The British Black Panthers: Organising, Education and Community

A movement made in Britain

The British Black Panthers challenged racism through demonstrations and the teaching of Black history. They developed their own organisation in Britain, drawing inspiration from American Black Power without becoming an official branch of the United States party. Their campaigns addressed the society in which their members lived: a country where discrimination shaped ordinary opportunities and the National Front was taking its anti-immigration politics onto London’s streets. ¹

Photographer Neil Kenlock helped give this movement a public face. His work, now held in collections including London Museum, records people taking part in demonstrations and claiming a visible place in public life. The pictures belong to a wider record of Black London that emphasises personality and strength. They invite attention to the people who made a movement possible, alongside the slogans through which it announced itself. ¹

From Black Power to a new organisation

The Panthers emerged from a period of intense discussion about Black Power. Stokely Carmichael’s appearance at London’s Dialectics of Liberation congress in 1967 gave those debates a particularly public platform. Activists were already considering how people subjected to racism could organise independently, defend themselves and change the terms on which they participated in British society. Different organisations developed from these arguments, with the Panthers forming one part of a wider political field. ²

Obi Egbuna founded the British Black Panthers in the summer of 1968. After his arrest that year, Altheia Jones-LeCointe became central to the movement’s leadership. Its concerns encompassed policing, employment, housing and education. Meetings and reading connected political ideas to these immediate struggles, while its newspaper, Freedom News, communicated campaigns to a wider audience. The movement offered an organised setting in which members could examine experiences often treated as private misfortunes and ask what collective action might change. ²

Who could belong?

Membership crossed boundaries of origin. South Asian participants included writer Farrukh Dhondy, activist Mala Sen and artist Vivan Sundaram. Their involvement reflected an understanding of Blackness that could describe political solidarity among people of African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds who confronted racism and carried histories shaped by colonial rule. This was a particular political use of the word, rather than a claim that everyone shared the same culture or experience. ³

The South Asian Britain research project records connections with organisations including the Indian Workers’ Association. Such relationships required contact between existing groups, each with its own history and priorities. The coalition was an achievement people worked towards, not something that followed automatically from being classified as outsiders. Its participants sought enough common ground to act together while bringing different languages, experiences and political traditions into the movement. ³

Race, class and the legacy of empire

The movement’s ambitions extended beyond gaining acceptance within existing institutions. Research by John Narayan, based on contemporary newspapers, pamphlets and other archives, shows how British Black Power connected racism at home to imperialism and economic exploitation abroad. The Panthers treated discrimination in work, housing and policing as part of a larger distribution of power. Their politics asked who benefited from that arrangement and how it might be changed. ⁴

Narayan identifies Panther support for struggles beyond Black communities, including coverage of miners and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in, and solidarity with opposition to internment in Northern Ireland. These connections make little sense if Black Power is understood solely as separation between racial groups. The movement’s arguments were radical and international: it sought alliances against exploitation while insisting that racism within British working-class life had to be confronted. Supporting workers did not require overlooking the barriers encountered by Black workers. Organising locally could therefore sit alongside criticism of the global economic order. ⁴

The education of a schoolboy

Linton Kwesi Johnson encountered the Panthers while he was still at school. In a 2011 interview, he recalled seeing their newspaper being sold on a Saturday, attending meetings and becoming involved in the youth section. What attracted him was the movement’s educational work. Black history and literature offered knowledge that helped him understand his African roots and his place in the world. ⁵

Johnson’s recollection describes learning through involvement. He encountered books, but also the practical work of organising and encouraging support for a cause. Poetry grew from that political engagement. His later literary achievement should not obscure the younger person finding a language for experiences he was trying to understand. A newspaper seller and a meeting could open a route into sustained study. The youth section gave that process a collective setting, with other people asking questions, recommending reading and turning an emerging political awareness towards action. ⁵

Teachers, artists and political learning

Beverley Bryan’s route into the movement also involved literature and education. In an interview conducted in 2022, she recalled experiences of racism at school and the importance of reading James Baldwin. Through the Black Arts Workshop at the West Indian Students’ Union, she became involved with poetry, drama and work with young people. Cultural activity helped create the relationships through which political involvement developed. ⁶

