In 2015, a citizen advisory committee including several Indigenous activists proposed that ‘Lake Calhoun’—christened for John C. Calhoun, antebellum politician, slavery advocate, and proponent of the Indian Removal Act—be restored to its original Dakota place name, ‘Bde Maka Ska’, meaning ‘White Earth Lake’. What followed was a contentious legal battle… Read More
On 21 June 2021 plans were confirmed for the removal of the statue of Theodore Roosevelt, which had been standing outside the American Museum of Natural History since 1939. The eventual decision to remove the statue came after years of debate, protests and multiple instances of vandalism. The decision also… Read More
The statue of Sebastian de Belalcazar, erected in 1940 in Popayan, Colombia, was torn down in September 2020 during a wave of protests. Local indigenous communities had long considered the statue as the embodiment of the city’s colonial past, and a symbol of the continued impact on their lived experience. Read More
In Central Park in New York, New York, a statue of physician J. Marion Sims was raised in 1934. Sims was credited with highly impactful procedures in gynaecology; However, many of these procedures were generated by conducting surgery on enslaved Black women without anaesthesia. Local activists began calling for the… Read More
In 1967, an equestrian statue of Belgian King Leopold II, the owner and absolute ruler of the Free State of Congo from 1886 to 1908, was taken down and discarded on the outskirts of Kinshasa, in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, as part of President Mobutu’s postcolonial re-indigenising policy. In… Read More
In 2015 the #Rhodesmustfall protests erupted at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The resulting debate and movement soon spread globally, with similar protests occurring at the University of Oxford. This case study shows how protests over symbolic historical representations can draw wider attention to issues of structural… Read More
In June 2016, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi was gifted to the University of Ghana in Accra, by the Indian President. Shortly after, staff and students at the University circulated a petition calling for the statue’s removal due to Gandhi’s racist writings on Africans. In 2018, two years after the… Read More
This book examines the role of post-conflict memorial arts in bringing about gender justice in transitional societies. The book brings together research from scholars around the world who are interested in the gendered dimensions of memory-making in transitional societies. Aimed at those interested in the fields of transitional justice, memory… Read More
This book critically opens new pathways for de-colonial scholarship and the reclamation of indigenous self-definition by women scholars. Indigenous peoples around the world are often socially and gender egalitarian, matricentric, matrifocal, matrilineal, less violent, beyond heteronormative, ecologically sensitive, and with feminine or two-gender deities or spirits, and more. Bernedette Muthien… Read More
The CARGO classroom initiative aims to address the narratives that are missing from the history that is taught in schools across the UK, including the perspectives of individuals of African and African Diaspora descent and the recognition of their resilience, contributions and visionary leadership. Includes lesson plans and they are… Read More
A social enterprise that aims to deliver black British history all across the UK. We run a variety of virtual and in-person programmes to schools, young people and corporations to promote the importance of Black history. We also have a curriculum and develop free and licensable resources for schools to… Read More
In December 2019, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) appointed a Special Committee to probe the early history of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) to identify inequalities in the way the organisation commemorated the dead of the British Empire from the two world wars. Where such inequalities were identified,… Read More