UK Black History Month: Making Waves Off-Stage
By Tabitha Gilbert, in collaboration with the Dramatic Resources trainer team
The theme of UK Black History Month this year is #SalutingOurSisters (specifically to "honour Black women’s achievements, amplify their voices, and challenge the systems that oppress them" - find out more here). Inspired by this theme, the Dramatic Resources team has been reflecting on Black women who led the way both on- and off-stage.
This week, we are sharing the work of some incredible women who broke new ground off-stage – from entrepreneurs to activists to writers (and more!). You can check out our favourite on-stage performers in Part 1, here.
Amy Ashwood Garvey: Ferocious Pan-African leader, community figurehead, and 1930s entrepreneur. After her divorce from Marcus Garvey, she moved to the UK and set up the Florence Mills Social Parlour in Covent Garden – one of the first of its kind, as a Black-owned bar in Central London in the early twentieth century. The Florence Mills Social Parlour was a haven for Black people in the 1930s: a political hub by day and a calypso, swing and jazz bar by night. As one of our team members wrote, “It reflected what I believe it means to be Black in Britain.” Amy Ashwood Garvey was also a true community leader. She helped a lot of young people come to London and study to become what we know now as some of the first Black lawyers, accountants and even journalists and presenters. She is an inspiring example of a Black British icon making waves long before the Empire Windrush.
Pauli Murray: Murray’s story is rarely told, but she was an important civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar, and author. Her work was essential in the American civil rights movement and in expanding legal protection for gender equality. 15 years before Rosa Parks refused to move on a bus in Baltimore, Pauli Murray was arrested for sitting in the whites-only section in 1940. She is also now considered an LGBTQ+ icon – Murray was briefly married to a man but went on to have relationships with women, although she did not identify as a lesbian. In fact, Murray’s journals reveal that she thought of herself as a man attracted to bisexual women. It was reported that she pleaded with doctors to check her hormone levels and treat her with testosterone. The Smithsonian records that Murray innately believed she was a man stuck in woman's body and may have identified as a trans man in today’s society.
Mural captured by one of our US-based trainers in Durham, North Carolina, USA
Winsome Pinnock: As a team of actors and performers, we had to include Winsome Pinnock! Described by The Guardian as "the godmother of Black British playwrights", Winsome Pinnock is an award-winning playwright and dramaturg whose work has been staged both in Britain and internationally since 1985. She blazed a trail with her 1986 play Leave Taking, which was the first play by a Black woman to be staged at the National Theatre. Recently, she received the 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize in recognition of her status as “a singular voice in world theatre”.
Lorraine Hansberry: Another incredible playwright, Hansberry was the first Black female author to have a play performed on Broadway. In her short life, she completed three full-length plays (including her most widely known work, A Raisin in the Sun, which focuses on racial segregation). Her activism spanned borders; she not only contributed to the US-based Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom but was vocal on global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Her writings also discussed her lesbian identity and queer rights. Recently, two DR trainers worked on the sold-out and highly acclaimed BAM production of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which later transferred to Broadway; Melle Powers was the EDI consultant and Miriam Silverman played Mavis (a role which won her a Tony at the 2023 Tony Awards!)
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: The first Black woman and first former federal public defender to serve on the US Supreme Court. Justice Jackson holds a particular soft spot for some of our US team, as she is not only a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Time Magazine reporter, but also a champion Speech & Debater from Miami (where some of our US team are based!). In celebration of her confirmation, she said: “I am feeling up to the task, primarily because I know that I am not alone. I am standing on the shoulders of my own role models, generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity, but who got up every day and went to work believing in the promise of America.”
UK Black History Month is a chance to acknowledge and celebrate the immense contributions of Black people to British society. To learn more about UK Black History Month, its significance, and ways to get involved, you can find a 2023 resource pack here.