Black women’s every­day prac­tices of refusal: the echoes of their voic­es, the tex­tures of their mem­o­ries and the rhythms of their lives, which not only chal­lenged dom­i­nant forms of remem­ber­ing and for­get­ting but also cleaved through the cur­rent arrange­ments of the world and imag­ined it anew.

Mak­ing my way through the beau­ti­ful­ly curat­ed space, I even­tu­al­ly arrived at a dis­play map­ping the his­to­ry of the Black women’s move­ment in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Watch­ing footage from the First Black Women’s Con­fer­ence held in 1979 by the coali­tion of groups that made up the Organ­i­sa­tion of Women of Asian and African Descent, I found myself yearn­ing to know more about these women: who they’d been, who they were now and the aspi­ra­tions that had incit­ed them to come togeth­er as a crit­i­cal mass and demand lib­er­a­tion for Black women everywhere.

Inspired by this brief encounter, I returned to Brix­ton a few months lat­er to view archival papers relat­ed to the move­ment. Painstak­ing­ly col­lect­ed and pre­served by sis­ters of the move­ment across decades and even­tu­al­ly donat­ed to the BCA, these pam­phlets, meet­ing min­utes, yel­low­ing pho­tos and scraps of ephemera pro­vid­ed a win­dow into the thoughts and feel­ings of the women who were the heart­beat of the Black lib­er­a­tion strug­gle in Britain.

Cast­ing my eyes over the Speak Out newslet­ters fanned across the desk in front of me, I drank in the words of the Brix­ton Black Women’s Group, women who were writ­ing four decades pri­or
to the moment in which I encoun­tered them, women who were express­ing so many of the thoughts and feel­ings that I had yet to find a way to artic­u­late. In the first issue of Speak Out, the group argue that attend­ing to the speci­fici­ty of Black women’s sub­ju­ga­tion is a pre­req­ui­site for the lib­er­a­tion of all Black peo­ple: ​‘In order to change our entire sit­u­a­tion, we must strive to ful­ly under­stand the nature of the oppres­sion we face as black peo­ple, and par­tic­u­lar­ly as black women. We have brought to this coun­try a his­to­ry of exploita­tion and a tra­di­tion of strug­gle which has nev­er been documented.’

Hav­ing spent the entire day in the read­ing room por­ing overSpeak Out issues, the light began to dim out­side, and soon enough it was time to leave, but the expe­ri­ence had left its mark on me. Read­ing BBWG’s insight­ful, urgent and pre­scient analy­ses of racism, sex­ism and cap­i­tal­ism, as well as all that exceed­ed these death­ly entan­gle­ments – the con­ver­sa­tions about art, the med­i­ta­tions on lit­er­a­ture, the vers­es of poet­ry, the dreams of free­dom – struck a chord that would con­tin­ue to chime near­ly a decade lat­er. My grow­ing desire to seek out Black fem­i­nist counter-nar­ra­tives – oth­er ways of know­ing, oth­er ways of liv­ing – was the same one that ani­mat­ed the group of Black women who came togeth­er to form the BBWG (then known sim­ply as the Black Women’s Group) in 1973.

When I met with sis­ters of the group in the autumn of 2022 for a vir­tu­al round­table dis­cus­sion, they empha­sised that when they began organ­is­ing, they did so with a shared long­ing to deep­en the strug­gle for Black lib­er­a­tion by form­ing an analy­sis of Black women’s posi­tion with­in it. As the first autonomous Black women’s organ­i­sa­tion in Britain, BBWG mem­ber Gail Lewis not­ed, the group was focused on ​‘the speci­fici­ty, not just of ​“woman’s con­di­tion” but of woman’s role in the struggle’.

Gath­er­ing every Sun­day at Sabarr Book­shop at 121 Rail­ton Road, the BBWG extend­ed the tra­di­tions that began in the women’s cau­cus of the ear­ly 1970s by first com­ing togeth­er as a study group. Seek­ing to incor­po­rate the var­i­ous polit­i­cal his­to­ries and under­stand­ings that shaped each member’s tra­jec­to­ry with­in the group, the col­lec­tive read and analysed Marx­ist, social­ist and anti-colo­nial lit­er­a­ture and endeav­oured to for­mu­late an analy­sis that moved Black women from the mar­gins of these texts to the cen­tre. Dur­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, found­ing mem­ber Bev­er­ley Bryan empha­sised the sig­nif­i­cance of explor­ing and inter­ro­gat­ing texts collectively:

The group’s non-hier­ar­chi­cal, com­mu­nal process of learn­ing illus­trates their com­mit­ment to devel­op­ing a polit­i­cal con­scious­ness that could speak to and, ulti­mate­ly, trans­form the social con­di­tions in which the lives of work­ing-class Black women emerged.

