“When it comes to Manchester history, there’s not a lot of Black Manchester history that’s recorded,” Bianca Danielle said.
“We’ve got a lot about certain topics like suffragettes, but if you type in Nello James, hardly anything comes up.”
Today, from the outside, Nello James – the community centre at the heart of a significant chapter in Manchester’s Black history – is a husk of a building.
The walls that held the hopes and dreams of thousands are scarred with graffiti and fenced off from trespassers.
Named in honour of CLR “Nello” James – the Trinidadian author, activist and Guardian journalist who wrote The Black Jacobins, the seminal history of the Haitian revolution – the centre was the legacy of Manchester’s West Indian United Association, formed in 1967 to pursue self-determination in the face of systemic racism.
At Nello James, Manchester’s teachers ran supplementary schools, countering the discrimination in the state system that had led to hundreds of Black children being wrongly labelled as “educationally subnormal”.
The day nursery based at the centre was transformative for working women. Teenagers learned everything from kung fu to how to fix cars. There were parties and wedding receptions. And organisations dedicated to promoting pan-African ideals – such as the Black women’s collective the Abasindi Co-operative – used its spaces for cultural events and campaigning.
Now, the Rekindling Nello James project, led by Danielle, a project manager at the Black-led social enterprise Rekindle School, is ensuring the story of the centre is recorded for posterity. It comes amid community concern over the subsequent sale of the site for development, eight years after its 2012 closure.
New films – including Stories of Nello James, which records memories of the centre, and For Those of You Who Don’t Know My Name is Nello James, in which the writer Keisha Thompson tells its story in verse – were commissioned as part of the Rekindling project and screened at community events.
The Heritage Lottery Fund-backed project launched with the screening of a 1983 documentary – The Nello James Centre – which captured important figures in the centre’s evolution at a pivotal moment in its history after footage was rediscovered and restored.
While Black history has lacked visibility in Manchester’s mainstream spaces for decades, with work accelerating since 2020 but still incomplete – the specialist Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Centre (AIU) has been dedicated to the study of anti-racism, ethnicity and migration in the city since 1999.
Now, AIU is creating the first permanent Nello James archive, which will include the documentaries, blogs and recordings from oral history workshops. An exhibition at Manchester’s Contact Theatre is showing images from the project until August.
Danielle said: “There are lessons in the story of Nello James – which was like a second home or a church to the community – at a time when the barriers and hurdles of the past remain, but are more covert. Black communities are still fighting for ownership, but we have come on leaps and bounds in education and enterprise, and that’s what Nello James was set up to advance.
“It’s really important for future generations to be able to hear the story from the people who were there. One of the main messages from the whole project is that as a community, we’re a force. It takes patience, it takes time, but we have done monumental things and we will continue to do them.”
The site of the former Nello James centre, at Withington Road, Whalley Range, was bought in 1971 with a donation from the Hollywood actor and leftwing activist Vanessa Redgrave for the Walton Cottage Education Trust, which wanted to help Manchester’s Black community empower itself in education, employment, enterprise and justice. The teacher Roy Blackman, activists Felix Daniels, Wilda Grant, George McCorkle and the former Guardian journalist Barry Coleman were among the key figures.
By 1978, officials were praising Nello James’s work. A report that year from the Commission for Racial Equality described how the centre and its nursery were set “in an attractive large house … with a pleasant side garden full of children’s toys”, adding that a “youth club is to open shortly, and longer-term plans include an arts and theatre centre, a children’s workshop and a day centre or luncheon club for elderly people”.
The report added: “The community aspect is also very important. Many of the projects designed to meet mainly West Indian needs have a tendency to cut off one type of need from another, rather than emphasising the inter-connecting links and the richness of the community’s life … With the community centre combining facilities for children and adults, young and old, a fragmentation of the community is avoided. The idea behind the nursery is to provide Black children with an environment in which they can develop and take a pride in their blackness.”
In the decades that followed, the centre became an incubator for community housing, legal and welfare initiatives.
In 2020, the Withington Road site was sold to a property developer for £850,000 by Walton Cottage Education Trust. Today, many in the community would like to see Nello James return.
The film-makers John Crumpton, Martin Lightening and Roy Newton, who all worked on the eponymous 1983 film about the Nello James centre, ensured precious archive footage was recovered. The original, complete 16mm print of the film was lost, but Lightening found an early print without sound in his loft, while Crumpton had a video copy and Newton provided additional video material from the US. Combining the three elements enabled the film to be restored and digitised, with the help of the editor Rafe Conn, in collaboration with North West Film Archive.
Crumpton said the struggles of Black communities in the Thatcher years – including uprisings in Brixton, Moss Side and Toxteth – formed the “backdrop” to the making of the film, adding: “I knew it was a really important piece of film as a documentary, a really important record of what was going on, so I spent a lot of time in the workshop trying to fine-tune it.”
The centre was home to the Abasindi Co-operative for a decade. Francia Messado, a member of the Black women’s collective for 45 years, said: “Nello James has been in and out of my life in different ways. I used to live directly across the road, I moved there in 1979 and I had fond memories of the youth club downstairs, lots of parties, lots of projects going on for young people.
“Nello James would end up being Abasindi’s home for about 10 years – both were spaces where people came together for different types of projects, whether educational, political, cultural or artistic – they made that happen. These spaces supported the community from tiny babies, right through the early years, and then gave the opportunity for people to develop their skills. If you go past today, you can still feel the energy.”
Walton Cottage Education Trust was approached for comment.
For more, visit www.rekindlingnellojames.org
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