Black History Month at BGU

Throughout Black History Month, October 2023, BGU will host a variety of events that celebrate the local, national, and global contributions of Black People to various areas. An academic lecture, a live drama performance, and storytelling in the community are among these events.

As per the best tradition of public engagement, these sessions are intended to educate, entertain, and challenge existing ideas and knowledge.

Full Schedule of Events

Scroll down to check out this years events and to reserve your tickets!

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“Black Resistance"

The theme for 2023 Black History Month is "Black Resistance" exploring and celebrating those who addressed historic and ongoing disadvantage and oppression.

We have chosen to highlight three incredible people, who all made a difference for the Black community in the United Kingdom.

Malorie Blackman OBE

Malorie is a British writer who held the position of Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues. Her critically and popularly acclaimed Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional dystopia to explore racism. Blackman has been the recipient of many honours for her work including, most recently, the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize.

Malorie Blackman was born in Clapham, London, and grew up in Bromley, one of five siblings. Her parents were both from Barbados and had come to Britain as part of the "Windrush generation"; her father was a bus driver and her mother worked in a pyjama factory. At school, Malorie wanted to be an English teacher, but she grew up to become a systems programmer instead. She earned an HNC at Thames Polytechnic and is a graduate of the National Film and Television School.

She has written more than 60 children's books, including novels and short story collections, and also television scripts and a stage play. She became the first person of colour writer to work on Doctor Who ever. Her books have been translated into over 15 languages including Welsh, Chinese and French.

Lurel Roy Hackett (19 September 1928 – 3 August 2022)

Lurel was a Jamaican-born activist and long-time civil rights campaigner for the British African-Caribbean community in Bristol, England. He was appointed an MBE in 2020. Hackett grew up in Trench Town in Kingston, Jamaica. In 1952, he travelled to Britain by ship, as part of the Windrush generation, and lived in Liverpool, London and Wolverhampton, before settling in Bristol. Once in Bristol, he faced racism from his first day, as boarding houses refused to give him a room as soon as they saw he was black, and he ended up spending his first night sleeping in a doorway.

He was one of the primary organisers of the Bristol Bus Boycott, which protested against the Bristol Omnibus Company's ban on employing black and Asian drivers and conductors. These events then paved the way for the Race Relations Act of 1965, the first legislation in the UK to address racial discrimination. He was also a co-founder of the Commonwealth Co-ordinated Committee (CCC) which set up the St. Paul's Carnival[2] (originally known as the St Paul’s Festival), a major cultural event in Bristol. He was also a member of the Bristol Race Equality Council and founder of West Indian Parents’ and Friends’ Association (WIPFA).

Jackie (Jacqueline) Margaret Kay, CBE, FRSE, FRSL (born 9 November 1961)

Jackie is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011).

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. The couple had already adopted her brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. As a child Kay suffered racism from children and teachers at school and as a teenager worked as a cleaner. She decided to concentrate on writing after Alasdair Gray, a Scottish artist and writer, read her poetry and told her that writing was what she should be doing. She studied English at the University of Stirling and her first book of poetry, the partially autobiographical, The Adoption Papers, published in 1991 won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992. Kay has also won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. From 2016 to 2021 Jackie Kay was the Makar, the poet laureate of Scotland and Chancellor of the University of Salford between 2015 and 2022.