Introduction

Holly Cooper brings to the podcast up to date research on Caribbean histories in Coventry, using storytelling and archival materials. Holly intervenes in how black histories are written, adopting radical black futurist methodologies into the writing and research practices. Holly situates parallels in community organising from the past towards the forging of inter-generational futures. The contact between elders and young people is a valued as a point of connection and knowledge creation, such as the annual event Laugh and Chat held with grandparents. Holly’s extensive engagement with multiple archives -digital and local press archives – has created a cross analysis, built from visits to nine archives which do not have a digital catalogue. Interconnected black histories are organised in a spreadsheet catalogue by Holly spanning all the archives.

Holly shares the complexity of gaining legitimacy as an authorial voice when black historians undertake black history. What counts as history and who the somatic norm of a historian is expected to be, accompanies the challenges and joys of gathering stories vying for legitimacy in the face of erasure. Holly’s approach re-assembles the whiteness of archives via the notion of ‘negative assembly’, by working against the grain. Looking forward, Holly takes us back to festival Exodus 85, to imagine how this significant creative event in Coventry could be re-created for a 50^th anniversary, by re-visiting the archives of this event currently sitting in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.

At Coventry Cathedral, Canon Peter Berry is identified by Holly, from the sixties onwards, as an outspoken figure on anti-racism, who was also founder of the Community Relations Council. Locating him as a figure of privilege who was constantly working behind the scenes for justice, she hopes to return to him as a running thread in the manifestations of anti-racist initiatives, including for instance, the Coventry-Kingston Society. Holly flags up specific individuals and organisations with respect to social and political mobilisations, including Paul Stephenson who mentions Berry in his memoir. Lloyd Grant, another figure from Coventry, became the Secretary of the West Indian National Association. Holly also brings into the light feminist organisations, such as the Osaba Women’s Centre which opened in the 1980’s, with Viva Cummins as the first Development Officer.

Biography

Holly Cooper (they/them) is a DPhil History student at the University of Oxford, who, under the supervision of Dr. Meleisa Ono-George and Dr. Chantelle Jessica Lewis, is working on a community grounded thesis of the Black Caribbean community in Coventry. Prior to this, Cooper had completed their History BA (Hons) at the University of Lincoln (2020), and the Black British History MA at Goldsmiths, University of London (2022).

Over the last five years, they have undertaken several different research roles, surrounding archival recovery, reparatory justice, educational reform, community education, and the legacies of the British Empire. More recently, Cooper has become a Director of a newly establish community interest company (CIC), the Black Historians Network UK; the objective of which is to support Black, Caribbean, and/or African historians and communities in Britain by nurturing a network to support and encourage further entry into the study of Black history, while advocating for the legitimacy of the field in Britain. The network is an outcome of an ISRF-funded project, on which Cooper was a Co-Investigator. Cooper is an active trade unionist, as the University of Oxford UCU Equality Officer (2023 – 2025) and the ‘Young Workers’ seat holder on the TUC LGBT+ Committee (2023 – 2025). They are also invested in grassroots community building, as the facilitator of Queer Kinship Coventry, a community organisation for Black and Global Majority LGBTQ+ people in the city, as well as being an organiser with another Coventry organisation, the Arawak Community Trust (https://www.arawakcommunitytrust.com/).

Podcast

Transcript

NIRMAL PUWAR: Today, we're in Coventry Cathedral Archives for the Hear Here podcast, and our special guest is Holly Cooper. Holly is a DPhil history student at the University of Oxford in the Faculty of History. Holly's particular focus is on 20th-century black and Caribbean communities and their histories and voices in Coventry.

Holly, you particularly favour black radical methodologies, and when I was embarking on my project, Multicultural Experiments in the Civic Life of the Cathedral, I was so pleased to hear that this was your topic, because it really hasn't been studied, and when you go into any of the archives, there's not much there. But you've taken yourself to archives, conversations, and different community collaborations. So, tell us about how you've engaged in your research, including with black radical methodologies.