As more and more sis­ters joined the organ­i­sa­tion in the mid-sev­en­ties, the group formed a crit­i­cal mass that was intent on not only nam­ing the sources of their oppres­sion but also, impor­tant­ly, craft­ing a the­o­ry that could be mobilised in prac­tice. Arriv­ing at the term ​‘Black social­ist fem­i­nism’, BBWG sought to illu­mi­nate how the inter­sec­tion of race, gen­der and class under­gird­ed their posi­tion with­in the social order. When I asked the sis­ters how they defined Black social­ist fem­i­nism, Lewis explained that it was impor­tant to the group that along­side an under­stand­ing of the ways in which racism and patri­archy func­tioned, ​‘class was also cen­tral’ to their analysis.

BBWG’s vision of Black social­ist fem­i­nism sought to redress the over­lap­ping crises of anti-Black racism, eco­nom­ic depri­va­tion, patri­ar­chal vio­lence and the state’s organ­ised aban­don­ment of work­ing-class Black women and chil­dren. Under­stand­ing that the mun­dane and the ordi­nary were stag­ing grounds for rev­o­lu­tion­ary change, the group was foun­da­tion­al in forg­ing links with fel­low sis­ters in the local com­mu­ni­ty and form­ing a net­work of ini­tia­tives and cam­paigns that could ade­quate­ly address their needs. BBWG mem­ber Olive Gal­limore formed the Mary Sea­cole Craft Group, which brought togeth­er a com­mu­ni­ty of Black sin­gle moth­ers for craft ses­sions and pro­vid­ed a forum for them to voice the issues that imbued their every­day lives.

Bryan, then a pri­ma­ry school teacher in Brix­ton, was also active in the West Indi­an Par­ents Action Group and agi­tat­ed along­side par­ents and oth­er local activists to uproot a racist edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem that rou­tine­ly crim­i­nalised and under­served Black chil­dren. Reflect­ing on the expan­sive net­work that the group cul­ti­vat­ed, Mon­i­ca Mor­ris described the polyvo­cal nature of BBWG’s organising:

This was Black social­ist fem­i­nism in prac­tice, the­o­ry in the flesh that was ener­gised by an unyield­ing ded­i­ca­tion to being in sol­i­dar­i­ty with those who were ren­dered for­got­ten, miss­ing and dis­ap­peared with­in both the women’s lib­er­a­tion move­ment and the Black lib­er­a­tion movement.

In a land­scape where inter­sec­tion­al analy­ses of race, gen­der and class fell out­side of main­stream nar­ra­tives of women’s lib­er­a­tion, the organisation’s insis­tence that Black women’s free­dom had to be cen­tral to any notion of a fem­i­nist future was a rad­i­cal under­tak­ing. When white-led women’s groups organ­ised for greater abor­tion rights and cam­paigned for ​‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’, BBWG argued that this fram­ing failed to account for the scale of repro­duc­tive injus­tice waged by the state against Black women. Not­ing that Black women were sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly coerced into hav­ing abor­tions and ster­ilised against their will and that many were giv­en the con­tra­cep­tive injec­tion Depo-Provera with­out their con­sent, the organ­i­sa­tion cam­paigned against the insid­i­ous prac­tices of repro­duc­tive reg­u­la­tion that were illeg­i­ble under a sin­gu­lar focus on abor­tion rights. In their demand for repro­duc­tive free­dom at every lev­el, includ­ing the auton­o­my and resources to raise their chil­dren with dig­ni­ty, the group fun­da men­tal­ly shift­ed the ter­rain of fem­i­nist struggle.

With­in their analy­sis of Black social life, the sis­ters of BBWG focused their ener­gies on the gran­u­lar, the local and the every­day, while nev­er los­ing sight of who their ene­mies were or the his­tor­i­cal dynam­ics that informed the polit­i­cal stakes of their organising.

The coer­cive pow­er of the state and the colo­nial roots of Black women’s oppres­sion were always at the fore­front of their minds.

