Kath Locke: Community Action and Black Manchester

Kath Locke wanted Manchester to acknowledge a history that was already there. She campaigned successfully for a plaque commemorating the 1945 Pan-African Congress, making an international gathering part of the city’s visible public record. Her commitment to Black history also took a more immediate form: helping women establish an organisation they could control, and challenging the discrimination that limited people’s opportunities. These were connected concerns. People needed practical support in the present, and an understanding of the struggles that had brought them to it. ¹

Growing up in Blackpool

Born in 1928 to an English mother and a Nigerian father, Locke encountered racism in education and employment. Her family background belonged to an established Black presence in Britain, while the hostility she experienced repeatedly called that belonging into question. Racial equality would remain central to her campaigning throughout her life. ¹

One childhood experience stayed with her. In the interview later used for the documentary We Are Born to Survive, she recalled a woman on Blackpool’s seafront asking where she came from. When Locke identified herself as local, the woman refused to accept the answer because she was Black. Producer Paul Henley discussed this recollection in his account of making the film. It exposes a form of exclusion that operated through an ordinary conversation: a child could know her own home, yet find a stranger claiming the authority to tell her she did not belong there. ²

Manchester offered connections to a wider Black political world. Locke worked at the Cosmopolitan, one of the establishments associated with the Pan-Africanist Ras T. Makonnen. His restaurants and clubs provided meeting places when colour bars restricted access elsewhere, attracting seafarers, servicemen and other Black residents and visitors. Their earnings helped finance political activity and accommodation for delegates to the 1945 Congress. Locke’s connection with this environment places her within a history of Black Manchester that reaches back before the post-war Caribbean migration most often associated with the city. International politics could be encountered through workplaces and social spaces, as well as through formal organisations. ³

Housing and the work of a neighbourhood

By the 1970s, Locke was working as a hospital domestic and was active in the National Union of Public Employees. Living in Hulme’s Crescents, she campaigned around the redevelopment of Hulme and Moss Side, organised tenants and started a local magazine, Alcatraz. The Workers’ Educational Association’s account of her life records direct action as well as publishing. Its example of demonstrators bringing bugs into a council meeting suggests how residents made the conditions of their housing difficult for officials to ignore. The problems of a neighbourhood became matters for collective argument and pressure. ⁴

In 1973, Locke and Ron Phillips established George Jackson House for children experiencing homelessness. She was also active in the Moss Side Housing Action Group. These commitments show the practical scale of her politics: a place to live, support for children and a stronger voice for residents. Establishing a home required a different kind of work from organising a demonstration, but both addressed the consequences of people having too little control over their circumstances. Housing activism also brought her into contact with the institutions and community organisations through which later educational and women’s projects would develop. ⁵

Women organising on their own terms

Locke’s work with Elouise Edwards in Black Women’s Mutual Aid brought attention to children’s experience of education. The organisation helped parents confronting racism and other difficulties at school. Historian Jessica White describes a useful distinction between the organisers’ political commitments and the reasons some parents attended: families often wanted specific help with an immediate problem, without necessarily identifying themselves as activists. A successful community organisation had to accommodate both. Its usefulness could be measured in whether a parent found advice and support, as well as in the arguments advanced at a meeting. ⁶

In 1975, Locke and her sisters Ada Phillips and Coca Clarke helped establish the Manchester Black Women’s Co-operative. It offered office-skills training to mothers seeking a route into paid employment, operating from the Moss Side People’s Centre alongside the George Jackson Trust. The arrangement brought access to resources, but also raised questions about who controlled them. As White’s research shows, the women’s project had to negotiate its position within a wider community structure. Providing training was one task; ensuring that women could direct the organisation providing it became another. ⁷

That disagreement came to a head in 1979. Following conflict over management and a proposed relocation, founding members occupied their room at the centre on 26 October. The protest lasted ten days. On 1 January 1980, the group re-formed as the Abasindi Co-operative, independent of the George Jackson Trust. The chronology gives substance to the emphasis on women’s autonomy: it emerged through a contested decision about a real organisation, its space and its resources. Locke’s community work included challenging authority within community institutions themselves. ⁷