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, so my methodologies as a history student are traditionally quite restricted to traditional archives like brick-and-mortar archives, but also newspaper archives and digital spaces like the British Newspaper Archives and secondary literature, etc. However, recently in the last sort of few decades, oral history testimony has become more respected within the field of history. But even that is still very contentious with the idea of different biases that interviewees have and whether you can lean on them to tell the “true, objective, neutral” history that we're supposed to be pioneering in traditional academia.

So, I tried to subvert that by embracing black radical methodologies, such as storytelling, and also in my practice, that is community-grounded, which means that I'm placed within the community that I'm researching. For example, for the last three years or so, I've been volunteering and working with a group in Coventry called the Arawak Community Trust, which acts as a vehicle to provide intergenerational activities and education in the black community in Coventry. That work has definitely taught me more than any traditional archives ever could, for doing this underrepresented history but, of course, when you come to writing up you can't really say: “oh well, I've developed part of my method or my research through this informal engagement”, because there's no qualitative or quantitative “data” that goes with that.

So, I've definitely struggled with working in the site of history and trying to do this work. So much of how black culture is understood is through storytelling, but again, how do we analyse stories as this “objective truth”, that is supposed to be engaging with in history? Sometimes I feel like I should have leaned more into sociology or perhaps black studies generally, but then that kind of seeks to delegitimise the work that we're trying to do by calling it something other than history when it is, in fact, history. I take great pride in the fact that what I am doing is history, and I'm a trained historian. That's how I understand my methodology.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It’s quite a challenge with the Big H in history, and you're definitely intervening in that space with your methodologies. I'm thinking through how you have gathered, as you say, the intergenerational exchanges. How have you found them in Coventry? How did you come to ground yourself here?

HOLLY COOPER: It sort of began when I studied my MA in Black British History at Goldsmiths. I was in its first cohort—its pioneer cohort—in 2020 under the supervision of Dr Christina Fryer, and that course is so powerful, and I think that's potentially why it's been so viciously attacked over the last two or three years. It was my first introduction to doing history in this way, despite having done a whole three-year undergraduate degree in history. Before that, I hadn't been introduced to these sorts of ideas until this point of doing the MA. One of the modules that I undertook was called Regional Black British Histories, and it was during the pandemic and lockdowns. Christina called upon us to look to our local as a kind of “dig-where-you-stand” approach to understanding black history. My local was Rugby, and I was connected with a brilliant long-time activist, Cheryl Donaldson, who works in Coventry, and that's how I reached this space and did my MA dissertation on Coventry.

But it felt like it only really scratched the surface of what was here. I was actually overwhelmed by the under-researched, unreported aspect of Coventry's black history. It still surprises me to this day when I come across things in the archives, and I'm like, wow, this has not been written about anywhere, and it feels very overwhelming to be the person to undertake that kind of important historical recovery. But I feel privileged enough to have the support of the community, because without them I wouldn't be able to do this, not at least in a way that is meaningful.

So, the MA taught us that to do this work meaningfully, you have to be engaged and you have to understand the community on a human level rather than a research subject level. It's been an invaluable experience that has led to the development of my thesis so far.

NIRMAL PUWAR: And you've been right in the middle there in the community, haven't you? You spent hours, days, and months with particular groups, with elders, and as you say, intergenerationally with young people. If you'd like to share, Holly, what does that involve?

HOLLY COOPER: So, just yesterday, actually, I was one of the volunteers at our annual family fun day that we put on, which brings together families for sports and games and all sorts of different things. Our community trust has been running the family fun days in Coventry for the last 14 years, on the first or second Sundays of June, July and August.

