#pacm

“After the start of the service a line-up of the people whom I had met at the funeral parlour got up to deliver eulogies. The minister, who turned out to be young, white and female, told a story about my brother. It appeared that he had been a regular church-goer, and they had shared several serious conversations about spiritual and social matters. He had often helped to entertain the children of the congregation, who had loved him, and the previous Easter he had taken part in a pageant in which he played the part of Jesus. His empathy with Christ’s suffering, the minister said, made him so convincing that he had moved all his young friends and several of the audience to tears. My jaw literally dropped open with amazement. As far as I knew, until he died, my brother had been a passionate believer in a complex blend of Marxism, pan-Africanism and various kinds of black nationalism. At the end of the 1960s the first notable public demonstration he had organized had been when he marched his band of Black Power followers into Manchester cathedral one Sunday, ordered the Dean out of the pulpit and delivered an oration about converting church property in the city for the use of poor black people. In the time we were together I had often heard him launch into bitterly humorous diatribes about White Christians like this American minister. During his last years in Britain his closest friend among British politicians had been Arthur Scargill. He had worked on the Yorkshire mines and often expressed his contempt for people who who came into politics with soft hands. In our last conversation he had exploded in rage when I used the term ‘black British’.”

د.فوزي يونس: كيف تسهم آلية إدارة الكربون في بناء اقتصاد منخفض الانبعاثات؟

“Few places demonstrate as clearly as Manchester, the crucial role of black labour power in the development of the productive forces and the political economy of Britain. If Liverpool and Bristol are associated with the accumulation of profit from the slave trade then Manchester must be given pride of place in the application of that accumulation to the development of the industrial revolution. Manchester’s consciousness of black people had therefore from the beginning of its development been connected with its economic life. Up to and including the 1930s black settlement in Manchester was concentrated in Cheetham Hill and some areas of Salford, because of their proximity to the docks…By the 1940s West Indian servicemen and a few war production workers had began to appear as well as larger numbers of West African merchant seamen. The more successful of them became small businessmen who were able to contribute to the funding of the 1945 Pan-African Conference. They were also able to move their families into the old working-class slum of Hulme, where Engels had earlier gathered much of his materials for his study of conditions of the Working Class in England. At the end of the Second World War, the rise of West Indian immigration to the North West was signalled by the arrival of ‘Empire Windrush’ at Liverpool. In common with communities in other cities, Manchester’s blacks now formed a replacement population for white workers refusing to do unpalatable or low-wage jobs. The No 53 bus was contemptuously christened the ‘African Queen’, which was in reference to the fact that thousands of Manchester’s black workers, travelled to the massive industrial estate of Trafford Park to badly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs. Male black workers were concentrated in low-wage occupations –public transport, cleansing, street production, rubber processing and regeneration of ‘health-hazardous jobs – asbestos processing. At Trafford Park, many black women worked in food production and packaging. Apart from the manufacture of rubber goods, light engineering and plastic extrusion, a number of black women made their living in the clothing trade some parts of which was notorious for sweatshop conditions and low wages.”

His intellectual mentors were Bernard Coard, Ron Phillips and Marcus Garvey, whom he had met as a child in Guyana and who inspired his belief in the importance of African-Caribbean cultural identity. Berry's community work had a permanently campaigning element; he was secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, which played an important part in achieving the 1976 Race Relations Act, and also founded the Manchester branch of the Pan-African Congress Movement. The practical side of these initiatives particularly appealed to him, and he set up a bookshop specialising in African-Caribbean history and culture. He also organised the country's first Saturday schools, designed to give black children pride in their background. Culture Week, the forerunner to the current Black History Month, owed much to him and he also worked with local colleges to set up courses in motor vehicle engineering and TV and radio repairs. These initiatives earned him respect, and not just from the African-Caribbean young. When he turned up day after day in his role as Courthouse Edwards, the magistrates and employment tribunals knew that they were dealing with a practical, down-to-earth man rather than a blusterer or demagogue.