Gus John

Augustine "Gus" John (born 11 March 1945)[1] is a Grenadian-born award-winning writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has done notable work in the fields of education policy, management and international development. As a social analyst he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development.[1] Since the 1960s he has been active in issues of education and schooling in Britain's inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and he was the first Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain.[2] He has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. John is an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the Institute of Education, University of London.[3][4][5] A respected public speaker and media commentator, he works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant.[1]

Early life and education

Gus John was born in the village of Concord in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, to parents who were peasant farmers.[6] At the age of 12 he won a scholarship to attend secondary school at the prestigious Presentation Boys College in St George's, the island's capital.[5][7] When he was aged 17 he joined a seminary in Trinidad,[5][8] where he spent two years as a theology student.[9]

At the age of 19 he went to England, transferring to the Theology programme at Oxford University.[5] He became Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration (OCRI), and recalls: "OCRI as it was called then was run by a woman who became a veteran in the anti-racist movement, the late Ann Dummett and her husband the late Professor Michael Dummett. As I engaged in the middle 1960s with the English schooling system and with academia at Oxford University, where I was a member of the African and Caribbean Students Society, I soon became convinced that Britain faced two momentous challenges. One was to determine who and what it was and what its place in global politics was as it tried to remake itself after two devastating world wars, with only two decades separating them. The second and closely related challenge was to determine how it would deal with the legacy of Empire."[9]

Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with South Africa.[6] In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner-city youth club.[6]

Community activism

Maintaining his interest in "schooling and education, youth development and the empowerment of marginalised groups within communities", John became a community activist.[5] In 1968, he started the first Saturday/Supplementary School in Handsworth, Birmingham, with a group of colleagues.[10] After working on youth and race in Handsworth for the Runnymede Trust, he went in January 1971 to Moss Side, Manchester, where he continued organising and campaigning on four issues in particular: housing and the specific difficulties for young people to get houses on their own; employment for black school leavers; the way the community was policed; and the quality of schooling outcomes for black school leavers.[11] The following year, as he recalled:

"I had got some money from the British Council of Churches to set up a hostel for young black people, because they were sleeping on their friends' floors or sleeping rough in Moss Side, the reason being that their parents had been decanted to places like Sale and Partington, as part of the whole so-called regeneration business. And they continued to gravitate back to Moss Side, they would be here until after the last bus left, some of them would be in the night time dives – shebeens as we used to call them – and there was generally a sense of drift and disaffection amongst them. That made them even more in danger of getting involved with the police."[11]

In 1972 Because They're Black, a book on which he collaborated with Derek Humphry, was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for its contribution to racial harmony in Britain,[12] and Gus John went on to produce many other notable publications. His 1976 work The New Black Presence in Britain was "One of the earliest texts written by a Black Christian in Britain that began to articulate a distinct and conscious experience of black religious sensibilities" and he has been called described as "a grand patriarch of black theology in Britain".[13]

He became a member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the civil rights organisation led by David Pitt.[14] By 1981 John was the northern organiser of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, and one of the organisers of the "Black People's Day of Action" held on 2 March, a response to the New Cross Fire on 18 January in which 13 young black people died.[14] Following the uprisings in Moss Side in July 1981 he chaired the Moss Side Defence Committee, and he was adviser to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee following the Toxteth Uprisings that same year.

He was the co-ordinator of the Black Parents Movement in Manchester, founded the Education for Liberation book service and helped to organise the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in Manchester, London and Bradford.[15] He was a member of the 1987 Macdonald Inquiry into Racism and Racial Violence in Manchester Schools and subsequently co-authored (with Ian Macdonald, Reena Bhavnani and Lily Khan) Murder in the Playground: the Burnage Report. He was a founder trustee of the George Padmore Institute under the chairmanship of John La Rose. In 1989 he was appointed Director of Education in Hackney and was the first black person to hold such a position.[5] When the two departments were amalgamated he became Hackney's first Director of Education and Leisure Services.[15]

Consulting and advisory work

Since leaving Hackney in 1996 Gus John has worked as an education consultant in Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, and is director of Gus John Consultancy Limited.[1] He has been Chair of the Communities Empowerment Network (CEN) – an advocacy and campaigning service working for equality and justice in education[16] – since 1999,[5][17] and is Chair of Parents and Students Empowerment (PaSE), an organisation devoted to empowering students and parents in schooling and education.[4]

He chaired the "Round Table" for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) October 2006/March 2007 and produced Born to be Great, the NUT's Charter on Promoting the Achievement of Black Caribbean Boys.[18] In 2010 he produced The Case for a Learners' Charter for Schools, a charter that articulates the educational entitlement of all school students and the rights and responsibilities of everybody engaged in the schooling process – local authorities, school governors, teachers, pupils and parents.[19]

He was a member of Channel 4's Street Weapons Commission[20] and later adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson on serious youth violence in the capital.[21]

Since 2006 Gus John has been a member of the African Union's Technical Committee of Experts working on "modalities for reunifying Africa and its global diaspora".[22] In 2008 he co-authored with Samina Zahir Speaking Truth to Power, which resulted from research on identity, aesthetics and ethnicity in theatre and the arts.[23][24]

Among other recent undertakings he has since 2011 been a consultant to the Methodist Church, UK, on implementing Equality and Human Rights legislation,[25] and in 2012 was appointed to chair the Expert Advisory Group on Equality, Diversity and Social Mobility, Legal Education and Training Review (LETR).[26] He was commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to undertake a comparative review of how the SRA has dealt with disciplinary cases,[27] John's report being published in 2014.[28][29]