What I learned from doing one of my interviews with one of my fellow community volunteers was that the family fun days are inspired directly from an event that used to happen in the 80s called Jabaddus in Coventry, which was a full day tournament of different black sports teams from across the country, coming together to compete against each other in Coventry. Several of my fellow community members were around during Jabaddus and organised with Jabaddus, and when it ended in about 2011, they were like, we need to bring this back. This is crucial for our community cohesion and harmony. So, you could sort of see those parallels of what we do today and how much of it is inspired and leans on the past. It centred a lot around young people and their families.

Our community trust runs Laugh and Chat, a monthly community-grounded event for elders in the community. We provide a free minibus to collect them from their homes and bring them into town. We provide hot meals for them, and there's always a game. One of my favourite events that we do with Laugh and Chat, which we do once a year, is called Grandparents Day Laugh and Chat. It's like the US holiday for celebrating grandparents. So, these elders come with their grandchildren, and it's such a heartwarming event in which we get to see the parallels between generations and how they interact. Growing up, I was sort of deprived of that kind of community, and so it's so nourishing for me to be a part of that, to help facilitate that, and just do this kind of day-to-day work in the community. I think it is what allows me to then sit at my computer for eight hours a day, trying to actually use the historical language to legitimise these people and the history of Coventry.

NIRMAL PUWAR: And a process of translating, as you say, your rich interactions and rich lives with the scholarship of history with the Big H. You also do so much work with the archives, don't you? Especially, the newspaper archives, and most of that has been digital?

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, so I've engaged quite heavily with the digital archives, like the British Newspaper Archive, especially. Another that comes to mind is the Manchester City Archive and the Modern Records Centre at Warwick. They actually have large collections of newspapers, like snippets that somebody has, like the one in Manchester, which was from the Institute of Race Relations, where they would take newspaper clippings from newspapers that speak about race outside of London. They had these massive volumes, so I've sort of analysed them against the digital archives because a lot of these archives in these books and these volumes haven't been digitised; they're not like the traditional sort of local newspapers that are on the British Newspaper Archive website. So, I cross-analysed them to see how these more mainstream newspapers were reporting events compared to these smaller, more grassroots ones.

So yes, I worked quite heavily with the newspapers in the archives, both online and in person, and in physical print. In 2023, I got a grant from the university to go to nine different archives across England. It would involve physically going into these spaces and trying to find anything that might not be on the digital catalogue that a lot of these archives have now, and that in itself was overwhelming to say the least.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It's a lot of archives. What does that include, then?

HOLLY COOPER: On a more entry-level, I went to the National Archives in Kew and the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton in London. I also went to the Warwick Modern Records Centre, which is traditionally a trade union archive, but actually had a lot in there pertaining to the black community in Coventry, because, of course, they're interconnected in lots of different ways.

I went to the Birmingham Archives, which had a lot relating to the Indian Workers Association, but again, that's very interconnected to the black community organising in the West Midlands, specifically in Coventry. I went to the Institute of Race Relations. So, a lot of different places I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was a lot.

NIRMAL PUWAR: So, you kind of constituted some sort of informal catalogue from this?

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, I have a breakdown—a folder for each archive I visited, and each one has a spreadsheet that pertains to the material catalogue number, so I can ensure I'm referencing everything properly. I think from an outside perspective it would look a bit chaotic, but I've organised it in such a way that I can navigate it quite easily.

And of course, I have photos of each of the materials that I've then catalogued in my own little spreadsheets and then I can revisit them whenever I want to engage with that but I knew from the outset that handling these materials correctly was going to be a really important part of my work, because I don't want to leave any space for questioning over the legitimacy of these sources and whether or not they do belong into an official archive. I want to be able to signpost individuals to specific places and give them the archive, the catalogue name, the file number, the box they're even in because I know that work such as this is challenged, especially when engaging the archives because there's such a dearth of these materials in traditional archives. People are always surprised when you actually have the stuff, but yes, it's been a lot.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It's like an archive of archives, and you're doing at least two things: one is looking for the gaps, and that's enough of a job, but then you have the additional burden of continuously having some kind of voice here saying: is it legitimate? is it legitimate? And then you use the techniques from history that, you know, are kind of authorial methods for legitimation. So, you're doing both at the same time, all the time. It's quite a burden, I imagine.

