Black Feminist Praxis and Pedagogy Under Fire

• In Event: If Black Women Were Free: The Politics and Pedagogy of Black Power from the U.S. to the U.K.

Abstract

Black feminist teachers and advocates Sybil Phoenix and Norma Gibbes were part of the Windrush Generation, migrating to London from Guyana in 1956 and Jamaica in 1958 respectively. Phoenix founded Moonshot (also known as the Pagnell Street Youth and Community Centre) in about 1971 as a space for Black youth and the community to gather. She invited Gibbes, a teacher and co-founder of the Caribbean Teachers’ Association, to join Moonshot in the middle of the 1970s; they worked closely together with Phoenix as director and Gibbes as chair of trustees. Phoenix founded Moonshot as part of a larger movement to build supplementary schools for Black children in Britain. These schools and youth centers were a direct response to the organized abandonment of Black youth by the British state which operated a system of segregated schooling.

In the 1970s, the National Front waged a campaign of racist street violence in New Cross and Lewisham, the neighborhood where Moonshot was located and deeply embedded in the fabric of. On December 18, 1977, Moonshot was destroyed in an arson attack when members of the National Front firebombed the youth center. Sybil Phoenix was resolute that the fascists would not destroy Moonshot, and in 1981 the new location opened. This was the year of another fire during a birthday party in New Cross--likely also set by National Front arsonists--where 14 Black children were killed.

In 1980, Gibbes wrote the pamphlet West Indian Teachers Speak Out, jointly published by the Caribbean Teachers' Association and Lewisham Council for Community Relations. Following the New Cross Massacre, a coalition of organizations called a mass meeting at Moonshot. Sybil Phoenix was involved with the New Cross Massacre Action Committee from its inception. Indeed, the first interview of a massacre survivor took place in Phoenix’s house when Darcus Howe, John La Rose, Roxy Harris, and Alex Pascall spoke with Gee Ruddock, owner of 439 New Cross Road, the site of the fire. The committee was intent on investigating the fire and publicizing a narrative, because the police refused to meaningfully investigate the fire.

Using correspondence, oral history interviews, periodicals, and various sources from the George Padmore Institute and the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton–along with published sources produced by members of the movement–this historical inquiry traces the work of Phoenix and Gibbes within and beyond the contexts of the New Cross Massacre. Moreover, it explores the routes to grassroots advocacy that furthered the 1980s supplemental schools in the UK and the abolitionist praxis evident in their institution building and critical pedagogies.

Author

• Lucien Baskin, Graduate Center - CUNY