Download a 1 page pdf with a short biographical note on Olive Morris, written by ROC member Emma Allotey and published by the Remembering Olive Collective.
Archive for the 'Olive Morris Bibliography' Category
Remembering Olive Collective: Phone-in interview with Toyin Agbetu, Head of Social and Economic Policy, for Ligali’s Nyansapo Radio – Tuesday 10 March 2009
On Friday 6 March ROC had a stall inside Brixton Library as part of an event organised to commemorate International Women’s Day (8 March). Emma Allotey, Ana Laura and I were all there and we took it in turns to look after the stall, talk to people about Olive, and sell some of our lovely merchandise.
Our new poster’s arresting image of Olive speaking through a megaphone amongst a crowd of people captured a man’s attention. This man was Toyin Agbetu, founder of Ligali. As he stood there in front of the poster, he wondered about this brave unsung heroin and asked himself how come he had never seen or heard of her before.
Emma did a great job of informing the intrigued Toyin about Olive and her achievements, and he was so impressed that he decided to invite her to be a guest in his next radio show to share the message with a wider audience.
Emma could not do the interview, so she sent an email to the rest of the group asking if someone else (preferably of African descent due to Ligali’s remit – see below) could do it and I -reluctantly- put myself forward and volunteered.
Ligali describe themselves as a “Pan African Human Rights Organisation that challenges the misrepresentation of African people, culture and history in the British Media”. As a way of redressing the balance of power, Ligali produces “Africentric media, and education programmes that actively work for self-determination, socio-political freedom, physical health and spiritual wealth” (see www.ligali.org for more information), hence the importance of having a ROC member of African descent as a guest speaker in their radio programme.
‘Empowering African Women’ was the title of the programme ROC featured in. Dedicated to International Women’s Day, the programme focused on the achievements of African women and discussed the issue of women’s activism. Consequently, the questions posed by Toyin centered around the legacy of Olive Morris as a black female figure, a community activist, and her relevance to the Pan African community -especially women – living in London today.
You can listen back to the programme by visiting Nyansapo’s audio archive
Olive would have told me to shut up and do something by Tara Alturi
2 March 2009, The f word blog
Tara Atluri reflects on her time with the Olive Morris project as well as her being a part of the Remembering Olive Collective.
Olive would have told me to shut up and do something
Civil rights hero Olive ‘erased from history’ by Walter Hemmens
11 November 2008, South London Press
A council has been accused of “erasing from history” the name of a woman hailed as one of Brixton’s heroes in the 1970s struggle for civil rights.
When the Lambeth council building in Brixton Hill names after Olive Morris, a member of the Brixton Black Panthers, was revamped as a “customer centre” last year, her name was removed from the part of the building used by hundreds of members of the public everyday.A photograph of Olive and a plaque, unveiled by her mother Doris in 1986, were also taken down.
Olive’s name now appears only above and inside the staff entrance.Veteran civil rights campaigner and poet Clarence Thompson said: “People who have dedicated their lives to changing the quality of life in Lambeth should be honoured and it should be forever.”
“You wouldn’t go interfering with Nelson’s Column would you? Why have they got to do that?. It sends a bad signal.” He was speaking after a meeting of the REmembering Olive Collective (ROC), an organisation set up last year to preserve Olive’s memory.
The meeting was held at the Karibu Centre in Gresham Road and was attended by Emory Douglas and Billy X Jennings – two veterans of the US Black Panthers that inspired Olive and the Brixton Movement.
Born in Jamaica in 1952, Olive made her mark as a feminist and black activist until she died from cancer aged 27. Only five out of 20 people spoken to by the South London Press outside Olive Morris House knew anything about her.
Liz Obi, chairwoman of the ROC, who squatted at 121 Railton Road with Olive and was in the Brixton Black Women’s Group set up by Olive, said last week: “She was a whirlwind of a person, really inspirational. She had a lot of energy. It’s tragic she died so young, she had a lot to give to the community.”
Ms Obi said the ROC and the Morris family wanted to reinstate a display about Olive’s life in the customer centre, but had been told by the council it would not match the centre’s new “corporate image”.
Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who was a member of the Brixton Black Panthers with her in the 1970s said after last week’s meeting: “Its tragic really, it shouldn’t be allowed to happen. She was someone who was very significant for Lambeth, and its part of the borough’s heritage.”
A council spokesman said: “We very much want to pay tribute to Olive Morris and her legacy in Lambeth, and we’re looking to reinstate a plaque near to its original location as well as looking at further options to mark her contribution. The building is already named after Olive Morris, in her memory and displays her name on the outside.”