[00:14:49]

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, I didn't quite realise going into my PhD how complicated, perhaps unnecessarily so, this kind of work would be. I feel like this is something very unique to black historians doing black history that perhaps white historians, for example, doing black history don't have to contend with. I know several white historians that when I tell them about my methods, are kind of confused as to why I feel like I have to take all these extra steps. And there's this kind of naivety there, around the contentions of being black and doing black history, because until relatively recently, it was considered that black people do not have the value neutrality necessary to do their own history because they're part of it. That’s the sort of colonial legacies of doing history that we see even today; it's this idea that you need to be away from the subject area to be able to really write an official history on something. That’s something that I didn't quite realise coming into the PhD, but something that I now am very much familiar with, and it's unfortunately the reality.

NIRMAL PUWAR: What kind of response do you get?

HOLLY COOPER: So, I think people are sometimes surprised when I present parts of my work at conferences that have gone under the radar in our understanding of black Britain. I wrote a whole chapter about town twinning, and I'm talking about its colonial legacies and how it's very much ingrained with this sort of post-colonial desire to still have influence over the Global South.

[00:16:57]

I think when people see me as a young black person doing this work, they're automatically—I don't mean to say everybody; I just mean sometimes especially when I meet more senior historians in my field—they sort of approach me and my work with this—sometimes it's just genuine curiosity and they are willing to hear what I have to say—but sometimes I feel like they approach me like I've offended them somehow. There's this real idea that there should be no more new history, that everything really should now be covered.

Within the field of Black British History, leaders in the field do feel like there are quite a lot of works that cover the whole of black Britain that are very respected in their own right. I personally rely on, like Kennetta Hammond Perry's work, Rob Waters’ work, Peter Fryer's work. I think people really resent the idea of black history taking up more space in British history than it already has. There's this whole idea that we're just making things up to prove that we were somehow here or a part of this history. There's a sort of pushback against teaching black history in schools, where different communities are saying, you know, denying the reality of this, and I think that sort of denial does extend into academia as well. Obviously, I stand by my research wholeheartedly, and I take so much enjoyment in my research.

But I don't think Coventry is unique in being overlooked. I think a lot of towns, especially those that sit outside of traditional understandings of space, are overlooked. Coventry is a really interesting space in that it's a city, but it's relatively new in its architecture and structure, following the aerial bombing in 1940.

It kind of straddles this idea of being a historic city, but also this kind of newer city, a 20th-century city. Then, with the wards as well, it kind of straddles this suburban-urban nature. It’s not as straightforward as just saying—like with Birmingham, there's the city, then inner-city areas and towns connected to it. Coventry doesn’t fit neatly into that, and I don't think Coventry is alone in that, but I think spaces that aren't straightforwardly understood in how we understand space are even more overlooked in terms of black history, because you can't just say it's an inner-city space, so there's lots of black people. Coventry traditionally hasn't had a lot of the black Caribbean population. It's been just over the average percentage for black Caribbean people in the West Midlands, so it's not like it has this exceptionally large population of black Caribbean people. But the significance of the individuals would suggest that the community was somehow bigger. I think that sometimes the historical recovery has been reserved for cities with larger populations, which denies a lot of spaces in England of this black historical recovery. Hopefully, my work and other people's work that look at the sort of liminal spaces will gain more traction and afford more agency to spaces like ours.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Are there any particular figures—I know, you don't have an elite notion of history, so it's community-based—but are there any figures that you especially like to share with us from your research?

[00:21:00]

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, so looking at a well-known end of the spectrum for black Caribbean figures or African Caribbean figures, we have Paul Stevenson. Paul Stevenson is mostly known for his involvement in the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott and the success around that. Of course, he was in the US for a while, and he was a strong, principled advocate for civil rights and for black political agency and for people to have their own spaces and to have this heightened political awareness. He was in Coventry from 1967 to 1972, and he was the first Community Relations Officer at Coventry's Community Relations Council (CRC), which was the second of its kind in England.