Recog­nis­ing that bor­ders and nation-states were sites of impe­r­i­al enclo­sure, the group under­stood that their sub­jec­tion in Britain was insep­a­ra­ble from the sub­jec­tion that Black women expe­ri­enced through­out the world. Sis­ters of the group hailed from dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al and organ­i­sa­tion­al back­grounds and brought with them a lens that was root­ed in a transna­tion­al vision of Black lib­er­a­tion. Pri­or to join­ing BBWG, mem­bers such as Suzanne Scafe and Sin­damani Bridglal had spent years organ­is­ing in women’s labour move­ments in Jamaica and Guyana, respec­tive­ly, and Joce­lyn Wolfe had organ­ised around pol­i­tics and edu­ca­tion, first in the youth move­ment and lat­er in the People’s Nation­al Move­ment, in Trinidad. Ami­na Mama grew up in Nige­ria where her pol­i­tics were shaped by rel­a­tives who had been involved in the strug­gle against British colo­nial­ism. Claudette Williams, Mel­ba Wil­son and Gail Lewis trav­elled togeth­er to form links with women’s groups in Nicaragua, and even­tu­al­ly Ger­lin Bean and Mon­i­ca Mor­ris went to work in Africa – in Zim­bab­we, Tan­za­nia and the Gambia.

Bring­ing togeth­er dif­fer­ent dias­poric con­texts and per­spec­tives at their week­ly study ses­sions, the group craft­ed a Black inter­na­tion­al­ist frame­work in which they under­stood that the move­ment against racism, against patri­archy, against cap­i­tal­ism and against impe­ri­al­ism was a glob­al one. ​‘Black social­ist fem­i­nism was about race, sex and class, but it was also about what was hap­pen­ing on the ground; what was hap­pen­ing to us and to oth­er women,’ Bryan explained dur­ing our conversation.

Mobil­is­ing along­side sis­ters from across Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca as well as strate­gis­ing with the grow­ing num­ber of Black women’s organ­i­sa­tions through­out Britain, the group carved out an anti-colo­nial move­ment of Black women that was expan­sive enough to envis­age their col­lec­tive free­dom while hold­ing space for the speci­fici­ty of their dif­fer­ent loca­tions and mate­r­i­al conditions.

The spir­it of col­lab­o­ra­tion that lay at the foun­da­tions of BBWG’s organ­i­sa­tion­al prac­tices found its expres­sive lan­guage with­in the pages of the group’s Speak Out newslet­ter, first pub­lished in 1977. Lewis describes the newslet­ter as ​‘the ​“organ” of the group’, a vital con­tri­bu­tion to the Marx­ist – Lenin­ist tra­di­tion, in which pro­duc­ing lit­er­a­ture that could artic­u­late the organisation’s polit­i­cal vision and pro­vide a resource for mass mobil­i­sa­tion, an essen­tial part of rev­o­lu­tion­ary strug­gle. The group resist­ed their work being assim­i­lat­ed into an insti­tu­tion­al frame, seek­ing instead to speak to the grass­roots – those who they were organ­is­ing in com­mu­ni­ty with and those who were not yet part of the move­ment but could become com­rades of tomorrow.

‘With Speak Out, we were very con­cerned to not just talk to our­selves, so it wasn’t going to be some­thing that was pri­mar­i­ly intel­lec­tu­al or hard to digest,’ Mor­ris notes. ​‘We were hop­ing to bring up issues that were rel­e­vant to peo­ple on the street.’

Speak­ing to many issues with many voic­es, the group’s news let­ter was a ground­break­ing endeav­our in which the capac­i­ty for imag­in­ing what free­dom could be was cen­tred around Black women’s lives. Speak Out: A Brix­ton Black Women’s Group Read­er is alive with the ener­gy that coursed through the group’s organ­is­ing and brings togeth­er the threads of their work that have remained out of view until now. The book doc­u­ments more than a decade of BBWG’s activism, illu­mi­nat­ing the colos­sal scope of the group’s polit­i­cal vision, the rela­tion­ships that they nur­tured and the lives that they touched. In their writ­ings and speech­es, sis­ter­hood becomes a verb, an action that the group com­mit­ted them­selves to over and over again.

The kin­ship, rela­tion and strug­gle that brought BBWG togeth­er can be felt every­where through­out their work. Speak Out is writ­ten in a col­lec­tive gram­mar, and there are rarely any names under the edi­to­r­i­al pieces col­lat­ed through­out the newslet­ter, sig­ni­fy­ing the group’s desire to eschew indi­vid­ual acclaim and celebri­ty in favour of a shared vision of lib­er­a­tion. The book also doesn’t shy away from the ten­sions and fail­ures that mark any attempt at rev­o­lu­tion­ary change; in the edi­to­r­i­al to Speak Out, no. 5 (1983), ​‘On Black Women Organ­is­ing’, the group reflect on the mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion of les­bian women with­in the organ­i­sa­tion and reaf­firm their com­mit­ment to fight­ing racism, sex­ism, clas­sism and homo­pho­bia on all fronts.

