They both came from the Caribbean to Manchester, and they both dedicated their lives to the betterment of Black communities. Now, the legacies of two postwar pioneers, strangers to each other and from different walks of life, have been celebrated by one gesture.

Locita Brandy, 91, never met the Nobel prize-winning economist W Arthur Lewis. She arrived in Manchester in 1956 from Nevis – via Southampton and a rough sea journey on the SS Irpinia – and spent much of her working life as a school chef.

Lewis, the UK’s first Black full professor, left the city in 1957 to become an economic adviser to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s revolutionary first post-independence leader, having worked at the University of Manchester from 1948.

But what Brandy and Lewis shared was a lifelong belief in the power of education, self-help, enterprise and community to overcome colonial legacies, and a dedication to the people of the Moss Side area of Manchester.

Now Brandy, a Christian activist, archivist and Windrush pioneer, has been awarded a medal of honour – bearing Lewis’s image – from the University of Manchester in recognition of a lifetime of campaigning in the city.

Continuing the synchronicities, Brandy’s achievement has been celebrated by the community at the West Indian Sports and Social Club (WISSC), the oldest surviving venue of its kind in the UK, which was co-founded by Lewis in Moss Side in 1953 to provide evening classes.

While the WISCC is a legacy of Lewis’s grassroots activism in Manchester, he spent much of his life advising governments and pioneering theories of economic development in academia, at the University of the West Indies, Princeton University and the London School of Economics, as well as the University of Manchester.

Brandy’s journey was different. The corridors of academia and elite power were closed to her but, like Lewis, who died in 1991, she was determined to create opportunity for others, fired by pan-African ideals.

Her activism started in 1960 when she became the first Black woman to join her local Mothers’ Union branch. By the 1970s she was campaigning on behalf of Black children who, because of systemic racism, had been labelled “educationally subnormal” and removed from mainstream schooling.

She went on to volunteer in classrooms, teaching the Black and Caribbean history that the official curricula ignored, ensuring children felt what Maya Sharma, the head of Manchester’s Black histories library, the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Centre, describes as “a strong sense of identity, community, and belonging”.

Brandy also built what would become a beloved institution in Moss Side: Normanby Street project, a volunteer-run holiday club that started with her own six children and grew into something much bigger, fundraising to take children from the terrace streets of inner south Manchester to the seaside, to farms and stately homes. Generations of Moss Side children grew up calling her Auntie Locita.

Brandy’s civic engagement deepened over the decades. As a co-founder of Moss Side Residents’ Association, she campaigned on road safety, youth education and anti-poverty interventions, before serving as a Labour city councillor for the Moss Side ward between 2003 and 2007.

As a founding member and chair of the Manchester Alexandra Park Association and an active member of the Leeward Islands People’s Association, Brandy is a key figure in the history of Manchester’s Caribbean carnival, using it to further community cohesion, and acting as a bridge between the traditional, liberationist spirit of carnival and the soundsystem culture of her children’s generation.

Her son, Keithly Brandy, said: “In the late 70s there was a stigma and barrier between the old and the new carnival tradition, and it was my mum who gave the young a chance and said ‘OK, come on and bring your tings then’.

“We observed what my mum went through in her campaigning, and nearly every single one of us – children and grandchildren – has been inspired to work with young people, adapting her lessons for a different era.

“She kept an open door for anyone who wanted to be listened to, and didn’t throw away anything her descendants can learn from.”

Brandy’s personal archive donations now form the bedrock of the carnival collection at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Centre, and items from her collection featured in the 2024 We Have Always Been Here exhibition at the John Rylands Library. She still lives in the house her husband, Osborne Brandy, bought in Moss Side in 1958.

For Brandy, her work is just one step in a battle for equality and reparative justice that future generations of Black activists and pioneers – and society at large – must continue.

“I’m still saying to the children, your generation must continue one way or another,” she said. “I want them to sit in that boardroom. That is where you’re going to make the changes.

“I came [to the UK] on a ship and it was awful. But it was better than the journey our ancestors had to take from Africa to all those parts of the world. We don’t know what village or what area that all those people might have come from because they dispersed them like the wind dispersing the seeds from the flowers.

“I haven’t won anything. I will say I win before I die if they say that they’re sorry and give back what they took from the people.”

On Thursday 2 July, join Maya Wolfe-Robinson, Ebony Riddell Bamber, Prof Verene A Shepherd and Ahmad Ward in this free event for a wide-ranging discussion on the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme

Book tickets here or at guardian.live