Dorothy Kuya: Liverpool, Education and the Fight Against Racism

In October 1974, Dorothy Kuya wrote to The Times about a court decision allowing the Preston Dockers’ Labour Club to maintain its colour bar. Her letter described trying to explain the ruling to her niece. How could a child whose family included a Nigerian grandfather and a white Liverpool docker be denied the future freedom to enjoy an evening out wherever she chose? Kuya’s argument was rooted in ordinary life. Black people should be able to use places of leisure without having their belonging questioned at the door. She refused to accept exclusion as a harmless matter of club tradition. ¹

A Liverpool childhood and an early political education

Kuya grew up in Liverpool 8, within a Black community whose history reached far beyond the post-war migrations usually associated with modern Black Britain. Her mother was white and English; her biological father was from Sierra Leone. She took the surname of her Nigerian stepfather, a seaman. Journalist Angela Cobbinah, who knew and interviewed her, described a close family and a neighbourhood sustained by social clubs and relationships across different nationalities. Kuya also recalled the sharp distinction between that sense of community and the hostility Black residents could encounter beyond it. ²

Politics entered her life early. As a teenager she attended Young Communist League meetings, distributed leaflets and sold the Daily Worker. Her parents encouraged an interest in left-wing newspapers and local anti-colonial organisations. Secretarial skills became useful in the work of groups including the Colonial People’s Defence Association. Meetings, political classes and conferences provided another form of education, introducing her to arguments about colonialism, work and inequality. The Communist movement gave her a setting in which to develop as an organiser and public speaker. ³

From nursing to the classroom

Her route into professional life involved several changes. After leaving school she worked as a secretary, then trained as a nurse before moving towards teaching. Her first teaching post was at Edith Neville School in the Somers Town area of London. This experience placed her close to children’s daily encounters with education: the authority of the teacher, the books available to a class, and the assumptions adults brought to their work. The classroom would remain central to her campaigning after she left full-time teaching. ¹⁰

Adult study helped make that change possible. Following a period living and working in Geneva, Kuya received a scholarship to Hillcroft, a residential college for women in Surbiton. Teacher training at Philippa Fawcett College followed. These stages in her education matter because her later challenge to schools came from someone who had worked through their professional requirements. She understood the practical responsibilities involved in educating children and brought that knowledge into discussions of racial bias, training and the material teachers put before their pupils. ⁴

Building support in Liverpool

In 1970 Kuya returned to Liverpool to become its first Senior Community Relations Officer. She held the post for seven years. The role placed her within an organisation expected to address discrimination while working with communities who experienced its effects. She supported initiatives that extended beyond individual complaints, including the Liverpool 8 Writers’ Workshop. Her approach combined the resources available through an official position with the knowledge and initiative of local people. It was a demanding combination: public institutions needed to be challenged as well as persuaded to provide help. ⁵

Louis Julienne, a writer who knew her, identified several projects developed with her input during these years. They included South Liverpool Personnel, an employment and training agency; the Black Social Workers Project; and Ujaama House, which supported homeless young people. These were practical responses to difficulties in finding work, obtaining appropriate support and securing somewhere to live. They also created opportunities for Black people to develop skills and exercise responsibility within organisations serving their own communities. ⁶

The writers’ workshop offered a different kind of opportunity. Among those who attended was Levi Tafari, then working in catering, who went on to become a performance poet. His writing drew on his Liverpool upbringing and Rastafari beliefs, reaching audiences through performance and educational work. The workshop’s place in that development shows why spaces for cultural expression belonged alongside employment and welfare projects. A community could support people in finding their own language for experiences that others too often defined for them. ⁷

Challenging the books children were given

Kuya’s educational work became particularly influential through the scrutiny of children’s books. As a governor at Arundel Comprehensive School, she worked with headteacher Olive Cope and other teachers to examine racial bias. A Community Relations Council working party produced Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Racial Bias in Books We Teach, bringing together reviews and recommendations. Exhibitions helped place the disputed material before a wider public. This was detailed work: examining what books said, how they pictured people and which assumptions passed into the classroom under the authority of education. ⁸

She became an active participant in Teachers Against Racism and went on to chair the National Committee on Racism in Children’s Books, established in 1976. Its publication, Dragon’s Teeth, circulated criticism and guidance. Invitations to conferences widened the reach of the campaign; in 1978 the World Council of Churches approached her about a workshop associated with the Frankfurt Book Fair. A concern developed through local schools had become part of an international discussion among educators and publishers. ⁸

The writer Beverley Naidoo later placed Kuya’s editorial work within a broader change in British children’s publishing. Naidoo recalled parents searching for books in which Black characters appeared without degrading stereotypes, and the importance of bookshops such as New Beacon and Bogle-L’Ouverture. Reviewing journals, bibliographies and recommendations helped teachers and librarians make different choices. Kuya contributed to that practical infrastructure. Challenging a harmful book also meant helping an adult choose a better one, and making publishers answer questions they might previously have dismissed. ⁹

London responsibilities and women’s organising

In 1979 Kuya took up a race relations role at Haringey Council. She later served on the independent inquiry into the Broadwater Farm disturbances of October 1985, chaired by Lord Gifford. Cobbinah remembered watching her question witnesses and seeing how firmly she pressed a point. Such work demanded both familiarity with institutions and a willingness to challenge their account of events. Kuya brought the experience of community relations into an inquiry concerned with the circumstances behind a profoundly damaging confrontation. ¹⁰

