IN DEPTH


Black Cultural Archives: A ‘ruby’ in Brixton


The Black Cultural Archives moved into its permanent home in Brixton’s Windrush Square eight years ago. Here, Collections and Research Manager at BCA, Dr Hannah Ishmael looks at how the BCA has grown and why its mission to collect, preserve and celebrate the histories of people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK is inspiring individuals and communities.


ON the 24 July 2014 in front of a crowd of thousands, Black Cultural Archives opened its doors to its first permanent home, the national Black heritage centre at 1 Windrush Square. We are a unique independent archive based in the heart of Brixton, South London, our archive seeks to transform our understanding of local, national and global black history. I have been involved with Black Cultural Archives since 2012 when I joined as the assis- tant archivist. I undertook my MA in Archives and Records Management at the University of Liverpool in 2010 and coming to Black Cultural Archives was my first professional post. I worked at Black Cultural Archives until 2014, working on the move to our national heritage centre, before moving on to UCL to undertake a PhD in the Department of Information Studies. I returned to Black Cultural Archives in 2019 as the Archivist, moving to Collections and Research Manager in 2022. My current role is to provide strategic direction for the collections, and I am currently supported by two members of the collections team, alongside other members of the organisation. Black Cultural Archives was established as the African Peoples’ Historical Monument Foun- dation (which remains our official charity title) in 1981, with the aim of providing educational resources to intervene in historical narratives on the black presence in the United Kingdom. Since our inception, 40 years ago, we have grown to become a key institution dedicated to document- ing the histories of black British communities, becoming the ‘home’ of black British history. We provide free access to our unique set of archives, museum objects and reference library at our home, 1 Windrush Square. We use our mission to collect, preserve and celebrate the histories of people of African and of Caribbean descent in the UK and to inspire and give strength to individuals, communities


April-May 2022


Dr Hannah Ishmael is Collections and Research Manager at the Black Cultural Archives.


and society. Our founders were concerned with the negative effects of the misrepresentation of Black histories on young people, particularly within the school system and looked to find ways to address the pervasive racism that represented black history as either non-existent or distorted it. When founded in the 1980s, the founders of Black Cultural Archives found it difficult to find material that related to black life and the black experience, but they also found that archives, libraries and museums were also unwilling to collect contempo- rary material of black communities. In terms of situating the development of Black Cultural Archives, we owe our existence to the period of the ‘Windrush’ and the greater migration of peoples from the Caribbean and the continent of Africa. This migration, a result of the Transat- lantic Slave Trade and the period of colonialism unmasked Britain’s race ‘issues’ which by the 1980s had become increasingly visible and violent and was affecting all areas of society including housing, education, employment and the relation- ship between black communities and the police that exploded onto the streets in the 1980s in the forms of disturbances across England. It is impor- tant to note that our collections are both borne out of the context and frustrations of the black British


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 41


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