Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

New Beacon provided stocks of books to public libraries and to local education authority Teachers Centres/
Professional Development Centres and ran training and development workshops for teachers and curriculum
development staff on the books/teaching resources and how they might be used
New Beacon organised public seminars otherwise on policy matters and state practices that impacted negatively
and disproportionately on African heritage communities
When in 1981 the government established Special Access Courses to provide alternative entry routes to higher
education for black and ethnic minority adults who had missed out on, or had had poor educational outcomes
from, mainstream schooling, New Beacon provided essential advice both to individual mature students who
were pursuing those courses and to the leaders and teaching staff on those courses. Such courses, led principally
by African Diaspora staff, were in every sense the adult equivalent of the Black Supplementary Schools,
except that unlike the latter, they were full-time, one- or two-year courses
Over time, New Beacon came to be seen as the ‘go to’ place for guidance and advice on thesis proposals, ethnographic
research methods, course material, potential interviewees, etc.
New Beacon, with the Black Parents Movement and other partners with whom it worked in alliance, intervened
on the issue of criminal prosecutions that were politically motivated and developed a method for defendants
and their families/supporters/campaigns to take control of their defence against those charges and ensure that
their legal team acted under their instructions
On January 1981, 13 young people lost their lives in a house fire at 439 New Cross Road in Deptford, South London.
One more was to die later. Within days of that tragedy, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee was
formed, with John Las Rose as its Chair, and it went on to organise the New Cross Massacre Black People’s Day
of Action on 2nd March 1981, which brought 25,000 predominantly African people to march from Deptford to
the Houses of Parliament and then to Hyde Park on an ordinary working Monday. New Beacon was involved in
the activities of both formations
Between 1982 and 1995, New Beacon, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Race Today Publications ran an
international book fair and book fair festival that spanned all five continents and was located in Bradford/Leeds,
Manchester and London. Fittingly, the first book fair was opened by CLR James at Islington Town Hall in 1982.
As the years progressed, New Beacon remained the only publisher organising the book fair
New Beacon established the New Beacon Educational Trust and the George Padmore Institute (GPI) was founded
in 1991 by John La Rose and a number of political and cultural activists associated with New Beacon and
with many of the movements, initiatives and organisations outlined above. The GPI is an archive, educational
resource and research centre that houses “materials relating to the black community of Caribbean, African and
Asian descent in Britain and continental Europe”
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