After thirty years at the University of California, Berkeley, this Liverpool academic returns for a 16 date book tour of the UK
This event is organised by Black History Walks as part of 61 Years Since 1965, the first ever Race Relations Act, and 20 years of the African Odysseys film series (2007)
Stephen Small, PhD. is a Professor of the Graduate School, Department of African Diaspora studies, University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for thirty years.
In the 1990s Professor Small spent three years working with Bernie Grant on Black history, reparations and collective mobilisation; as well as consulting with the Liverpool Museum of Slavery. A contemporary and colleague of Professor Gus John, Small moved to the USA and is now retired. On this day we will look at rare archive footage from Liverpool plus extracts from his new book and then general conversation about three decades of knowledge production and international politics, that highlight the unique perspective of the Liverpool Black community.
Black Liverpool.
This book describes the Black community in Liverpool and the arrival, embrace and transformation of waves of transnational Black culture from Africa, the West Indies and the United States in the final three decades of the twentieth century. Transnational cultural influences were spread via the media, brought first-hand by visitors to Liverpool, and through Liverpool residents who travelled internationally. Liverpool’s Black community was fundamentally different from Black communities in other cities in the 1970s because of the city’s unique history.
There were far more Africans than West Indians, more long-term citizens than recent immigrants, the highest proportion of inter-racial marriages and people of mixed race in the nation, and a far more vivid collective memory of imperialism in West Africa than in any other city. One important difference is the far greater salience of African cultural patterns, revealed in African family names, the largest concentration of African clubs in the nation, and the emergence of African-inspired organizations like Delado African Drum and Dance company, the Steve Biko Housing Association, and Amadudu women’s refuge.
Black Liverpool closely examines the role of gender ideologies, institutional practices and the experiences of Black women, alongside music and nightlife, social and political ideologies, Black Studies courses, language and dialect, and personal fashion, dress and hairstyles.
The religious and secular aspects of Rastafarian beliefs and practices are also foregrounded. Drawing on more than seventy first-hand interviews with Black community residents, workers, activists and celebrities, as well as private and public organizational documents and newspapers, this illuminating book is essential reading for anyone interested in Black culture and the history of Liverpool. He was born and raised in Liverpool.
About Professor Small taught in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies since 1995. He was Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (June 2020 to January 2025). He has held visiting positions at universities in Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Brazil, Japan and Zimbabwe. As a professor he researched the history and sociology of Black people across the diaspora, including the United States, Western Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil. Since retirement he mainly works on legacies of British imperialism, with a particular focus on Liverpool. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1989); his MS.C in Social Sciences from the University of Bristol (1983); and his B.A. (honours) in Economics and Sociology from the University of Kent at Canterbury (1979). His most recent book is In the Shadows of the Big House: 21st Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana, 2023. Before that he published 20 Questions and Answers on Black Europe, January 2018.
He worked with the Honourable Bernie Grant, MP, researching and lecturing on reparations and museums. He was a member of the Consortium of Black Organisations and the Federation of Black Liverpool Organisations, both in Liverpool, in the early 1990s. And he was a Guest Curator at the Transatlantic Slave Trade Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum which opened in 1994 (and which became the International Slavery Museum in 2007).
Black History Walks website / Black History Walks Instagram
Other coming events at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre: Part of the Roots to Routes season: Stories of migration, memory and reparative justice
The Price of Memory: Reparations film and talk Thursday 24th September
Other coming events ww.blackhistorywalks.co.uk HERE
- 60 years of Black British Civil Rights Professor Gus John
- Black history Bus tour/ Steam train trip/River cruise
- Frantz Fanon film and talk weekender
- Reparations, new film by 90s TV icon Chrystal Rose
- Remembering Joy Gardner: Black Lives Matter 1993
- Graphic Novels: Publishing Black History and movies
- Mayfair, Hackney,Notting Hill, Southbank, Trafalgar Square, Regents Canal and Soho walks
- Champion Black Boxers and businessmen in 1800s London:
- South Africa’s London Recruits
This is an African Odysseys screening. Previously at the BFI Southbank for 18 years, African Odysseys is now hosting films across London due to systemic racism at the BFI which ignored a18,600 strong petition and cancelled the popular,monthly programme there. Full details HERE