Black Panthers talk in memory of Olive
31 October 2008, South London Press
News item announcing the forthcoming Creation and Liberation event at Karibu Centre
Brixton: Veterans of the radical US Black Panther movement are giving a talk on Monday to commemorate their UK peer Olive Morris – the community activist who died in 1979, aged 27. Creation for Liberation: Black Panthers in Brixton includes talks by US Panthers Emory Douglas and Billy X Jennings, Brixton Panther Neil Kenlock and poet Clarence Thompson.
It is at the Karibu Education Centre, Greshan Road at 7pm, £10 on the door, £7 in advance, £5 for U18s. Email Black Cultural Archives at info@bcaheritage.org.uk or call 02075828516 for details.
Brixton’s force to be reckoned with by Jon Newman – Head of Lambeth Archives
19 October 2007, South London Press
If you mention the name Olive Morris in Lambeth most people think of the rather forbidding council offices on Brixton Hill which bear her name. Olive Morris House is on the right hand side as you go up from the Town Hall and has served since 1986 variously as Lambeth’s Finance and Housing Benefits office. Few would describe it as a lovely building and even the current makeover that will transform it into a Customer Centre is not going to change that rather brooding and monolithic quality that it has always had.
Anyone venturing inside Olive’s ‘house’- normally on business rather than pleasure – may notice the simple plaque in the foyer that records the opening of the building and its dedication to Olive, who died in 1979 at the age of just 27 and was the founder of the Brixton Black Women’s Group. It was one of a number of council buildings that were named or renamed in the 1980s to commemorate prominent black people in the borough. Who now remembers Paul Robeson House on South Lambeth Road, now the Comfort Inn hotel, or the fast-disappearing Mary Seacole House on Clapham High Street?
So far, so succinct. But just who was Olive Morris? There is surprisingly little information about her, either at Lambeth Archives or out on the web. But we do know that in her short life Olive not only helped found the Brixton Women’s Group but was also involved in setting up the Brixton Black Panthers – which in turn fed into various important Brixton-based groups like the Black Workers Movement and the Race Today Collective. She was also actively involved in the early squatting movement in the mid-70s. In other words she was an important player in aspects of Brixton’s recent history that could all too easily become forgotten.
Hopefully this is set to change thanks to a piece of work by local artist Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre who has just set up a web log to collect local people’s memories of Olive. The blog was launched at Lambeth Archives appropriately on the first day of Black History month and will remain open for contributions for the next 6 – 12 months.
If you want to find out more about Olive and the local politics of the 1970s; or if you have memories of those times yourselves that you would like to offer, then Ana Laura is waiting to hear from you. You can access the blog at http://rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com/
28
Sep
07
A World of Women
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Olive Morris was one of the women featured in A World of Women webpage, launched in 2001 by Mckenzie Heritage Pictures to mark International Women’s Day. The webpage featured images from the Mckenzie Heritage Pictures collection, and emphasis was given in the accompanying texts to the roles, achievements and contributions of African, Asian and Caribbean women.
After the closure of Mckenzie Heritage Pictures, its founder Anita Mckenzie hosted the page at her wesbite The Healing Image. This website has also been discountinued.
27
Sep
07
Squatters Handbook
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In 1979, the year of Olive Morris death, the Advisory Service for Squatters published the sixth edition of their Squatters Handbook. The cover of the booklet was graced with a picture of Olive climbing onto the roof of 121 Railton Road. This picture was taken during one of the attempted evictions of the squat, and several other pictures and news items about this particular eviction also appeared in the south London press.
Despite living side by side and having cordial relations, Black and White squatters did not organise themselves together. Liz Obi remembers that when they squatted 121 Railton Road, some white squatters came to help them turn on the gas and the electricity. During evictions some women from the ‘White Women Centre’ also came to show support, but that was as far as the relationship went. Black activists at the time were focused on the many specific issues affecting the Black community (police violence, discrimination in education and workplace, etc). The absence of joint activity might explain why in most accounts of the Brixton squatting movement written in later years, there are no references to the early Black squats of the 70s.
However, as the cover of the Squatters Handbook shows, in the late 70s Olive Morris was a well known and respected figure amongst White squatters.
26
Sep
07
The Heart of the Race
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Quote from:
The Heart of the Race. Black Women’s Lives in Britain
By Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe (Virago, 1985)
Beverley Bryan also spoke at the ceremony in which a Council building was given Olive Morris’s name. She now lives in Jamaica where she is Head of the Department of Educational Studies, University of the West Indies, Kingston.
