Book Review - INK! From The Age Of Empire To Black Power, The Journalists Who Transformed Britain By Yvonne Singh

I have read and reviewed so many books at this point (more than thirty) that these reviews have become their own recurring section of the TREC website. One thing that has become abundantly clear is that history is as much about the parts that get quietly swept under the rug as it is about the parts that are put up on the shelf for display. Many of the history books I have read have focused on removing the rug and pulling these forgotten parts out. This has especially been the case with the Black history books I’ve read. Their authors have taken the view that nobody else is going to bring these things to light we’ll do it ourselves. In doing so over the past few decades especially, they have carved out their own space, creating room to tell their own stories where previously such room didn’t exist. This is on full display in INK! From The Age Of Empire To Black Power, The Journalists Who Transformed Britain by Yvonne Singh. In INK! Singh profiles seven key Black journalists effectively giving the reader seven biographies for the price of one (now that’s what I call a deal). Each of these seven chapters could be read in isolation if one so wished and the reader would get the story of a pioneer’s life, but all of them together chart the birth and development of British Black journalism.

  The seven individuals that are spotlighted in Singh’s book are very different people, some of whom lived in very different eras, but that do-it-yourself attitude can be very clearly seen in all of them. There are many mentioned besides, but the main journalists featured here are Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards, Dusé Mohamed Ali, Claude McKay, George Padmore, Una Marson, Claudia Jones, and Darcus Howe. I’m not going to go into each of them individually because this review would quickly become excessively long, and because, simply put, that’s what the book is for. If any of those names spark your interest you could always read it for yourself and come back here after, or not, I can’t tell you what to do. Instead, while they are each very different people with their own lives, loves and experiences I will say some similarities did stand out while reading. These seven journalists all lived lives dedicated to the written word and the transformative power it can have when used for social justice whether it be fighting police brutality, campaigning for abolition, or supporting the independence movements of Britain’s former colonies. They all were constantly struggling to make ends meet and on the verge of bankruptcy while trying to keep their various papers afloat. Even when they had success and had papers with circulations in the thousands and in different countries around the world, they seemed to be operating on a shoestring budget keeping things going through sheer force of will. That independent thread runs through Black journalism all the way to today even as times and technology have rapidly changed. A direct link can be drawn from the work of these journalists to the work of modern activists online with social media. These journalists regularly used their papers to tell truth to power, to serve communities the mainstream media wouldn’t touch, and to expand the public consciousness of these issues. Similarly, now movements like Black Lives Matter, or Say Her Name have had success building enough momentum that the mainstream media is forced to cover their concerns whether they’d like to or not.  

  I will admit I had never heard of any of the seven people featured here before reading this book. If there’s been a trend with these reviews it’s that the more I read, the more I learn how much I don’t know. I appreciate not just the fact that Singh has introduced me to these individuals and their lives, but the way she tells their stories. Her writing style is rich in its description making each biography feel like a short story, which as a fan of short stories I greatly enjoyed. To show what I mean I’m going to include a short passage from Edwards’ chapter here: “The front row stamped their feet. Raucous laughter rippled across the hall and built to a crescendo. The missionary wiped his face with his jacket sleeve, staggered forward and attempted to address the audience again. The front row gobbed and hoicked once more. He slipped backwards in the snail-like mucin that bathed the stage. The heckling continued, brutal and vicious, criticising his appearance.” As you can see Singh uses her words to create quite a vivid picture of a jeering crowd at a late Victorian music hall heckling and throwing abuse at Edwards. Her writing is atmospheric and carries her narrative well and swiftly. At times I almost forgot I was reading a history book based on the lives of real people such is Singh’s skill at setting a scene. Of course, it helps a lot that the people she chose to profile led such fascinating lives anyone of whom could be the subject of a period drama. To me at least, what could have been a dry, removed, retelling of facts in the hands of another writer instead became quite a page turner which, to borrow a cliché for a moment, I couldn’t put down.

  It should be noted that Singh herself is a journalist and has been for more than thirty years, and while she has contributed to other works INK! is her first book. In addition to the above-mentioned narrative skill her journalistic experience is on full display throughout. Several times across the book she notes the poor quality of the record keeping of Black journalism and Black newspapers. She says that The Keys, a Black paper that Una Marson worked on for years, was the only newspaper that served communities of colour in the UK from the entire twentieth century that has been digitized in the British Newspaper Archive. The fact that of all the papers made for underserved communities across one hundred years only one has been properly digitized, is itself a prime example of how the history of communities of colour has been discarded as less worthy of preservation. Many of the papers the individuals featured made and worked on only exist in incomplete runs and scattered about various archives here and there in the UK and the US. Despite this Singh was still able to gather all these disparate bits and pieces together to write this book which itself should be recognised as an achievement. Her meticulous research includes images as well, as she includes many photos which she has sourced. These photos include portraits of all seven featured journalists as well as photos of some of the newspaper covers and articles featured through the book. These photos present a visual timeline to the reader and show how Black papers and magazines developed over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We see the austere, late Victorian era papers like Lux, and Fraternity which were all lines of very small type all crammed in to take up every inch of space, gradually giving way to more experimental (for the times) designs through to the more immediately visually arresting full cover images of Race Today in the 70’s and 80’s. In this respect this isn’t just a book about the development of Black journalism but is a piece of journalism in its own right. It is an act of restoration, recovery and respect.

  To conclude this piece, I think this book is a worthy addition to the growing collection of works whose goal is to decolonise history. It doesn’t set the record straight; it expands what is considered worthy of record in the first place. This book takes these seven people out from under the rug and puts them on the shelf where they always should have been. Singh doesn’t just put them in the spotlight; she celebrates their lives and their achievements too. Singh smoothly leads each chapter into the next, so they form links in a chain building Black journalism up from nothing into a real force for change. It left me wondering how many other struggling Black journalists there were, and other journalists of colour too, whose work and contributions to social justice and civil rights remain unknown. If Singh wanted to write another book where she profiled another handful of similar journalists, I would happily read it. I would easily recommend this book be read by as many people as possible, but especially by those who have an interest in the history of journalism, the activism it can enable, and Black people’s often unrecognised place in it.

To buy this book, please click here: https://tinyurl.com/4atswj49