Do Manchester’s monuments and statues do the city justice?

Do you have concerns about the types of statues, monuments and memorials used in Manchester to tell its history?  If you do, then this online public meeting to discuss the issues, on 10 March, could be for you. Award winning author and former columnist at the Guardian, Gary Younge is one of the four panel […]

Black Lives Matter: Greater Manchester is not innocent

Today the trial hearing of the four ex-police officers charged with the murder of George Floyd begins in the US, whilst Mancunians demonstrate this evening as part of a national day of anti-racist solidarity. But incidents of institutional racism that have taken place in Greater Manchester in recent years remind us that there is still much work to be done here.

Review: ‘Never Counted Out! The story of Len Johnson, Manchester’s Black Boxing Hero and Communist’

In this guest post, Bernadette Hyland reviews Michael Herbert’s biography on Manchester’s black middleweight boxing champion and communist, Len Johnson. When my parents moved to Clayton, a working class suburb of Manchester in 1963, it was a large sprawling council estate surrounded by engineering and manufacturing factories and dominated by two busy main roads, Ashton […]

William Cuffay, black pioneer of the Chartist movement

Working class radicals from our past are very rarely remembered within our public sphere – there are few monuments to their feats and their personal collections feature little within the official archives. William Cuffay was one of these working class radicals, preserving no diary, autobiography or papers and his lack of wealth and power leaving only faint traces of his life to explore