Olive Morris
One of the founder members of the BWG (Black Women Group) was Olive Morris, who in her very short lifetime made an invaluable contribution to Brixton BGW, OWAAD (Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent) and the Black communities in both Brixton and Manchester. Like Claudia Jones, she represents the kind of Black women who, over the years, have thrown themselves into the struggle in this country and made an indelible, if anonymous, mark.
Olive Morris’s short life was similar in most respects to the lives of the majority of West Indian women living in Britain today. She came to Britain at the age of eight to live with her parents, and went to a secondary modern in south London where she experienced all the inequalities and injustices of the British education system. She left at sixteen with no qualifications, but undeterred, she went on to college to study ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels while at the same time holding down a full-time job.
It was during this phase of her life, when she was only seventeen years old, that Olive carried out her first conscious political act, one which was to led her into organised political activity for the rest of her life. This was in 1969, when she went to the aid of someone who was being harassed in the street by the police. His crime was to have been driving an expensive car, which the police found suspicious enough to warrant an arrest. As a result of her intervention, Olive herself was arrested and taken to the local police station, where she was made to strip and was brutally assaulted. The incident did not intimidate her, however. It simply strengthened her opposition to racism and injustice.
Olive went on to join the Black Panther movement, and it was here that she began to develop the political ideology which would determine her future actions. She gave a total commitment to the organisation’s work and development, and participated in nearly all of the battles which formed part of the community’s everyday life. She was in tune with the needs of the people, and always showed herself willing to take the initiative and act. This was certainly the case with the squatters movement in Brixton, when she organised with others like herself to squat because there was nowehere to live and no hope for a council flat. She became well known in the community for her willingness to help other Black people who were facing difficulties, whether with the schools, the police, housing, social security officials or the courts – whatever the issue, she was never too busy to offer support. For Olive, it was not just a case of doing things for those who couldn’t do it for themselves: it was her way of involving people in the struggle, showing by her own example the will to resist and to challenge.
After the decline of the Black Panther movement, Olive worked with some other Black women in the area ad with a group of brothers to set up Sarbarr Bookshop, the first Black self-help community bookshop in south London. During the same period, she helped form the Brixton Black Women’s Group, to which she made a lasting contribution. The political perspective she brought to the group helped it to develop a coherent political ideology, based on the needs of ordinary Black people in the community, which made clear links with other anti-imperialist struggles. She worked relentlessly to translate these ideas into practice, and most of her political work was done at grassroots level.
In 1975, she went to Manchester University to study for a social science degree. This in itself was an important step for Olive, who believed in education for the people. For her, going to university was not a status symbol, but an example to many young Black people of how to fight and win against a system which tries to push us to the bottom of the education pile and force us to compete against each other.
Unlike many students, Olive did not separate her work at the university from the struggles which were being waged in the rest of the community. In her work with the Manchester Black Women’s Co-operative and the Black Women’s Mutual Aid Group, which she helped to set up, she participated fully in the black community’s battles in Moss Side. Committed to furthering education rights for Black people, she campaigned with Black mothers for better schooling for their children and helped to set up a supplementary school and a Black bookshop in the area. Because she was an internationalist, she also worked at the university within the National Co-ordinating Committee of Overseas Students. She provided an essential link between international, community and women’s organisations, drawing the parallels between our experiences here and in the Third World.
In 1978, Olive visited China. The trip was of great significance to her, for she saw China as one of the countries which Third World peoples could learn a lot from, and which could serve as a model for us in self-help and self-reliance. The lessons she learn there were shared with everyone she worked with on her return. Sharing knowledge was always her practice.
Olive had always identified the relationships between the struggles of people in the Third World and those of the white working class. She recognised that it was a fight which had to be won through the contribution of both groups, and that we would need to work together if we were to bring about any meaningful changes. It was this awareness which was her greatest contribution to the political development of those she worked with.
When she returned to Brixton in 1978 after completing her studies, the work she had begun while in Manchester to launch OWAAD was taken up by other women in the Brixton Black Women’s Group. It was then that she began to suffer the symptoms of the cancer which killed her within the year. In her fight against leukemia, she displayed the same courage she has shown throughout her lifetime, and when she died on 12 July 1979, at the age of twenty-seven, she had already made her mark. She was mourned by all sections of the Black community, and by many others from outside it whose lives she had touched.
