We Take a Look Back at Len Garrison’s Prolific Career

Len Garrison was born in Jamaica at the height of the second world war, the son of a teacher and a cabinet-maker. By the time he died of a heart attack at 59, his obituary in The Guardian called him “arguably the most important figure in the black British community's exploration and understanding of its history”, and he was held in high enough esteem to have a bust commissioned in clay, for his face to adorn the notes of the Brixton Pound. In the years between, he had brought black history out of obscurity in Britain and onto the curriculum. And much of this, the crux of his life’s work, was done here in Nottingham.

Garrison’s first passion was photography. He worked part time as a cinema projectionist in Clapham Junction, splicing together broken reels, and with the keen eye he’d developed he soon went on to become a medical photographer at Guy’s Hospital, while the West Indian Gazette regularly published his photojournalism. At London’s Institute of Psychiatry he soon spearheaded the new Medical Illustration Unit, documenting the variety of troubled minds that existed in the capital of the Sixties.

Garrison’s focus soon moved from photography to education and he earned a BA in African and Caribbean history, as well as an MA in local history. In 1971, he took a diploma in development studies at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation on the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. Educated at a Chelsea grammar school and having gone on to reach the pinnacle of British academia at Oxford, Garrison couldn’t escape the conclusion that other young black people were being failed within Britain’s schools: "given the right opportunity,” he said “[black children] can become an asset to society.”

Finding the means to address this would soon become the main resolve of Garrison’s life. He co-founded the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton and, while working on his PhD, established the Afro-Caribbean Education Resource, ACER, becoming its first director. One of ACER’s several projects was the Young Penmanship award for creative writing, success in which was a huge spur onwards for the careers of many black writers, including The Times’ current chief theatre critic Clive Davis. ACER’s black history educational packs were piloted in Brixton, and these were soon distributed in schools all over the country.

Len Garrison was a man of scrutiny and sureness. “Every black activist knew him,” writes the novelist Mike Phillips, “because he would turn up everywhere, taking photographs, making notes and collecting documents… he devoted himself to uniting the black diaspora.” Garrison moved again to Nottingham in 1988, taking up the role of Director of ACFF, Afro-Caribbean Family and Friends. Here in Notts, he established East Midlands African Caribbean Arts, as well as Build, one of the first effective mentoring projects in the country. Not easily satisfied, he persuaded the King's Fund to back Timeout, a scheme for supporting the carers of orphaned and abandoned black children. He was instrumental in exposing the story of George Africanus, a former black slave who became a successful businessman in eighteenth century Nottingham.

Garrison’s single book of poetry, Beyond Babylon, written in 1983, gives an elusive impression of the man behind the words. “All is not lost,” he writes, “I have breath and the will to change my state of decay.” His determination was that black history would not be relegated to the marginalia of the history of our nation, and the goal of this pursuit seems much closer now than when his career began. Len Garrison reminds us what can be done with a camera, a typewriter and a restless sense of conviction.