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Black Scholarship in the UK: Historical and Contemporary Context

By: Chloë Marshall, Frankie Harnett, Mishelle Kennady and Natalie Klinkenberg


In 2023, just two out of 164 University Vice-Chancellors were Black, as were only 210 out of 24,430 Professors in the 2022/2023 term. Several recent reports on the UK’s higher education sector have highlighted an overwhelmingly disproportionate representation of Black academics, teachers and researchers. While a 2023 study into student populations across the country found that this disproportion was less pronounced in medicine, dentistry and veterinary sciences, the humanities and languages generally suffered from much lower diversity. Indeed, in 2018, The Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality Report found that history was one of the least diverse disciplines from undergraduate to academic study. Black historians made up less than 1% of university-based history staff that year, compared to a 96.1% White majority, highlighting a systemic failure to enrich “both academic and public understanding of the past.” 


Beyond the study of History, the activity of Black British scholars in the UK’s wider academic landscape extends far beyond universities and research institutions: the presence of Black voices in the production, circulation and governance of knowledge impacts the entire education system and the society it forms. 


The most revealing story of the rise of Black scholarship in the UK is told not through academic works but through grassroots movements, such as the Black Studies Movement. The Afro-Caribbean Self-Help Organisation (ACSHO) founded one of the first Black supplementary schools in 1967, bringing how the education system treated Black children to the forefront. This plight was recognised in print with Bernard Coard’s 1971 study How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British Education System, which found that, in some boroughs, up to 80% of Black boys had been classed as “educationally subversive. This work was profound not only in its revelations and further encouragement of the supplementary school system but also as a work of Black History in its own right. The curriculum of these schools focused on Black revolutionaries and Marxism, some even hosting international freedom fighters, making them vital in the emergence of an independent Black consciousness in Britain. Since then, British Black Studies has developed across disciplines and as a subject in its own right; the network “Black British Academics” has emerged and Black scholars, such as Professor Shirley J. Thompson and Professor David Olusogo, are breaking into the mainstream.


Black Scholars in Britain 

Amon Saba Saakana migrated to Britain in 1965 from Trinidad and went on to become a Writer, Journalist and Creative. He studied playwriting at Mountview Theatre School for a year in 1966, obtained a Diploma of Higher Education in Caribbean Studies from the University of East London in 1982, an MA in Caribbean literature from the same university in 1988 and studied towards his doctoral degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he obtained his PhD in Drama & Cultural Studies in 1995. Additionally, he received a Certificate of Distinction and a Diploma of Merit in Egyptian Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, Birkbeck College, UCL by 1998. Saakana wrote Soul of a Nation while contributing to the drama magazine Plays & Players, which was then produced for the Royal Court Theatre in 1975. That same year, he founded Karnak House in London to identify and publish works by African and Caribbean individuals involved in creative fiction and poetry. Through this venture, Saakana wrote about the difficulties faced by Black presses and indigenous Black stories in a Washington Post article released in 1988.


In 2018, Olivette Otele became the UK’s first Black female history professor at Bath Spa University. In 2020, she became a Professor of the History of Slavery at the University of Bristol, undertaking a research project into the involvement of both the city and the university in the transatlantic slave trade. Today, she is a Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Learned Society of Wales. In addition to her PhD in History from the Sorbonne in Paris, she holds an honorary doctorate in Law from Concordia University in Canada. For information about her other activities, see here, here, here and here


Despite department closures and cut courses, the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency states that the number of Black professors “has risen by 25% in one year.” This brings hope that the next generation of Black students joining the scholarly publishing sphere can feel they have the resources to join scholarly conversations. Resources like scholarships and programs such as the MA in Black British History offered by Goldsmiths at the University of London, whose website states the program “situates Black British History within the histories of the African diaspora,” allow students to explore key themes within the field. For undergraduates, The University of Cambridge launched the Stormzy Scholarship in 2018 to provide financial aid to Black students, becoming a stepping stone for them to publish research in the future.


While these programs are a step forward, there is still work to be done to ensure that Black scholars and students feel that they have a voice within academia. Amplifying diversity in student bodies and university faculty is one way for Black scholars’ place to rise in scholarly publishing. Creating the opportunity for change in representation allows for dismantling obstacles that set back Black scholars  present and future  from becoming leaders in their fields.


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