“Olive and I went to the same school. Even then she had that streak in her – in school, they would have called it rebelliousness or disruptiveness, but it was really a fearlessness about challenging injustice at whatever level. This made others very weary of her, she was so obviously a fighter. I saw her once confronting a policeman – it might have been when she was evicted. She went at him like a whirlwind and cussed him to heaven. And this policeman looked really taken aback, he didn’t know how to deal with someone who had no fear of him. He was meant to represent the big arm of the law. But because she was angry and she knew he was in the wrong, she didn’t hesitate.
She would take anybody on like that, even people in organisations if she thought that someone needed to expose their hypocrisy for mounting slogans and living a lie. Because of that, a lot of them saw her as a pain in the neck and she was too! She’d fight them physically, if it was necessary. If you moved with Olive, you couldn’t be a weak heart. She gave a lot of support to so many sisters though, when they came under pressure from the brothers at meeting or wherever. She was a real example, You didn’t see it then, of course, but that fearlessness of hers, and that genuine commitment she showed to the work she did made her stand out, made her special.
I remember when Olive was in Manchester, I went up to an education meeting she was organising with the Manchester Black Women’s group, and it struck me at the time how at home she was away from home. She had gone up to the university to study, but she made contact with people so easily that before you knew it she was right in there with the Black women in Moss Side, organising with them, taking things on. She could easily have found a student clique on the campus, but instead she sought out her people and just carried on the work we’d been doing in Brixton. But then she always was hot on personal commitment – not just showing willing, but showing determination. Her life is a kind of symbol to the people who knew her. People like Olive inspire you to resist.”
At her memorial ceremony in Brixton a few weeks after her death, several hundred people came to pay testimony to her remarkable courage and her fighting spirit. Those who knew her were left with her vision of a new society, and the lasting memory of one more Black woman who was not afraid to fight back.
26
Sep
07
Sabaar Bookshop
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The first person I ever spoke to who had known Olive Morris was Mr Oniel Williams. He told me there was some information published about Olive Morris in a book entitled: The Heart of the Race. Black Women’s Lives in Britain (Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe – Virago, 1985). The book is out of print and Brixton Library’s copy had gone missing. Liz Obi, who has a copy of the book, kindly lend me some photocopies. A transcript of the section on Olive Morris is posted separately.
Oniel told me he used to frequent a Black bookshop on 121 Railton Road where he had met Olive Morris. The book shop was called Sabaar, but I have also found references to it with other spellings: Sabbaar and Sarbbarr. Sabaar Bookshop was opened at 121 Railton Road, once Olive and Liz (the first squatters to live there) moved to another squat down at 64 Railton Road. The squat at 121 was then used as premises for the Brixton Black Panther Movement, and was soon developed into a Black advice center and bookshop. Olive was involved in setting up and running it.
Sabaar Bookshop is sometimes referenced as the first Black Bookshop in Brixton, but the first Black bookshop in Brixton had been Unity Bookshop that in 1973 had been burned to the ground when a firebomb was placed in the letter box. Sabaar Bookshop filled in the gap, but I haven’t been able to find out the exact dates it was open at 121 Railton Road, or any other information about it.
The importance of these bookshops is described in “We Shall Not Be Terrorized Out of Existence”: The Political Legacy of England’s Black Bookshops by Colin A. Beckles (Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 Sep., 1998)
Finally there were bookshops cum advice centers, such as the black people’s information centres, BLF’s Grassroots Storefront and BWM’s Unity Bookshop and the weekly or monthly newspapers: Black Voice (BUFP), Grassroots (BLF), Freedom News(BP: Black Panthers) Frontline (BBC Brixton), Uhuru (BPFM: Black People’s Freedom Movement) BPFM Weekly and the BWAC Weekly (Black Workers Action Committee) and the less frequent and more theoretical journal Black Liberator. A theory can be purported that these small publications paved the way for stronger forms of black literary self-expression in the form of poetry and the novel. The connection is valid since this was to happen a few years later in this decade of the black journal.
The Radical Bookshop History website lists Sabbaar as a Black bookshop active during the late 70s and early 80s at 378 Coldharbour Lane, where the Archives and Museum of Black Heritage and then the Black Cultural Archives were subsequently located during the 80s and 90s. So it seems that Sabbar was moved from 121 Railton Road to Colharbour Lane at some point in the late 70s. In the same website there is reference to a later bookshop at 121 Railton Road, run by anarchists and feminists from 1982 onwards (possibly until the final closure of the squat in 1999).
Do you remember anything about Sabaar or Unity Bookshops, or were you involved in the running of these bookshops? Perhaps you still have copies of some of the publications that they sold, or have a picture of the shop at the time.
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