Black Unity and Freedom Party

In 1970 the Black Unity and Freedom Party was formed in Britain, emerging from the Universal Coloured Peoples Association (UCPA). The UCPA had been created by Nigerian Obi Egbuna in 1967 in the wake of the visit of Trinidian-American activist Kwame Touré (Stokely Carmichael) to Britain. The year before Carmichael had transformed the civil rights movement in the US with his call for "Black Power" championing cultural pride, political independence and socio-economic empowerment.

In Manchester, the Black Unity and Freedom Party organised Saturday Schools, campaigned against police brutality and educational inequalities, organised political discussions and distributed the paper The Black Voice.

Source: Sharae Deckard "United States of America, Britain, and the Civil Rights Movement", The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007)

Nello James Centre

Started in 1967 as a community education centre, the cottage supplied day-care and a nursery playground, legal advice, a printing workshop and a social centre. The founders of the centre had partly come together to protest police brutality, although its membership broadened beyond West Indians to include local university students. Amongst its successful events were dance nights and a free university. The centre was visited by the select parliamentary committee on race relations.
Its political radicalism was expressed not only in the cottage being named after leading Trinidadian socialist intellectual C.L.R. James but also in the posters on the trees outside reading "Free Angela Davis" who had been arrested as part of the repression of the Black Panterh Party in California during the early 1970s.

Source: The Guardian, 1/7/1972, p.1

Community House

This Edwardian lodging house at 55 Darcy St was converted into a social club to bring together whites and blacks in the spring of 1954. The project was led by twenty West Indian and Africans, many of whom were in inter-racial relationships. With the parish worker Brother Bernard, they redecorated the building so that it could host Saturday evening dances and carry a "large stock of West African and West Indian newspapers". The club was celebrated as a much needed social space given the difficulties faced by early migrants of lodging in single rented rooms.

Source: Manchester Guardian, 8/4/1954, p.4.

The Economist

Bookshop established by Ras Makonnen in the mid-1940s to support his Pan-African Publishing Co. The directors of the latter were Makonnen, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta and Peter Millard. Amongst the anti-colonial works published by the press were Sylvia Pankhurst, Italy's War Crimes in Ethiopia (1946), Kenyatta's, Kenya: Land of Conflict (1945) and The Negro in the Caribbean by Trinidadian historian and later Prime Minister Eric Williams. The bookshop relied on the support of students at the University of Manchester, for as Makonnen recognized:

it wasn't a race bookshop, either in the sense that it catered only to blacks - there weren't enough around for this to be possible - or in the sense that we only sold books about blacks. However, when there was some particular book on blacks that I felt needed promoting, we went to town.

One of those books that was made a "big splash" about was Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944) which explored how Caribbean slavery help to fuel the emergence of Britain's industrial economy.

Source: Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from within (1973), pp.145-146.

Roots Festival

First held on 2-3 December 1977 in Ducie High School, the festival celebrated the arts and history of the African and Asian Diasporas. It included craft exhibits, book displays, food stalls and demonstrations of Nigerian drumming. Part of the initial vision of the festival was that it was a multicultural event celebrating cultures that were marginalised in British education and society. During the 1980s the festival moved between local schools. Emerging from the festival was an extensive oral history project with Caribbean, African and South Asian migrants which is now available at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre.

Source: Roots 5 years on (1981)