The piece is an impor­tant med­i­ta­tion on how con­flict with­in organ­is­ing spaces can be han­dled with account­abil­i­ty and care, and on the vital role that Black queer women have played in Black strug­gle. Speak Out acts as an archive to the less­er-known aspects of the group’s polit­i­cal work. In coali­tion with the Mary Sea­cole Craft Group, the organ­i­sa­tion opened the Black Women’s Cen­tre (BWC) in Stock­well Green in Sep­tem­ber 1980. Offer­ing a space for oth­er polit­i­cal groups to gath­er, as well as a crèche, a library and a place for Black women to come togeth­er and pro­duce music, the­atre and art, the BWC became a cru­cial site of resources and ser­vice pro­vi­sion for an under­served com­mu­ni­ty. The BBWG was also instru­men­tal in the Black Peo­ple Against State Harass­ment (BASH) cam­paign, where, in coali­tion with a num­ber of local Black organ­i­sa­tions, they fought back against the police’s per­va­sive use of Sec­tion 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act (‘sus’ law). The BBWG spear­head­ed protests against the leg­is­la­tion by dis­rupt­ing police attempts at mak­ing arrests and demon­strat­ing out­side police sta­tions and courts.

Among their expand­ing net­work, the group strove to raise the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness by hold­ing meet­ings at the BWC and doc­u­ment­ing the dis­cre­tionary pow­er the law grant­ed the police to prey on Black peo­ple. The group’s cease­less organ­is­ing would prove crit­i­cal when, in 1981, Black peo­ple through­out Britain rose up against the end­less cycle of police harass­ment. Orches­trat­ing the Brix­ton Defence Cam­paign in the after­math of the Brix­ton upris­ings, the BWC became the epi­cen­tre of anti-racist organ­is­ing in the local area, with the BBWG pro­vid­ing care and legal sup­port for Black com­mu­ni­ties expe­ri­enc­ing the brunt of state war­fare. An open revolt in the face of state racism and police pow­er, the group pro­vid­ed a cri­tique that helped to lay the ground­work for con­tem­po­rary demands for the abo­li­tion of the police and the carcer­al state.

As our con­ver­sa­tion came to an end, I asked the sis­ters of the BBWG to reflect on how their polit­i­cal work in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies is in con­ver­sa­tion with our present moment. ​‘I think that ques­tion needs to be asked to anoth­er gen­er­a­tion,’ Scafe replies. ​‘It is impor­tant that the gen­er­a­tion who’s expe­ri­enc­ing what it means to be a Black woman or expe­ri­enc­ing issues around Black­ness and gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty speaks for itself in rela­tion to how they might be in con­ver­sa­tion with oth­er gen­er­a­tions.’ Scafe’s response encour­ages me to return to the young woman I was in 2014, when I first learnt of BBWG, and to all the women I’ve been in the wake of that first encounter. Nine years lat­er, we con­tin­ue to live in a state of emer­gency that pro­duces pre­car­i­ty around Black women’s lives. Speak Out is a love let­ter to all those who yearn for anoth­er world, a reminder of the foun­da­tions that have been laid and a call to action for what remains to be done. In return­ing to the speech­es, poems, arti­cles and archival frag­ments assem­bled here, I retrace the steps of the work­ing-class women, daugh­ters of migrants, sin­gle moth­ers and queer peo­ple who came togeth­er as the Brix­ton Black Women’s Group. In return­ing to the Black fem­i­nist labour that held the organ­i­sa­tion togeth­er, I am able to hear the sound­scape of rebel­lion that echoes into the present.

Speak Out: A Brix­ton Black Women’s Group Read­er is out now on Ver­so. 

Jade Ben­til is a writer, crit­ic and his­to­ri­an from South Lon­don whose work is sit­u­at­ed with­in Black fem­i­nist thought. Her debut book, Rebel Cit­i­zen, explores the every­day rebel­lion of African and Caribbean women who migrat­ed to Britain in the after­math of the Sec­ond World War and is forth­com­ing from Allen Lane.

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