Diana Watt, a participant in these events, described the discussions that preceded the change. Members reviewed their achievements during 1979 and decided that the project needed to involve Black women more fully in shaping local life. The founding group included women from Britain, the Caribbean and South Africa. Their experiences differed, yet they agreed that the organisation should be governed by women and decide its own priorities. Abasindi’s formation therefore involved both a change in control and a widening of ambition beyond a single training programme. Locke worked within this group of organisers, whose shared effort made the new cooperative possible. ⁸

Education across the generations

Abasindi developed a varied programme from the People’s Centre. Its Saturday school concentrated on English and mathematics, while summer activities included drama, music, crafts and dance. It supported older people and addressed community health concerns, including sickle cell anaemia. The Abasindi Cultural Theatre Workshop encouraged performance and creative work. Hair plaiting and craft activities also helped raise funds and brought women together. These projects, documented in the cooperative’s own 1985 newsletter, show education taking place across several generations. The organisation Locke helped create could serve a child needing support with schoolwork, an adult learning a skill, or somebody seeking company and advice. ⁹

Locke also developed her own educational practice. She completed a youth and community workers’ course at Manchester Polytechnic in 1978, researching Moss Side’s community struggles. Around 1980 she joined the WEA’s North West Trade Union and Basic Education project as a development officer. Its courses covered African and Caribbean history, immigration and nationality law, and Black workers’ experiences in trade unions. There were also anti-racist programmes for white participants. Locke worked as a facilitator and co-tutor, connecting adult learning with the practical knowledge communities needed to challenge unequal treatment. ⁴

Discussing racism at work

Recordings catalogued by the North West Film Archive give a more detailed view of these educational exchanges. At a 1982 Manchester meeting with NUPE officer Bernie Grant, Locke contributed to discussion about checks on overseas patients in the NHS and the involvement of white workers in opposing racism. Grant addressed discrimination within unions as well as in employment. The questions belonged to the day-to-day workings of public services: who could obtain help, how staff responded, and whether organisations representing workers confronted unequal treatment among their own members. Locke’s participation connected community concerns with workplace organisation. ¹⁰

Another 1982 recording documents a meeting she chaired with Kum Kum Bhavnani on Black women’s struggles. The discussion considered paid employment alongside dependence on men, domestic responsibilities and childcare. Contributions from Locke, Edwards and others extended the meeting into questions about home life and equal pay. Such sessions made room for subjects that could otherwise be separated between workplace campaigning and private experience. The archive’s description records women discussing those relationships together, with Locke helping to provide the forum. ¹¹

She also chaired a meeting at the 8411 community centre in Moss Side at which Wally Brown discussed Black settlement and organising in Liverpool. Brown’s account included exclusion from social venues and campaigns around schooling, legal advice and community institutions. Bringing that experience into a Manchester meeting enabled participants to consider another city’s responses to related problems. Locke’s role was partly to connect people who possessed knowledge with people who could use it. The surviving catalogue records a form of political education grounded in the experiences of Black communities themselves. ¹²

Making Manchester’s Black history visible

The campaign for a Pan-African Congress plaque brought that educational work into public space. The plaque was unveiled in 1985, forty years after the meeting at Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall. The archive preserves a letter dated 7 October 1985 from Elouise Edwards, writing from Abasindi, inviting its recipient to the unveiling. That small document records the organising behind commemoration: people had to make arrangements, circulate invitations and bring a public together. The Congress’s place in Manchester’s history was made visible through the work of later activists, including Locke, who insisted that the city should acknowledge it. ¹³