Her work also continued within the National Assembly of Women, which she had joined in its early years. By 1983 she was general secretary and by 1987 vice-chair. She challenged the lack of diversity within the organisation and encouraged women including filmmaker Bea Freeman and activist Linda Loy to become involved. Equality inside a campaigning organisation required attention as well as equality in the wider world. Kuya used her position to widen participation and bring more Black women into its discussions and decisions. ³

She also helped establish Affirmata, a consultancy concerned with race equality, and chaired the London housing association Ujima. Tony Soares, a founder and director of Ujima, remembered her as both supportive and decisive. These responsibilities required the less visible work of sustained organisational leadership: helping people reach decisions, supporting those carrying out the work and maintaining direction. Her experience in housing would become especially relevant when she returned to Liverpool and confronted the threatened destruction of streets in her own neighbourhood. ⁶

The fight to keep Granby standing

Back in Liverpool during the early 1990s, Kuya became one of the founding members of the Granby Residents Association, established in 1993. She lived on Jermyn Street and opposed plans to demolish homes in the surrounding area. The association provided a forum through which residents could organise and represent their interests. Surviving agendas and minutes document that continuing work, while its newsletter, The Jangler, first issued in December 2002, shared local information and opportunities. Keeping people informed was part of keeping a community capable of acting together. ¹¹

Cobbinah’s later interviews captured Kuya’s anger at the damage already done. Houses had been emptied and boarded up, and the loss of shops and neighbours had changed everyday life. Kuya understood demolition as a threat to the Black community’s continued presence in the area. Her resistance therefore involved more than the fate of her own house. The eventual survival of four streets came after substantial losses; she did not regard it as grounds for forgetting the people and homes already displaced. ²

The surviving streets were Beaconsfield, Cairns, Jermyn and Ducie. Residents subsequently established the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust in 2011, continuing the work of bringing homes back into use. Kuya’s campaigning belonged to this longer collective effort. Its records show meetings, publicity and competing proposals as well as protest. They help explain how a neighbourhood’s survival can depend on years of persistent attention from people who refuse to let apparently settled decisions pass without a challenge. ¹⁴

Reparations and Liverpool’s public history

Kuya’s concern with Liverpool’s future was closely connected to its account of the past. She served on the advisory committee for the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, which opened at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in 1994, and remained a determined advocate for the International Slavery Museum, opened in 2007. With fellow activist Eric Lynch, she also developed walking tours examining the city’s connections to slavery. Streets and buildings became places where residents and visitors could confront a history easily obscured by familiar surroundings. ⁴

She was also part of the circle that established the African Reparations Movement in Britain in 1993, alongside Bernie Grant, Linda Bellos, Sam Walker, Stephen Small and others. The movement addressed the consequences of enslavement and colonialism through public meetings, research and educational campaigns. It also pressed for the return of African objects held in British collections. This widened the meaning of historical responsibility: the argument concerned what institutions should do with inherited wealth, cultural property and power, as well as what they should say about the past. ¹²

Liverpool’s Slavery Remembrance Day, first commemorated in 1999, gave public history an annual civic presence. Kuya helped its development. The programme brought people together through a walk, a waterfront libation ceremony and opportunities for learning and discussion. National Museums Liverpool later described its purposes as remembering enslaved people, recognising resistance and confronting the continuing effects of slavery. Commemoration linked historical knowledge with the lives of people living in the city, making space for reflection beyond a museum visit. ^{13, 16}

A record that others could use

Kuya died in 2013. In 2014 filmmaker Amma Asante, director of Belle, delivered the first Dorothy Kuya Slavery Remembrance Memorial Lecture. The honour placed her name within the institution whose development she had supported, while continuing a public conversation about Black lives, history and representation. ^{5, 15}

Wider recognition followed. In 2021, a University of Liverpool student vote selected Dorothy Kuya as the new name for a hall of residence previously named after William Gladstone. The campaign had involved petitions, open letters and discussions with university leaders. It brought a local Black woman’s history into the everyday geography of student life. Another formal recognition came in 2023, when Liverpool City Council announced a posthumous Citizen of Honour award. ^{16, 17}

Her papers have also supported new work. During the Writing on the Wall archive project, community participants helped research a walking tour and share material with residents at Granby Winter Garden. The documents returned to the neighbourhood as resources people could examine and discuss. They preserve the working detail behind Kuya’s public achievements: the records of campaigns, meetings and arguments through which people sought change. That detail allows a later generation to understand how the work was done, and where they might begin their own. ¹⁴

Sources

1. Camilla Schofield — In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England.

2. Angela Cobbinah — Dorothy Kuya RIP, 1933–2013.

3. Writing on the Wall — Dorothy Kuya Archive: International Women’s Day.

4. University of Liverpool Special Collections & Archives — Who was Dorothy Kuya?.

5. Writing on the Wall — Dorothy Kuya Creative Archives Project.

6. Louis Julienne — Dorothy Kuya obituary.

7. University of Liverpool — Local poet and performer Levi Tafari joins us.

8. Writing on the Wall — Dorothy and the Dragon’s Teeth.

9. Beverley Naidoo — What Is and What Might Be.

10. Islington Tribune — Dorothy Kuya was too often overlooked but now you can hear her story.

11. Writing on the Wall — Dorothy in Residence.

12. The Bernie Grant Archive — Reparations.

13. National Museums Liverpool — Written evidence on the social impact of participation in culture and sport.

14. Writing on the Wall — Dorothy at WoWFEST.

15. National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside — Annual Report and Accounts 2014–2015.

16. Liverpool Guild of Students — Revealed: Brand new name for Gladstone Hall.

17. Liverpool City Council — Shining a light on Black creativity, heritage and achievements.