Activity: Book Launch
Host: Moray House Trust
Date: Wednesday 22nd April 2015
Little is known in Guyana today about Jessica and Eric Huntley. They departed these shores over 50 years ago. Yet it was their determination to publish the manuscript of a young political theorist who had recently been refused re-entry to Jamaica that led to the publication of Walter Rodney’s ‘The Groundings with My Brothers’ in 1968. The successful printing of this work encouraged the couple and their friends to set up Bogle L’Overture Publications, named after Toussiant L’Ouverture, the eighteenth century Haitian revolutionary and Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon who led the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica to protest a lack of political representation.
The Huntleys went on to open a bookshop in west London that specialised in topics relating to Africa and people of African descent. Later, in 1982, they helped to set up an International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books with John La Rose. This fair, held in April 1982, was opened by CLR James, the distinguished Trinidadian historian and welcomed over 100 publishers and 6000 people.
Jessica Huntley died a few years ago and Moray House Trust held an event to commemorate and pay tribute to her life and work. On Wednesday evening, the Trust hosted the launch of a biography of the Huntley’s lives, titled: ‘Doing Nothing is Not an Option: The Radical Lives of Eric and Jessica Huntley.’
This is the first account that has been written on the lives of Eric and Jessica Huntley and it charts their story from their country of birth, British Guyana to the depositing of their archives at the London Metropolitan Archives, the first major deposit from the Black community.
“In the telling of the story of struggles for Black community in 20th century Britain, the names of Jessica and Eric Huntley loom large. They began as frontline fighters against colonialism and imperialism in their native Guyana, and translated that activism to combating racism and injustice when they moved to London in the 1950s. Spiritually socialist and internationalist, they came to be celebrated by the communities from and for which they organised – from their Ealing, West London base, founding a major Black and Third World publishing house, Bogle L’Ouverture, as well as, grounding numberless local UK campaigns at their Walter Rodney Community Bookshop. This book describes their legacy for new generations – scholars young and old, freedom fighters Black and White.” Colin Prescod, Chair of the Institute of Race Relations.
MORAY HOUSE TRUST PRESS RELEASE JUNE 2015
Eric Huntley presented a collection of books, documents and recordings to Moray House Trust in the course of his recent visit to Guyana. He expressed his gratitude to the Trust for hosting two events. The first, held in October 2013, was to honour his wife, Jessica Huntley, on her passing. The second event, in April 2015, was the launch of a biography of the Huntleys entitled “Doing Nothing is not an Option”. Eric and Jessica Huntley were pioneer publishers and political activists in the UK, after they migrated from Guyana in the 1950s. Jessica was a founding member of the Women’s Political and Economic Organisation in 1946 along with Janet Jagan, Winifred Gaskin and others. Jessica was, in the words of Tom Dalgety, “an encourager of many who wanted to say something but had no audience.” The Huntleys’ biography is on sale at Austins Bookstore.
