A community activist, a former member of the Black Panthers group, and co-founder of the Brixton Black Women’s group, Olive Morris dedicated her life to leading the fight for social justice in Britain. Though she died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the young age of 26, she played a crucial role in pioneering the British Black Power Movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
Beginning of Olive’s activism
Olive Morris was born in Jamaica in 1952 and moved to London as part of the Windrush Generation at the age of 9. The Windrush Generation is a name given to people who emigrated from the Caribbean to Britain between 1948 and 1973, answering the call to rebuild Britain following the second world war. Though people arriving from the Caribbean were told there would be jobs they could enter on arrival, it wasn’t this easy for them as many businesses did not want to employ black people and many of them experienced racism and discrimination.
Olive’s political life came to the forefront of the nation in November 1969 after the Nigerian diplomat, Clement Gomwalk, was stopped by the police and accused of stealing his own car. Olive intervened in his arrest, attempting to stop the police from attacking the diplomat, along with a small group of other protestors. In her account of the incident, Olive writes that she was beaten up in the police van and subject to racist and sexist abuse in the police station following her arrest. This photo of Olive Morris held by the Black Cultural Archives shows her bruised and swollen following the attack, and the reverse contains her handwritten comments that verify it: “Taken at about 10pm on 15th Nov 69 after the police had beaten me up.”
During her arrest, she was physically abused, threatened with sexual violence, and humiliated by the male police officers who berated her for wearing ‘male’ clothing. Shockingly, Olive was forced to strip in order to prove she was a woman. This became a defining moment in her political life, driving her forward in her activism for the Black liberation movement.
As Longley notes, Olive pushed back “popularised and limiting framings of Black British identity”. Similarly, Ford states that Olive’s “lit cigarette, bare feet, and androgynous clothing communicated a youthful irreverence that transgressed what many perceived as the respectable boundaries of black womanhood”. As a Jamaican-born, London-raised, and queer feminist revolutionary, there were many aspects of Olive’s presentation that did not fit into the confines of socially acceptable identities at the time.
The law used to stop Clement Gomwalk was an example of “Sus Law”, a racist UK law that was used strategically against young black men throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Reminiscent of stop and search powers used by police today, which we know are still used disproportionately against black men, section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 allowed police to stop, arrest, and charge an individual for simply looking suspicious. This law and its use by the police and courts had a detrimental impact on Black communities across London and the UK.
The incident occurred at a time of intense discrimination of people of colour across the UK, reflected by Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech which was criticised as one of the most overtly racist public addresses in modern British history. Following the incident, Olive was charged with assault on a police officer, threatening behaviour, and possession of dangerous weapons. For this, she was given a three-month prison sentence which was suspended for three years, thrusting Olive to the forefront of the British Black Power Movement.
At the time of her arrest, she was already a member of the British Black Panthers Movement, which she joined in 1968 alongside key figures such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Althea Johnson. Whilst in the group, with council housing waiting lists becoming increasingly long and housing standards declining by the minute, Olive began squatting alongside her friend, Liz Obi. Olive and Liz, 20 and 18 at the time, were supposedly the first people to begin squatting in private accommodation, going against the norm of squatting solely in publicly owned buildings. Olive is pictured on the cover of the Squatters’ Handbook, an iconic shot that was taken of her climbing onto the roof of a flat she squatted in following a police attempt at illegally evicting her. This was one of three illegal eviction attempts which were resisted by Olive and Liz, playing a part in the flat becoming one of the “longest-running squats in the country” and staying occupied until August 1999.
Independent organisation
In 1974, she became a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG) and later founded the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD). This was driven by misogyny in the Black Panthers and a refusal of the group to consider women’s issues, leading her to leave the group and set up an autonomous organisation alongside fellow activists Beverley Bryan and Liz Obi. A pamphlet issued by the Brixton Black Women’s Group, which remained active until 1989, states that they aim to “study and analyse the situation of black women in Britain” because such an analysis has been “long overdue”.
Though leaving school with no formal qualifications, Olive moved away from Brixton in 1975 to pursue a degree in economics and social science at Manchester University. Here, she continued to campaign for causes close to her heart and played an active role in community change. Olive was an active member of the Manchester Black Women’s Cooperative and the Black Women’s Mutual Aid Group. As well as campaigning for the abolition of student fees for overseas students, she also set up a supplementary school that made better educational provision accessible for Black children.
Olive returned to Brixton on her graduation in 1978 and immediately set to work. Alongside the Mary Seacole Craft Group, the BBWG set up the Mary Seacole House in Stockwell Green, later renamed the Black Women’s Centre. They offered a community space for Black women to gather, connect, and take part in arts, crafts, drama, literature, and music. It was also a space for political groups to come together and host services around citizens' rights, welfare, and health.
In coalition with other Black organisations, the BBWG also helped to spearhead the Black People Against State Harassment (BASH) campaign which fought against the widespread and discriminatory use of the Vagrancy Act’s ‘Sus Law’, earlier discussed. In a flyer written with her partner, Mike McColgan, Olive writes about police brutality at the Notting Hill Carnival, remarking:
“The Ad-Hoc Committee was set up after the weekend of the Noting Hill Carnival, when the police not only flexed their para-military muscles at the Carnival itself, but also systematically terrorised and assaulted black youth at a number of tube stations in South London.”
