Ciarán O’Rourke (Jacobin) writes, “Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson calls his verse a ‘cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle.’ For half a century, his work has provided a peerless record of black British experience offering a vital lesson in how oppression fuels the flame of defiance.” In the beginning,” recalls Linton Kwesi Johnson, “writing…
In the 1970s, Beverley Bryan joined the British Black Panthers in solidarity of her friend who was a victim of a police assault. Since then, she has leveraged her educational background to intentionally spread Black stories, Black culture and Black history.
22 June 2021
The Museum of London has acquired an ensemble from London fashion designer Tihara Smith’s ‘Windrush collection’ along with a suit owned by her grandfather. Both pieces, and oral histories recorded for the museum by Tihara, her mother and her grandfather have been made available to explore on the Museum of London website to mark Windrush Day 2021.
Designed as part of Smith’s UCA Epsom graduate collection in 2018, and selected for display at Graduate Fashion Week, the outfit specifically references the story of her grandfather Lazare Sylvestre, who arrived in the UK from St. Lucia in 1958 as part of the Windrush generation.
Listening for the Caribbean on The Crown
APPROXIMATELY HALFWAY through the latest season of
The Crown, the series tackles a most peculiar incident that occurred during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign: the night a British man named Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace. Since the 1982 event, multiple others have tried to scale the Palace fence and gain an audience with the Queen, including one just last year on the anniversary of Fagan’s original break-in. But Fagan didn’t just make it past the perimeters; he had a 10-minute chat with the Queen herself. You would think, then, that it’s the conversation between the two that would take centerstage in the episode entitled “Fagan.” And, to be fair, it’s what the show builds up to, vividly detailing Fagan’s daily life of estrangement and isolation in Margaret Thatcher’s and the Queen’s London before he scales the walls. Yet there is another, far briefer, exchange that’s just as intriguing, and just as pointed