Working as a teacher in Brixton, Bryan met her former schoolmate Olive Morris again. Morris’s account of being beaten by police helped draw her towards the Panthers. Bryan remembered spending about three years in the movement before becoming involved in the Brixton Black Women’s Group. Her account shows how entry into an organisation could grow from an existing friendship and a concrete incident, alongside broader political ideas. People arrived with skills and commitments formed elsewhere; the movement gave those resources another collective purpose. ⁶

Bryan also organised Saturday schooling. UCL’s account of her educational career identifies her work introducing Black history into her primary-school classroom during the 1970s. These commitments crossed the boundary between voluntary activity and paid employment. The teacher bringing neglected histories into a classroom and the activist helping organise supplementary learning were often the same person. Education was a sustained practice through which children could gain knowledge and adults could dispute what schools considered worth teaching. ⁷

A newspaper made from working lives

Freedom News helped turn experience into a public argument. In his autobiographical account for the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive, Dhondy describes producing the paper with other members and taking advice from the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James. James urged them to report what was happening in people’s workplaces and lives. Dhondy recalls material from a bus conductor, while his own experience as a teacher supplied reports about schools. ⁸

Such journalism depended on access to knowledge that an outside reporter might miss. Members could recognise a workplace grievance or a school practice because they encountered it themselves. Producing a paper then required them to describe the problem clearly enough for other people to discuss. Dhondy also recalls preparing evening reports during the Mangrove trial at the Old Bailey. Writing became part of the work of sustaining a campaign: readers needed information while events unfolded, and the defendants’ supporters needed a means of putting their account into circulation. ⁸

The Mangrove campaign

The campaign around the Mangrove restaurant brought Panther organising into a wider alliance. Frank Crichlow’s Caribbean restaurant in west London had become a meeting place for local residents and activists. Repeated police raids prompted a demonstration on 9 August 1970, in which Panthers participated alongside other members of the community. The subsequent prosecution of nine people made the treatment of the restaurant a matter of national attention. ⁹

The Old Bailey trial lasted fifty-five days and ended in December 1971. All nine defendants were cleared of the principal charge of inciting a riot, although four received suspended sentences for lesser offences. Altheia Jones-LeCointe was among those prosecuted. The outcome should therefore be described precisely, without turning it into an acquittal on every charge. The campaign demonstrated how a local institution’s defence could bring together community relationships, political organisation and public communication. It also placed allegations of police racism before an audience far beyond the streets around the restaurant. ⁹

Photography as political work

Kenlock joined the Panthers after attending a meeting and became their photographer. In a 2018 interview with Huck, he connected this work to a concern about how Black people appeared in the media. He wanted his subjects to possess visible strength and personality. Making pictures was a contribution to the movement’s argument about who had the right to represent Black life. ¹⁰

His photographs were produced from within a network of relationships. He knew the people and causes he recorded, rather than arriving only when a confrontation attracted outside attention. That position shaped what could become part of the public record. His retrospective account also distinguishes the British movement’s circumstances from those of its American inspiration. The photographs should be read with that difference in mind: familiar symbols of Black Power belonged to people organising in the particular streets, workplaces and institutions of Britain. They provide evidence of participation as well as an image of protest. ¹⁰

When the movement's premises were attacked

One Kenlock portrait brings the vulnerability of that infrastructure sharply into view. Taken in 1973 and now in the National Portrait Gallery, it shows Dhondy outside the Panther bookshop in Brixton after a firebomb attack. The premises also contained his home. He escaped through an upstairs window and was injured. A place used for political work was also somewhere people lived, making an attack on the organisation an immediate threat to their lives. ¹¹

In the portrait Dhondy holds the March 1973 issue of Black Life, which reports the bombing. The newspaper and photograph together make the aftermath public. This is a reminder of the material conditions needed for organising: rooms, books, papers and places to meet could be damaged or destroyed. The image records survival, but it also records interruption. Maintaining a movement meant dealing with attacks on the spaces through which its members worked and communicated. ¹¹