He came into one of my chapters, where I look at the progression of his politics, while being in Coventry and how he came in on this sort of platform of integrationism, believing that his role in Coventry would be to integrate the politically black and the “white native” community. But, then the longer he was in Coventry the more he came to realise—and I'm not here to suggest that he didn't know this beforehand from his previous activism—but he came to realise that that wouldn't necessarily be possible; this kind of idea of integrationism isn't ever really going to work unless racially marginalised people sacrifice and give up their identities and their cultures and their histories. And, even then, it's still touch-and-go with how integrated you are considered to be.

While he was here, he did lots of different things, like he supported a group of young black Caribbean people to establish the West Indian Youth Council, which became this kind of political body for second generation and young black Caribbeans in Coventry, to allow them to create their own physical space, which was the Hollyhead Youth Club. They also got some money from the Home Office to set up a hostel on Walsgrave Road. It's just some really impressive work. In my interviews and throughout my research, it suggests that he encouraged this, and perhaps if it wasn't for his involvement, these spaces wouldn't have existed in the same way, or they wouldn't have existed at all.

So, I have Paul Stevenson, who is a brilliant figure in his own right. But then, also someone that I found relatively recently when writing one of my other chapters was a gentleman called Lloyd Grant. He served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and moved to Coventry in the 50s. He joined the Coventry branch of the West Indian National Association. The West Indian National Association was, as it says in the name, a National Association, but it had branches all across England, and the Coventry branch was quite active around the same time as the Community Relations Council was getting set up. In 1968, Lloyd was elected General Secretary of the National Association, not just the Coventry branch. I found it so interesting to know that a General Secretary for a national organisation came from Coventry, which had a smaller membership body because of its smaller population compared to other towns and cities across England.

Lloyd sort of reached the local press and some controversy, after Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech, when he created a pamphlet and distributed it across Foleshill which was where he was living, called Be Ye Prepared. It was basically trying to awaken people in his community to the rising violence and fascism in England that was always there. The pamphlet was very contentious, against his whole idea of integrationism. To an extent, Lloyd's not advocating for non-violence; he's saying be prepared to stand up for yourself, be prepared to be brought into this physical fight that is built upon anti-black racism. It's just really interesting to know that there was such a politicised and active figure living in Coventry.

From what my research would suggest, he wasn't an exception to the rule. There were lots of different active individuals living in Coventry. Paul Stevenson and Lloyd Grant were in the 60s, but if we look to the 80s, one of my personal favourite organisations throughout this research has been the Osaba Women's Centre, which started in the early 80s based off a grant that the West Indian Youth Council in Coventry got, to open a black women's centre. It was down Primrose Hill Street in Hill Field. Its first Development Officer was a young person called Viva Cummings, who was the first person to create the Osaba Women's Centre and establish its purpose. Of course, part of it was to just create a space for young black women to come together. But also what Viva and the Women's Centre were keen on was more space for young black mothers and young black Rastafari women in Coventry, who were a largely demonised group both as single mothers and those that follow Rastafarianism.

I've worked with Viva relatively recently, and she is still such an inspiring person. Just being a principled and outspoken young black woman during this period alongside a community largely led by black men, I can imagine, would have been difficult to say the least. But she really took the Centre under her wing, and I'm sort of in awe of the history that I found from speaking to her, but also from how she was reported in the newspapers.

[00:28:26]

Lastly, to talk a little bit about a thread that I found throughout my research, which was kind of surprising for me, actually, would be the work of Canon Peter Berry. Peter Berry was a white middle-class man who was a minister. He was a religious man, but it was reported as early as the 1960s, all the way through to the 90s, which is my research scope, that he was consistently outspoken against racism and especially against anti-black racism. I was curious to see how he was encouraged to voice these opinions, as I feel he wouldn't have been afforded the same platforms in many other spaces. I think he was privileged in his position to have these platforms. He did not misuse them at any point. He was speaking about unemployment and poverty as a key factor behind racism and racist attacks in Coventry and the scarcity of work, housing and physical spaces as a real antagoniser between the “white native” community and this newer, larger black community.

