Recording Black British history often feels like a rescue effort and a race against time. There is a very real risk that if you don’t preserve certain events and memories, then they might be lost for ever. I think this is true of the histories of all people who have lived within the crowded margins of society. Living under a state that has historically deemed “other” people’s lives to be of little significance means that its institutions – whether art galleries, archives, libraries, museums or universities – may deny them a space in the public record, leaving them in danger of being forgotten.
This institutional lack of interest means that much Black British history is contained within people’s private spaces: photo albums, VHS tapes, pamphlets gathering dust in an elder person’s attic, or memories of events, people and a different time. These materials disintegrate, are lost between homes or are unadaptable to modern technologies. A Black person in this country may have witnessed and participated in astonishing events or lively subcultures, but the memory and recollection of these will falter and eventually die with them. And so those of us who work to recover the stories and memories of our elders are as much emergency workers as we are historians and researchers.