Here, she talks about the ‘Committee against Police Repression’ that she set up following the carnival, feeling fellow left-wing activists such as the Anti-Nazi League were simply “front-bashing” – trying to intimidate people whilst not doing enough to support long-term change and anti-racist work. This flyer shows how her work with other social change activists was always coupled with a critical lens, addressing the intersectional issues of racism, sexism, and classism which other groups did not always do.
As Olive and Mark have highlighted in their flyer above, the BASH campaign believed that the British political left had conflated anti-fascism with anti-racism, which was harmful to the anti-racist work that groups such as the BBWG were trying to effect, calling for Black and Asian self-defence campaigns as resistance to police violence.
The Black Women’s Centre was to be at the centre of further anti-racist organising throughout the country when, in 1981, the Brixton Defence Campaign (BDC) was formed, bringing together the forces of BASH and the BBWG. In the aftermath of the Brixton Uprising, which was an uprising against state brutality and oppression lasting for 3 days, the BDC aimed to “co-ordinate those arrested” and give support to those who “continue to be victimised.” The Brixton Uprising was a culmination of poor housing conditions, state violence, high rates of unemployment, and continued discrimination against Black people across the nation. After the violence and many arrests of protestors, who were largely young, Black men, the BBWG stepped in to support the protestors and advocate for the Black community in Brixton.
Liberation across the world
Olive’s activism wasn’t just confined to the UK, however. She rallied for causes across the world, including for the freedom of activist Angela Davis and liberation movements such as those in South Africa and Mozambique.
In 1977, Olive visited China and was deeply interested in how a once-oppressed group of people uprooted an archaic power system and replaced it with a “people’s government”. In a report written for the BBWG’s newsletter, Speak Out, a sister observes:
“Many of the new techniques and methods of work have been developed by ordinary Chinese people, peasants and workers, some with only a very basic education. This has been made possible because, since the struggle began over 50 years ago, the leadership has put great emphasis on the ability of the people to build socialism by their own efforts”.
Olive and the BBWG praised China and the example that it had set for other colonised countries, serving as an aspirational image “of a peasant society which has had a successful revolution”, as well as the support that the country expressed for the struggles of people in places such as Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Interestingly, as a non-hierarchical group, the writings produced by the BBWG were never attributed to any individual author and were always published as a collective voice. Milo Miller’s book, Speak Out: The Brixton Black Women’s Group, is an anthology of the BBWG’s writings aimed at spotlighting their work. In the preface, the editor notes how the work of the group was absent from accounts of many “key political issues, campaigns, and events in 1970s and 1980s Britain” despite them playing a central role. Though their work paved the way for many feminist and leftist campaigns in the decades following, the BBWG’s work has been largely overlooked by academics and the general public alike.
Olive’s death
After a life of activism, Olive sadly passed away in 1979 from Hodgkin's Lymphoma. She began to feel ill during a trip to Spain and, though undergoing treatment for the disease, she died at the age of 26.
Though her life was short, it was incredibly remarkable and Olive has left a lasting imprint on leftist movements across the nation, whether acknowledged or not. In 1986, Lambeth Council named a building in honour of the “powerhouse of the squatter movement”. Lambeth Council also holds a collection of archives from Olive’s short but impactful life called the ‘Remember Olive Collection’. At the time this project began, there were no public records of Olive. Now, thanks to the research from this group, there is a selection of information, photographs and writings from Olive as well as 30 oral history interviews on her life.
Please consider donating to the Lambeth Archives. This important local resource houses the Olive Morris collection. Small archives are doing the heaving lifting to maintain our history, one piece at a time.
Elizabeth Burns is a writer based in the UK.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
“A Sister’s Visit to China.” 1977. Do You Remember Olive Morris. 1977.
Dyrom, Carolyn . n.d. “Squatting in Brixton in the 1970s.” Do You Remember Olive Morris.
General. 2014. “BCA Exhibits.” BCA Exhibits. 2014.
“Police – Do You Remember Olive Morris?” 2020. Do You Remember Olive Morris? 2020.
“Speak out Pamphlet - Black Women’s Group Brixton.” 2024. Google Arts & Culture. Google Arts & Culture. 2024.
Secondary Sources
Brixton Black Women's Group. 2023. Speak Out! Verso Books.Kelley, Robin D G, and Stephen G N Tuck. 2015. The Other Special Relationship : Race, Rights, and Riots in Britain and the United States. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Obi, Liz . n.d. “Remembering Time to Pass the Memories On.” Accessed November 25, 2024.
Olive Morris | Activist | Blue Plaques.” 2024. English Heritage. 2024.
“Olive Morris and the British Black Panthers.” 2024. Layersoflondon.org. 2024.
Prescod, Colin. 2016. “Black People against State Harassment (BASH) Campaign – a Report.” Race & Class 58 (1): 94–100.
“Talk: Olive Morris House - Gone but Not Forgotten.” 2022. Lambeth Council. September 8, 2022.
Tsang, Amie. “Overlooked No More: How Olive Morris Fought for Black Women’s Rights in Britain,” New York Times. October 30, 2019.
Further reading
Fisher, T. 2012. What’s Left of Blackness: Feminisms, Transracial Solidarities, and the Politics of Belonging in Britain. Springer.
Longley, Oumou. 2021. “Olive and Me in the Archive: A Black British Woman in an Archival Space.” Feminist Review 129 (1): 123–37.