The campaign for classroom equality and ethnic identity

Published: 11 February 2010

ERIC and Jessica Huntley shaped and influenced the course of black history in London.

The couple founded the independent Bogle L’Ouverture Press, best known for launching the career of the influential writer  Walter Rodney.

In the late 1960s, they campaigned for extra lessons for Caribbean pupils on black history, maths and English in what became known as the Supplementary School Movement.

It is the subject of fifth Annual Huntley Conference taking place at the London Metropolitan Archives later this month.

Keynote speaker Dr Aggrey Burke, the eminent psychiatrist and adviser to the British Medical Association, said: “It was in the late 1960s that the government realised they had a problem with immigration and the education system. 

“Because of the law in education you had to provide people with schools when they arrived. Before long it became obvious that the education system was finding it difficult to absorb Caribbean children.

“We are talking about people who were largely outcasts of a barbarous and very brutal process of populating the area by white masters and their slaves. The only history they had been taught was British. 

“It meant you had a group of people who were very British, coming to Britain, and believing they were British, without a sense of there being anything else. Then they were rejected because they were black.”

Black children were sent to specialist behavioural schools and their education suffered as a result. 

A progressive group was set up with the help of the Huntleys that called attention to the way black children were made “educationally subnormal by the British education system”.

It called for “Supplementary Schools” to provide extra tuition to these pupils for two or three hours on Saturdays.

Dr Burke said: “It became quite a thing and there were positive outcomes for those who went. They got black history and maths and English lessons. 

“The ones who didn’t go were just taught British history. This is the critical issue. 

“The identity issue is  a question which the Supplementary Schools were able to get into. 

“It gave pupils a sense of being Caribbean, not just part of a school system that saw them as inferior.”

Dr Burke, who was born in Jamaica and came to Britain aged 15 in 1959, believes there were “huge selection problems” and that the service only reached between 5 and 10 per cent of the children it could have done.

He said: “This attempt by the Supplementary School was a powerful thing, but how did it get on and how effective has it been? That’s what we will be discussing.”

• The day-long event includes children’s workshops, film showings, poetry and music. It is at the London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, EC1 on February 20. Entry: £5. For more information contact 020 7332 3851.