Black History Month

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson) in this important debate.

There are those of us who are saying that black history should be part of our history and, as someone who studied history at university, I want to say something about that debate and about the way we are taught. In history, there is not a definite right and wrong. There are people who write history, and as the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford said, the tendency has been for more men to be talked about in history than women, more people who were better off and more people who were white rather than black. It is not a right and wrong: it is not a case of “This is British history, and this is what we should be teaching”. It is about making sure that all the voices from our past are heard equally. I do not think that that should be a contentious issue; it should be something we all welcome.



I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare)—she is an incredible Member of Parliament already, even though she has not been here very long—on securing this debate, and on her well thought-through emails instructing us all on what to do. I welcome the fact that she is definitely a completer-finisher, which is not necessarily something that we all share.

As we know, Black History Month is particularly significant this year—a year in which covid has ripped through our communities, exposing and enlarging the inequalities we knew were already there. It has been a year in which we have seen powerful protests, with the Black Lives Matter movement shining a light on those inequalities and bringing people from all backgrounds together to stand against racial injustice and fight for a better future. This month is about celebrating and recognising the contribution that great black Britons have made over many generations, and it is the time to talk about black people whose stories have been left out of the history books.

In the short time that I have, I want to honour some of the great black Britons from my town of Croydon who have made outstanding contributions. I heard a debate on the radio recently about whether we should teach black history in schools. Somebody suggested that we should teach children about the great musician Stormzy, and somebody else said, “No, we should not be talking about Stormzy. We should be looking to our past and celebrating the other great black musicians, such as the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.” Both are from Croydon, so I think we should celebrate them both equally.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875, and he was the first black person to be accepted into the Royal College of Music as a violin student at 15 years old. He was also the first black person to be a recipient of the blue plaque, which can still be seen today on his house in South Norwood. He suffered horrific racial abuse—at school, apparently, he even had his hair set on fire—but somehow he remained dignified and committed. He was a household name in the UK and in America, but neither he nor his family got money from his success, because the rights to his most famous composition were sold for a small fee.

The other great musical genius is Stormzy. I was a fan before he was famous, and I even quoted him in my maiden speech in 2017. I still have yet to meet him, and that is very unfortunate—[Interruption.] If he is listening, I am still trying and I will continue to try. As Members will know, Stormzy was the first UK grime artist to headline the pyramid stage at Glastonbury, but he has done so much more than his amazing music. He set up a dedicated scholarship fund to send two black UK students to Cambridge every year, and he has made a lifetime commitment to help black British causes. He announced in June that he would donate £10 million to organisations, charities and movements that are committed to fighting racial injustice and supporting justice reform and black empowerment in the UK. Although we celebrate those influential and outstanding black Britons, it is a bittersweet reminder that Stormzy felt that he had to set up such a system to ensure that others do not face the barriers that he has faced.

Black history is British history and must be included in the school curriculum, as I have mentioned. We must learn the good and the bad about our past and ask questions about those we celebrate. In my constituency, we have a conservation area of streets called the East India conservation area, and since the Black Lives Matter movement we have been asking questions in Croydon about the history of the East India Company and whether it is appropriate for us to have such names. I think we would all accept, however, that change is about more than the name of a street; it is about the systemic nature of racism in our country and what we can do about it.

I wanted to mention a member of my team who has always lived in Croydon. She is very young and only joined me recently. When she was at school, she felt frustrated by what she saw as the whiteness of her school’s curriculum, so she set up her own weekly sessions where all students could go to learn about and debate issues that affected students from African and Caribbean backgrounds. Esther is amazing, and I am lucky to have her in my team. There are many other amazing black Britons I could talk about. Callton Young is a councillor in Croydon. He was the first ever black senior civil servant in the Home Office 20 years ago, and he is still the only black person to have been a senior civil servant in the Home Office.

I will jump to the end and quote Croydon’s first poet laureate, who is a young black woman called Shaniqua Benjamin. She has recently written a poem that says:

“We can’t go back.

Back to a normal that was,

a canvas painted over to start afresh

spilling love and goodness onto new turf

creating a brighter scene where all survive”.