Legacies of the Brixton Black Women's Group

Established in response to the lack of interest in women’s issues in male-dominated Black organisations in Britain, the trail-blazing Brixton Black Women’s Group was founded to create a distinct Black socialist feminist space where women of African and Asian descent could meet to focus on and organise around political, social and cultural issues as they affected Black women.

Following on from the publication of Speak Out!, a landmark collection edited by Milo Miller (LSE Gender) which brings together the writings of the Brixton Black Women’s Group for the first time, this panel reflects on the legacies of the group 50 years after its founding.

Meet our speakers and chair

Jade Bentil is a writer and DPhil researcher in History at the University of Oxford. Situated in Black feminist thought, her scholarship uses oral history methodologies to centre the experiences of Black women of African and Caribbean descent in Britain and their long histories of rebellion. For her doctoral scholarship on the Black Women's movement, Jade was awarded fellowships by the North American Conference on British Studies and the Institute of Historical Research in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Jade’s debut book, Rebel Citizen, uses oral history interviews to explore the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain following the Second World War and is forthcoming from Allen Lane.

Oumou Longley is a writer, researcher and creative practitioner who explores the complexities of Black diasporic experiences and epistemologies. Often drawing upon personal and cultural archives for inspiration, they are interested in the everyday, messy and fugitive ways that Black lives document and define themselves. Oumou’s interest in this began on the LSE MSc Gender in 2018, and they have continued to explore these themes using audio and installation art, with commissions from the ICA, and Lambeth Windrush. 

Milo Miller is an LSE Fellow in Gender, Media and Culture whose research attends to the ways in which squatting has intersected with decolonial, feminist and queer struggles and politics. His work has been published in City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action and Emotion, Space and Society.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

SM Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Dr Rodriguez’s research spans concerns of criminalised, queer, and/or disabled people of African descent and relies on engaged methodologies to answer questions of transformative change. They are the author of The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019), in addition to numerous publications for Agenda, GLQ, Comparative Sociology, Oxford University Press, and more.