Celebrating Black History Month

University runs first Race Lecture which is set to become an annual event

BLACK History Month events at the University of Huddersfield have drawn large numbers of students and members of the public.  When high-profile historian Professor David Olusoga came to deliver the first annual Race Lecture he attracted a 500-strong audience.

The professor, who is well-known for TV documentaries such as Black and British: A Forgotten History and the BAFTA-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, gave a lecture titled We need to talk about Windrush.  Speaking in the University’s Oastler Building – named after the famous Huddersfield-based social reformer and anti-slavery campaigner, Richard Oastler – Professor Olusoga argued that the Windrush Scandal that erupted in 2018 was intricately connected to the history of post-war British politics and the longer histories of racism and empire.

The University of Huddersfield’s Race Lecture was been instituted by Dr Berenice Golding, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, who is herself the daughter of a Windrush generation immigrant from Jamaica.

She believes that the positive contributions to British society made by the Windrush generation and its descendants have often been overlooked. 

Windrush Documentary

The fortunes of African-Caribbean migrants to the UK are the theme of an ambitious documentary and oral history project that has also been a centrepiece of Black History Month events at the University.

Titled Windrush: The Years After – A Community Legacy on Film, the film charts the experiences of people of over four generations, drawing on more than 80 newly-recorded interviews with individuals whose ages range from 11 to well over 80.  It focusses on the African-Caribbean descent community in Huddersfield, and the town’s University – staff and students – contributed to the project’s diverse production team.

The documentary was first screened at the University in the last summer, and now Windrush: The Years After has had fresh showings as part of Black History Month.

There was a public screening in association with the University of Huddersfield Archives, taking place at the Heritage Quay archive centre as part of a Windrush Huddersfield Exhibition.  This event included a Q&A session with key community members.  The University’s Department of History – closely involved in the project – hosted a second screening, with further opportunities for discussion. 

The prime mover in the project is Milton Brown, the son of economic migrants who came to Huddersfield from different parts of the Caribbean in the post-war years.  He is now chief executive of Kirklees Local TV (KLTV) and is also studying for a PhD at the University of Huddersfield.  A key collaborator was the film historian Dr Heather Norris Nicholson, a Senior Research Fellow at the University’s Centre for Visual and Oral History.​

“We needed to put this story together for a wider audience,” said Mr Brown.  “I was doing it purely to give the African-descent community a voice, rather than another generation dying out without being able to tell the story.”

Funding for the film included £34,500 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  The University of Huddersfield also provided financial support.  In addition, Professor Barry Doyle, who heads the Department of English, Linguistics and History, in discussion with Milton Brown, enabled PhD researcher Joe Hopkinson and a number of undergraduate students to contribute to the project as part of their own studies and work alongside volunteers and the 14-strong production team at KLTV.