Leila Hassan Howe: Race Today and a Life of Organising

Preparing for the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981, Leila Hassan Howe coordinated contacts and coach arrangements for groups travelling to London. Information arrived by telephone from organisers around the country. In her recollection, Race Today’s office became a centre of the mobilisation, where producing leaflets went together with speaking to community groups and keeping bereaved families involved. ²

That combination of editorial and organisational work runs through her career. Hassan Howe helped build the Race Today Collective, took responsibility for its magazine and participated in campaigns that changed the public visibility of Black protest. She subsequently returned to this history as an editor, helping readers encounter the ideas and experiences recorded by an earlier generation. ¹

Growing up between London and Zanzibar

Hassan Howe was born in Poplar, East London, to a Zanzibari father and an English mother. Her father, a former seaman, ran a halal butcher’s business. In her 2025 oral history she recalled moving with him to Zanzibar in the early 1960s, experiencing its transition from colonial rule, and returning to Britain in 1964. ²

At Plaistow Grammar School, she recalled being one of three Black girls and enduring racist taunts. ³

By the early 1970s, she was involved in the Black Unity and Freedom Party. Her political education developed within the British Black Power movement, which connected events overseas with struggles over how Black people were treated in Britain. She also worked at the Institute of Race Relations, where a dispute about the institution’s direction would give her a direct role in changing who controlled the production of knowledge about race. ⁴

Changing the Institute of Race Relations

The institute’s journal, Race Today, was itself caught up in arguments about the relationship between scholarship and political action. In 1972, staff and members challenged an approach they considered too detached from the communities being discussed. Librarian Ambalavaner Sivanandan was central to the successful movement for a more radical direction. Research, in this understanding, should assist people resisting racism and help explain the institutions they confronted. ⁵

Hassan Howe worked alongside Sivanandan in the effort to transform the institute’s leadership. The episode matters in her story because her involvement in publishing began with a struggle over power within an organisation. Who chose the subjects, who decided which experiences counted and who the work served were practical questions. In 1973 she joined the editorial work of Race Today under Darcus Howe, becoming part of the collective that developed around it. ⁴

The magazine subsequently moved from the institute’s premises in King’s Cross to Brixton. Its position within a neighbourhood of Black political and cultural activity helped shape its character. Reporting on workplaces, police encounters and community campaigns could sit beside writing about literature or music. The range reflected a conviction that the people confronting discrimination also created the culture through which they understood themselves. ⁵

Learning the craft of editing

Hassan Howe learned journalistic skills from the Caribbean writer Andrew Salkey. He asked her to write about her experiences, then worked through the writing with her. She also studied Darcus Howe’s editing and developed her own column, Without Malice. Her account presents editorial confidence as something acquired through practice, correction and encouragement. ²

An issue from July 1974 makes the publication’s working world unusually tangible. Its masthead lists Hassan among the staff. Readers’ letters discuss overseas students organising for themselves, the danger of racist groups and the need for information to challenge racism within a railway union. A report from a Ford worker describes conditions in the Dagenham engine plant, while another follows workers’ efforts to organise at Fidelity Radio in west London. ⁷

These contributions show a journal interested in what people knew from the shop floor, the college meeting or the picket line. They place readers inside arguments about wages, representation and organisation. The same issue carries international reporting, including the railway strike in India. Britain’s workplace disputes belonged within a much wider conversation about labour and power. This was the demanding mixture of correspondence, reporting and political argument that Hassan helped produce. ⁷

Workers, women and political Blackness

Race Today’s use of Black identity drew together people of African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds around shared struggles. Hassan Howe has explained this political Blackness through the lives of immigrants and their children seeking equal rights. It rested on organising together across different national origins. The collective’s commitment was to working people, including those whose qualifications had brought little recognition in Britain. ⁸

For Asian factory workers, she recalled, conflict could involve trade unions as well as employers. Racist assumptions within the labour movement could leave workers isolated when they challenged low pay or unequal treatment. Supporting their independent organisation meant questioning who had the authority to speak for them. Her account helps explain why Race Today could support a strike while sharply criticising established labour leaders. ⁸

The 1974 Imperial Typewriters strike in Leicester became an important test of that politics. Race Today recorded the organising, fundraising and discussions that sustained the strikers, paying particular attention to Asian women’s participation. In a speech in Manchester in 1982, Hassan Howe presented Imperial as a significant success. Her emphasis was on the capacity workers had developed to organise for themselves. ⁹

The outcome was more complicated than a straightforward victory: the workers made limited concrete gains and the factory subsequently closed. Research by Saskia Papadakis also shows that participants remembered the strike in different ways. Some emphasised solidarity among women or the opportunities they pursued afterwards. Recognising those differences makes the collective’s position clearer. Race Today was both recording a struggle and arguing for a particular understanding of its political importance. ⁹

From New Cross to the streets of London

The New Cross fire of 18 January 1981 brought grief and anger to the centre of Black public life. Thirteen young people, aged between fourteen and twenty-two, died after a fire at a birthday party. The New Cross Massacre Action Committee, chaired by John La Rose, challenged the handling of the investigation and the response of government and the press. Its campaign sought accountability while supporting survivors and bereaved families. ¹⁰

On 2 March, an estimated 15,000–20,000 people joined the Black People’s Day of Action. The march travelled from New Cross through central London to Hyde Park. Holding it on a Monday brought the protest into the working day, while its route through Fleet Street confronted the national press. The committee’s own fact-finding and its demands for justice were part of the organising behind the public demonstration. The cause of the fire remained unresolved; a second inquest in 2004 returned another open verdict. ¹⁰

