Britain’s Black Liberation Front: Transnational Feminisms from Black Power to Self-Help

Along with affective solidarity, familial and personal networks connected black revolutionaries in Britain to counterparts in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. This paper traces the migrations and political education of black revolutionary women in 1960s and 1970s Britain. More specifically, it profiles the politics and transatlantic connections of Afro-Asian migrants to Britain from Africa and the Caribbean who founded and participated in the Black Liberation Front (BLF), an understudied intellectual, activist, and social welfare organization based in London. Part of a constellation of black radical organizations in Britain at the time, the Black Liberation Front was connected to black revolutionaries across city, regional, and national borders. A node of the Revolutionary People’s’ Communication Network, the BLF worked in tandem with the International Bure­au of the Black Panther Party (US), headquartered in Algiers. In the pages of its newspaper, Grass Roots, the BLF disseminated local black news as well as information about revolutionary struggles throughout black diasporas. While publishing the writings and press releases of Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, BLF members fled state violence by seeking exile in Algiers, and maintained personal connections with the Cleavers long after they left Africa.

This paper locates the politics of women in the BLF as part of a transnational upsurge of black feminist organizing against sexism mobilized both within and against liberation movements. I explore the kinship between BLF women and renowned revolutionaries like Kathleen Cleaver, and the work of BLF women to advance an intersectional program against sexism, racism, militarism, and imperialism. The BLF established community self-help institutions like bookstores, Headstart programs, Saturday schools, women’s groups, and housing for squatters, especially women and children. Self-help initiatives like these became the foundation of the black feminist movement in 1970s Britain, and grew into lasting social welfare institutions.