Honours

In October 1999, Gus John was asked by Tony Blair to accept a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year Honours List, 2000. Declining, John said that he believed such honours to be anachronistic and indeed an insult to the struggles of African people like himself who have spent their life trying to humanise British society and combating racism, which is a core part of the legacy of Empire and which the society and its institutions are perennially failing to confront. He was quoted by The Guardian as saying:

"I had to decline because everything I have done in my life in this country since 1964 has been in the struggle for racial equality and social justice. One of the major impediments to promoting racial equality is the legacy of empire. I believe the whole thing is iniquitous. People think I'm being churlish campaigning against empire but I am struggling to end the injustice and inequality that whole damn thing is built upon."[30]

The journalist Jon Snow, who himself refused an OBE, made a special study of the honours system, writing in The Independent: "Gus John, the Afro-Caribbean former Director of Education for Hackney, explained to me what it felt like for him to be approached with the offer of being appointed CBE. 'I regard [the title] Commander of the British Empire as part of the iconography of British imperialism,' he said."[31] Snow subsequently commented to a Parliamentary Select Committee investigating criticism of the honours system on John's position: "As he had fought his whole life trying to unpick the consequences of British imperialism, he felt it was a pretty serious dishonour to have to wander round the planet henceforth as a Commander of the very institution he had tried to demolish."[32]

In 2015 Gus John's 70th birthday was marked by events honouring his five decades of activism in Britain: on 11 March at Conway Hall,[33] on 14 March at the British Film Institute, in conversation with Gary Younge,[14][34][35] and on 19 April at the Phoenix Cinema, in conversation with Margaret Busby.[36]

Selected publications

Books and reports

Articles

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Biography, Gus John website.
  2. ↑ "Fifty Years of Struggle: Gus John at 70", The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 8, March 2015.
  3. ↑ Institute of Education, University of London.
  4. 1 2 Profile at The Guardian
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Alliance for Inclusive Education."Talking to Professor Gus John", Inclusion Now Issue 37, 3 February 2014.
  6. 1 2 3 Fran Abrams, “This is Gus John; they say he's not anti-racist enough”, The Independent, 21 July 1996.
  7. ↑ Author's biography, Time to Tell.
  8. ↑ "Gus John addresses Lib-Dems’ Race Equality Task Force", Gus talks, Speeches.
  9. 1 2 Gus John, "Intercultural Dialogue and Mutual Respect between Europe and Islam – The challenge for Education".
  10. ↑ "The RSA Supplementary Schools Investigation", Gus John Newsletter.
  11. 1 2 Andrew Bowman interview with Gus John, "‘A violent eruption of protest’: Reflections on the 1981 Moss Side ‘riots’ (part one)", Manchester Mule, 15 August 2011. Reprinted in Gus John, Moss Side 1981: More Than Just a Riot (2011).
  12. ↑ Derek Humphry biography at Ergo.
  13. ↑ "Black Theology in Britain by Way of Published Works", in Anthony G. Reddie, Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 19.
  14. 1 2 3 Elizabeth Pears, "Professor Gus John: Fighting The Higher Power", The Voice, 21 March 2015.
  15. 1 2 "Prof Gus John", George Padmore Institute.
  16. ↑ Communities Empowerment Network.
  17. ↑ "Patron – Professor Gus John", CEN.
  18. ↑ "Gus John addresses Lib-Dems’ Race Equality Task Force", 25 April 2012. Reproduced on Gus John website.
  19. ↑ "Launching ‘The Case for a Learner’s Charter for Schools’", 17 June 2011. Gus talks, at Gus John website.
  20. ↑ The Street Weapons Commission Report, London: Channel 4, 2008.
  21. ↑ "Gus John – Live and Direct", School Speakers.
  22. ↑ "The reunification of Africans as a people", Rising Continent, 8 July 2012.
  23. ↑ "Speaking Truth to Power", Sustained Theatre.
  24. ↑ "Identity, Aesthetics, Ethnicity: 'Speaking Truth to Power – a diversity of voices in theatre and the arts in England'", Hybrid.
  25. ↑ "More about Gus John", official website.
  26. ↑ "Professor Gus John appointed to chair LETR Equality, Diversity and Social Mobility Group", Solicitors Regulation Authority, 20 June 2012.
  27. ↑ Jonathan Rayner, "Professor Gus John to carry out SRA racism review", Law Society Gazette, 7 August 2012.
  28. ↑ "Independent Comparative Case Review", Solicitors Regulation Authority, 3 June 2014.
  29. ↑ "The Gus John report – Law Society response", The Law Society, 4 June 2014.
  30. ↑ Michael White, "How the Empire gong could be dumped in the dustbin of history" (interview by Patrick Barkham), The Guardian, 14 July 2004.
  31. ↑ Jon Snow, "Medals that lost their lustre", The Independent, 28 December 2003.
  32. ↑ Quoted in Select Committee on Public Administration Fifth Report, Parliament, 13 July 2004.
  33. ↑ "Fifty Years of Struggle: Gus John at 70", Institute of Race Relations.
  34. ↑ "Gary Younge and Professor Gus John in conversation | BFI", YouTube.
  35. ↑ "African Odysseys", BFI.
  36. ↑ "Professor Gus John: 50 years of struggle", Phoenix Cinema.
  37. ↑ "Born to be Great – A Charter on Promoting the Achievement of Black Caribbean Boys", NUT.

External links

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