Hassan Howe was one of the organisers of this mobilisation. Her place in its history connects the well-known images of thousands marching with the less visible work required to bring them together. It also places her within a broad movement of families, local groups and campaigners whose demands could no longer be contained within a small meeting or a specialist publication. ¹

Listening to Brixton

When Brixton erupted later in 1981, the Race Today office stood close to the events on Railton Road. The collective interviewed participants, seeking to understand the confrontation through their experiences. In a later interview, Hassan Howe recalled young people explaining how they had organised themselves in the streets. She also remembered local households helping people who had been injured. Her account emphasised knowledge and relationships within the neighbourhood. ¹¹

Discussing this history in 2020, she distinguished the Brixton uprising’s immediate confrontation with policing from the more explicitly stated demands of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. She continued to emphasise the position of working-class and unemployed Black people. Her testimony follows the way protest develops from particular conditions, with different generations choosing their demands and methods. It brings the argument back to the people taking action and what they hoped to change. ¹¹

Culture, publishing and the editor’s chair

Race Today’s cultural connections extended beyond its own pages. Race Today Publications joined New Beacon Books and Bogle L’Ouverture Publications in founding the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. Beginning in 1982, the fairs brought publishers and readers together with writers, musicians and artists. Their accompanying programmes included discussions, performances, films and workshops. Through this shared publishing world, the collective helped create places where political argument and creative work could reach audiences together. ¹²

The fairs also made international exchange a practical activity. Participants came from the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe to order and distribute books as well as discuss them. Forums returned to questions of women’s writing, education and collective action. Events in cities beyond London gave the debates different audiences. This infrastructure helped small publishers and political organisations make connections that individual publications could rarely sustain alone. ¹²

Hassan Howe became Race Today’s editor in 1985 and remained in that role until publication ended in 1988. Historian Preeti Dhillon places her work within the wider contribution of Black women to radical publishing. That perspective brings editorial labour into view alongside the more frequently remembered demonstrations and trials. Selecting, preparing and circulating writing helped determine which experiences entered a public record and which people could answer accounts written about them by others. ¹⁴

Culture was also a personal source of political understanding. As a young woman, Hassan Howe found powerful recognition in James Baldwin’s novels. ²

Baldwin’s connections with the collective became public occasions. In 1985, he attended the third exhibition of contemporary Black art organised by Creation for Liberation, Race Today’s cultural wing, in Brixton. After his death, Race Today organised a memorial at Brixton Town Hall on 3 February 1988. Maya Angelou, Florence Alexis, David Baldwin, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Caryl Phillips were among those involved. The gathering connected a writer’s international reputation with the readers and cultural organisers who had made his work part of their lives in Britain. ¹³

Bringing the record to new readers

In 2019, Hassan Howe co-edited Here to Stay, Here to Fight: A Race Today Anthology with Paul Field, Robin Bunce and Margaret Peacock. The book gathered articles and extracts from the journal’s history, adding introductions to explain their contexts. Its sections follow subjects including Black youth, women’s struggles, Asian communities and workers, justice campaigns and culture. Readers could encounter a range of voices together, seeing how arguments about race, sex and class crossed between different campaigns. ⁶

The anthology’s contributors include C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Its arrangement makes connections between forms of activity that can become separated in historical accounts: Asian self-defence, campaigns over housing, workplace organising and artistic expression. Introductions by people associated with the collective place the original material in context, while a final section considers its relationship to later movements. Hassan Howe was helping present a shared history in which many people had spoken and acted. ⁶

In 2023, she also co-edited a special issue of Race Today, its first since 1988. ¹

The publication was accompanied by the launch of an online archive. A Goldsmiths event on 3 March brought Gary Younge together with the Darcus Howe Legacy Collective to mark the publication. The issue connected earlier organising with newer discussions, including interviews involving Black Lives Matter activists, Sonia Boyce, Diane Abbott and Kehinde Andrews. Poetry, photography and international perspectives continued the magazine’s broad cultural and political scope. ¹⁵

Making the journal accessible gives readers the means to examine its arguments as well as its achievements. Hassan Howe’s contribution now spans the production of that record and its return to public circulation. The articles, correspondence and campaigns she helped sustain allow later generations to trace how people organised, what they disagreed about and how they attempted to change the conditions of their lives. ¹⁵

Sources

1. Goldsmiths, University of London — Leila Hassan Howe.

2. University of Manchester, James Baldwin and Britain — Leila Hassan Howe oral history.

3. Al Jazeera — Leila Hassan Howe interview.

4. University of Westminster — Leila Hassan Howe shares stories from the British Black power movement.

5. Goldsmiths Library — How Race Today Evolved into the Forefront Radical, Anti-Racist Publication in 1970s Britain.

6. Pluto Press — Here to Stay, Here to Fight: A Race Today Anthology.

7. Race Today — Volume 6, Number 7, July 1974.

8. Socialist Worker — Leila Hassan Howe: race, class and struggle.

9. Saskia Papadakis, Ethnic and Racial Studies — Black struggles, black workers? Race Today and the 1974 Imperial Typewriters strike.

10. George Padmore Institute — New Cross Massacre Campaign.

11. Africa Is a Country — Revisiting the Brixton struggle: interview with Leila Hassan and Farrukh Dhondy.

12. George Padmore Institute — The International Book Fairs.

13. University of Manchester, James Baldwin and Britain — Timeline.

14. Women’s History Network — Quiet resistance: Black women in British publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, by Preeti Dhillon.

15. Goldsmiths, University of London — Gary Younge Talk on Darcus Howe, Race Today: Legacies of Resistance.