The makers of black history
01 January 1991
The makers of black history
artdoc November=1992
We are in danger of forgetting key figures in the making of black
history, even as it is made. In the last few months,three stalwart fighters for black community - Vishnu Sharma,
Kath Locke and Rashid Mufti - have died and yet these deaths have
gone practically without public notice.
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Vishnu Sharma, who died on 22 April, came to Britain in 1957 as
a seasoned political campaigner already involved in the Indian
struggle for independence, the Communist Party and peasant
movements. Applying that political expertise to Britain, he
joined the British CP, found work in a Southall factory,
organised one of the earliest black strikes at Rockware Glass,
and supported disputes such as at Woolfs rubber factory in 1965.
From local trade union activist, he rose to leadership of
the Indian Workers' Association - a national body which always
had its strongest base in Southall.
But Vishnu's vision of a better society was not a restricted
`workerist' one. From 1966, when the education minister decreed
that schools could not have more than one-third Asian children,
Vishnu led the campaign against the bussing of Southall's
children outside the area (a practice which was only ended in
1977) and helped set up a local Saturday school to give the
children a sense of their community. In 1962, when the first
Immigration Act was passed, Vishnu led the protests outside
Downing Street.
By the mid-1970s, he was working with the Campaign Against
Racial Discrimination for laws to outlaw racism. And, after the
Wilson Committee in 1967 into appeals procedures, it was Vishnu
who, with Mary Dines, set up the Joint Council for the Welfare
of Immigrants.
In later years, he became an authority on the many black
struggles in Britain in which he and others had played a part.
CARF was amongst those groups which benefited from his
considerable gifts as an oral historian. He was unstinting with
his time, ever ready to look out a photo or a document to
highlight an episode. And, unlike many of his contemporaries,
Vishnu bridged the generations. He was there on the streets
to commemorate in 1989 the murder of Blair Peach; he was always
there too to give incisive advice on new problems to the new
community activists.
Unlike Vishnu, Kath Locke and Rashid Mufti never gained
national prominence, but committed themselves to their cities of
Manchester and Liverpool.
Kath, coming to politics a decade after Vishnu, was, in the
late 1960s, a member of the Universal Coloured People's
Association and, later, a key regional organiser for the Marxist-
Leninist Black Unity and Freedom Party. But it was in two
community campaigns that Kath made her mark in the early 1970s.
She helped found the Moss Side People's Association to fight
against the destruction (known as redevelopment) of the area and,
in 1971, during the occupation of the Carmoor Road Centre, formed
the first multi-racial play group in Manchester.
From then onwards, she campaigned against the stigmatising
of black children as ESN (educationally subnormal) and the
failing of black children by the schooling system. She was also
active in numerous defence committees, anti-deportation campaigns
and self-help groups.
From 1982 to 1991, she worked at the Trade Union Basic
Education Project. But it was her work with and for black women
which will be longest remembered. In the 1970s, she was one of
the founding members of the unique Abisindi Women's Cooperative,
a women s advice and cultural centre in Manchester. And at her
retirement party earlier this year, black woman after young black
woman stood up to `testify' about the way that Kath's example of
struggle had influenced their political lives.
Rashid Mufti, who died aged only 51, went to Liverpool in
the mid 1970s as a lecturer.