Locke also collected material about Pan-Africanism. The archive associated with her includes historical papers, photographs and correspondence, as well as later commemorative material. Its range connects the political demands of the 1940s with the work of keeping that history available to another generation. The collection includes an open letter from the Pan-African Federation pressing for colonial self-determination and an end to racial discrimination. Preserving such documents helped retain the arguments of the movement, alongside the more familiar photographs of its leading figures. ¹³

Historical work continued alongside campaigning over present-day inequality. The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre’s account of Locke identifies her opposition to racist educational policies and to the poll tax. It also recognises the significance of the material she preserved for understanding Manchester’s Black communities. Her activities moved between the immediate and the historical: challenging a policy, supporting education and making evidence available. Recording the past could strengthen the claim that Black people belonged within the city’s account of itself, while campaigning addressed the conditions under which they lived there. ¹⁴

A life preserved in testimony

Locke died in 1992. Shortly before her death, her political colleague Paul Okojie interviewed her; that recording became the foundation of the 1995 documentary We Are Born to Survive. The film brought her own recollections into an account of her campaigns for Black people’s rights, women’s rights and educational and cultural activity. Her voice supplied something a list of organisations could not: an opportunity to hear how she connected episodes in her life and understood her place within the African diaspora. The interview made her a narrator of the history she had helped shape. ¹⁵

The documentary also included people who had worked with her, among them Diana Watt, Alima Soni, Shirley Innis and Yvonne Hypolite from Abasindi. Produced for the fiftieth anniversary of the Manchester Congress, it used photographs and archive film alongside those recollections. Its combination of voices placed Locke within relationships that had sustained community action. Remembering her involved remembering colleagues and the work they had done together, as well as tracing one woman’s political development. ¹⁶

A centre carrying her name

In 1996, a new primary care centre in Hulme and Moss Side was named after Locke. The circumstances reflected a familiar local argument about control. Residents and organisations had objected to a health facility they felt was being imposed without adequate regard for existing services. Following discussions and a bidding process, the Zion Community Resource Centre, working with North British Housing Association, secured the management contract. The building was completed in September 1996. Its name had been chosen earlier that year to honour Locke’s commitment to people organising for themselves. The centre’s ten-year evaluation described an ambition to make services accessible, involve residents in decisions about their health and bring public provision into closer contact with community experience. Her name was attached to a practical undertaking with responsibilities to the people around it. ¹⁷

Sources

1. Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre — Women’s Stories in Our Archives: IWD 2020.

2. Paul Henley — Modes of Oral Testimony in Ethnographic Film, Vivência (2017), author’s full text.

3. People’s History Museum — Africa Speaks in Manchester: Pan-Africanism, Manchester and a Collection Gem.

4. Workers’ Educational Association — Raising Our Voices: 100 Years of Women in the WEA, Kath Locke profile.

5. The Big Life Group — Hulme and Moss Side Heritage Trail.

6. Jessica White, in Labour Pains: Mothers and Motherhood on the British Left in the Twentieth Century — Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

7. Jessica White — Black Women’s Groups, Life Narratives, and the Construction of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century Britain, The Historical Journal.

8. Remembering Olive Collective — Manchester Black Women’s Co-op, including Diana Watt’s participant account.

9. Manchester Archives+ — Abasindi Co-operative, drawing on its 1985 newsletter.

10. North West Film Archive — The Struggle of Black Workers, Bernie Grant, Part Two (1982), film 7459.

11. North West Film Archive — The Struggle of Black Workers, Kum Kum Bhavnani (1982), film 7462.

12. North West Film Archive — The Struggle of Black Workers, Liverpool Connection with Wally Brown, Part One (1982), film 7468.

13. Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre — Pan-African Congress 1945 and Related Celebratory Events, collection GB3228.34.

14. Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre — Researching Ras T. Makonnen and Pan-Africanism in Manchester.

15. Royal Anthropological Institute — We Are Born to Survive.

16. North West Film Archive — We Are Born to Survive (1995), film 12667.

17. The Big Life Group — Kath Locke Centre Evaluation Report, 1996–2006.