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Race Today

Front cover of Race Today, January 1986

Jan 1986

Race Today is an essential resource for those studying the history of black community struggles in the 1970s and 1980s. The magazine started life as a journal produced by the Institute of Race Relations in the 1960s, but following an ideological dispute severed its links with the IRR in the early 1970s* and was thereafter run by a collective whose members included Farrukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, Darcus Howe, Gus John and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Race Today appeared monthly from May 1969 to 1978, and bi-monthly from 1979 to 1988.

It was published from 1969 to 1973 by the Institute of Race Relations and from March 1973 to August 1974 by Towards Racial Justice.

  • Peter Watson was editor from May 1969 to Feb 1970.
  • Alexander Kirby was editor from Mar 1970 to Oct / Nov 1973.
  • Ian Macdonald was guest editor in Dec 1973.
  • Darcus Howe was editor from Jan 1974 to Dec 1984.
  • Leila Hassan was editor from 1985 to Jan 1988.

The Library has an excellent but incomplete run of Race Today from 1969 to 1988.
We would gratefully receive donations of issues to complete the run.

 

Members of the Race Today Collective included:


John La Rose (1927-2006) was born in Trinidad where he was active in trade union and political movements. He came to England in the early 1960s and founded New Beacon Books, the first black publishers and bookshop in Britain. With Andrew Salkey he founded the Caribbean Artists Movement as well as being active in black educational campaigns which challenged the racism directed towards young black people in schools. In 1975 he founded the Black Parents Movement. In 1981 he chaired the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, established in the wake of a fire which killed 13 young black people and which organised a protest march attended by 20,000 marchers.

In 1982 he helped found the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, which ran annually until 1995, and was joint director with Jessica Huntley. He wrote that it was "a meeting of the continents for writers, publishers, distributors, booksellers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and people who inspire and consume their creative productions".

He was also chair of the George Padmore Institute, a library and educational centre established in 1991. He wrote several books of poetry

Darcus Howe (1943-2017) was born in Trinidad and Tobago and first arrived in London aged 18 to enter the legal profession at Middle Temple, but became a journalist instead. He went back to Trinidad, where he worked for a time as assistant editor on the trade union paper The Vanguard. He returned to Britain and became involved in black community struggles, joining the British Black Panther Movement in August 1970.  Howe was arrested after a protest and tried as one of the 'Mangrove Nine' for rioting, affray and assault but was acquitted after a trial at the Old Bailey by an all-white jury. He became editor of Race Today in 1974, holding the post for over ten years. In the years afterwards he presented a number of TV shows and documentaries and wrote regularly for the New Statesman and the Guardian. Howe was first cousin once removed to CLR James.

Leila Hassan was born in 1948 and started work with writer and activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan in the library of the IRR in 1970Hassan and Sivanandan signed up supporters as IRR members, until in 1972 they had sufficient support to pass a vote to replace the council of what she has described as then being a “colonial, academic institution”. From this point on Race Today became a much more radical publication; after the hiring of Howe as editor, Hassan and he transformed it into 'a beacon of black radical thought and practice' (Guardian interview with Leila Hassan by Kehinde Andrews, 8 October 2020).  Hassan was a member of the Race Today Collective from the outset, was the magazine's deputy editor from 1973 and took over as editor in 1986. She and Darcus Howe (by then her partner - they married in 1989) helped organise the huge protest march in response to the New Cross fire in March 1981 which was dubbed the National Black People’s Day of Action and is now seen as a turning point in black British identity. In 2019 Hassan co-edited Here to stay, here to fight, a collection of Race Today articles which aimed to introduce new audiences to Britain's black radical politics (available to read in the Library at shelfmark K35).

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica in 1952 and moved to London in 1963. He was briefly a member of the Black Panthers before joining RTC in 1974, who published his first book of poetry Voices of the living and the dead. His second Book Dread, beat and blood appeared the following year and he also produced an LP of the same name, working with reggae producer Dennis Bovell. His other records included Forces of victory (1979), Bass culture (1980) and Making history (1984). These were very influential records at the time, drawing as they did on young black music culture and patois. This style became known as "dub poetry" although Linton felt that this was an inaccurate description of his work. Johnson is one of only three poets to be published by Penguin Modern Classics while still alive.

 

* The 2020 Guardian interview with Leila Hassan describes this severance as follows: 'This began in the dead of night in August 1974. Hassan Howe, Darcus and other members of the staff loaded the equipment of the magazine into a post van – assisted by the British Black Panther Olive Morris. Then they drove to a squat in Brixton, where “we broke down the door, changed the locks and moved in”.'