Women and the limits of solidarity

Women occupied prominent positions in the Panthers, including Jones-LeCointe’s leadership. Their presence did not remove disagreements about gender. Research on Olive Morris and Liz Obi at the University of Bristol examines the frustration of women whose concerns could be marginalised within Black Power organisations. Participation in an anti-racist movement did not guarantee that sexism inside it would receive equal attention. ¹²

The emergence of the Brixton Black Women’s Group in 1973 provided a setting in which women could organise around the combined pressures of racism, class and gender. Morris and Obi’s work connected housing and local community needs to these wider arguments. This development belongs within the history of Black Power rather than being treated simply as a departure from it. Women carried experience and relationships into new forms of organising, while making a sharper challenge to the assumptions of organisations in which they had already worked. Their criticism helps explain both the possibilities and the limits of solidarity. ¹²

Work continued through other organisations

The Panthers dispersed during the early 1970s, but former participants continued through other projects, including Race Today. The South Asian Britain project traces Dhondy and Sen’s connections across these organisations. An institution’s dissolution did not erase the skills and relationships developed within it; people carried them into new settings and revised their approaches. ³

The George Padmore Institute identifies the radical period of Race Today with the years 1973 to 1988. Leila Hassan Howe, a founding member of its collective, later became editor in 1985. The journal connected political writing with organising, giving continuing form to arguments developed through earlier campaigns. Its history demonstrates one route by which experience survived beyond the Panthers’ own organisational life. The newspaper was a different institution with its own history, but former activists’ continued work makes it possible to follow relationships between political generations rather than treating each group as an isolated beginning. ¹³

A history recovered by another generation

In 2013, the Organised Youth project brought this history to Photofusion in Brixton. Participants aged thirteen to twenty-five prepared an exhibition combining Kenlock’s archive photographs with new portraits, oral-history interviews and a documentary. Interviewees included Johnson, Dhondy, Liz Obi, Darcus Howe and Leila Howe. Young researchers could ask former participants about the work behind the surviving public images. ¹⁴

The project joined photography to the preservation of testimony, with transcripts intended for a public archive. It also returned education to the centre of the story. A generation encountering the Panthers through research was learning how an earlier generation had organised, studied and made its experiences public. These records preserve more than a familiar name or symbol. They allow the movement to be considered through different voices: people who taught, wrote, photographed, disputed priorities and continued working after the organisation itself had ended. That variety is essential to understanding what the British Black Panthers made possible. ¹⁴

Sources

[1] London Museum. Neil Kenlock’s photos of 1970s Black London.

[2] Robin Bunce, Our Migration Story. Darcus Howe and Britain’s Black Power movement.

[3] Ellen Smith, South Asian Britain. British Black Panthers.

[4] John Narayan, The Sociological Review; author manuscript at Birmingham City University. British Black Power: the anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism; 2019.

[5] Debi Ghose, Brixton Blog. Interview: Linton Kwesi Johnson; 28 April 2011.

[6] Jaimee A. Swift, Wasafiri. We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities — interview with Beverley Bryan and Stella Dadzie; 9 October 2025; interview conducted February 2022.

[7] UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and Black History Walks. Beyond the Black Panthers: Dr Beverley Bryan; 8 September 2021.

[8] South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive. Farrukh Dhondy: autobiographical account.

[9] George Padmore Institute. Mangrove Nine Documentary (1973); 1 April 2021.

[10] Natty Kasambala, Huck. Neil Kenlock: the pioneering photographer capturing Black British life; 7 August 2018.

[11] National Portrait Gallery. Farrukh Dhondy by Neil Kenlock; Photograph, 1973; interpretation undated.

[12] Emma Baker, University of Bristol. Olive Morris, Liz Obi and Black women’s organising; 2021.

[13] George Padmore Institute. The Black Radical Press in 1970s Britain; 11 February 2026.

[14] Photofusion. Organised Youth Presents: The British Black Panthers; 16–26 October 2013.

Sources checked on 23 October 2026.