I'm always surprised when I read a newspaper article, and he's forever asked for a comment, and his comments sometimes actually go against what the newspaper article is saying. For example, the article is saying skinheads in Coventry are brutally attacking black people for no reason, and he's going, well, actually the reason is that they're being pitted against each other, because of this, this and this. He was actually also the founder of the Community Relations Council. In Paul Stevenson's memoir, he speaks about Peter Berry, that when the job came up for the Community Relations Officer for the CRC, Peter Berry called Paul and said you'd be brilliant for this job, please apply, and he did. This is all included in Paul Stevenson's memoir, and I just feel like Peter Berry seems to be a character who is working behind the scenes but uses his privilege and his personal knowledge to the advancement of racially marginalised communities in Coventry.

I always smile to myself whenever I look through an article, and I just see his name pop up. I was surprised to see that he sat on the Coventry Kingston Link Society, which was a group set up by a gentleman called Josh Williams to strengthen the twinning link between Kingston in Jamaica and Coventry in England. Peter Berry was there, and he's always kind of popping up, and it's nice to see that continuous thread throughout that. I'd love to learn more about why and what his agency was. I find that all very interesting.

NIRMAL PUWAR: That thread is fascinating, and it directly links us to this archive in a way, Holly. You probably need to spend more time in here because he was the Canon for Community and Industrial Relations. I think he spent a lot of his time living in Foleshill, so he had that very close tie with both the cathedral but also the city and what then would be referred to as immigrant populations. He travelled to many countries, as you say, to Kingston in this case, but also to China, to India, in order to familiarise himself with different ways of living, different ways of eating, thinking and political visions. It is really interesting, isn't it, as you say, that he used these platforms and his power to take it elsewhere and to create different connections. That's something that's not often foregrounded from here, from the cathedral.

You’re so methodologically creative. You do the historians' work of dotting every bit of archive box and cross-referencing and having that sealed. And there's a lot of questioning of what shouldn't really be questioned in the first place, but you also work out of speculative and creative methods, and you've done lots of research with respect to Coventry in that way.

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, I do use a lot of speculation in my work, and that's because I'm so acutely aware of how these historical narratives are understood around whiteness and are told through a lens of whiteness. There's this archival term, which is called “negative assembly”, which is that archives and histories are constructed in a way to uphold this idea of whiteness and the power of whiteness, so I love to challenge that and think outside of that.

NIRMAL PUWAR: I like that idea of how we work inside the negative assembly. How do we reassemble and reorder?

I often think about my companion thinkers. If I were to think of Holly, I would think of you working through these multiple archives and how you work against the grain of the negative assembly. And if you were to do something in the cathedral, even just in a kind of fantasy land, what would you like to do?

[00:34:43]

HOLLY COOPER: So, in the summer of 1985 in Coventry, there was a festival called Exodus 85 and it was constructed in four parts, so it was through arts and culture, performance, the creative word, but also through history, political alignments.

Harry Goulbourne, who was working at the University of Warwick at the time, had a few lectures during the festival, and it was—from what I understand—through looking through the archive material, but also the newspapers and asking people about their experiences. It seemed like a space for minds to come together, to push back against this idea of what it means to be black and specifically what it means to be black Caribbean, living in Coventry and from what I've found from the festival, you'd be surprised to hear that it was in Coventry and not in a space like London.

Exodus 85 will have its 40th anniversary this August, and something that I have always wanted to do is to try to recreate that in some way, through arts and culture and spoken word. Of course, that requires a lot of capacity and resources that I don't necessarily have, but perhaps by the time it's 50th anniversary, I may be able to bring something together. For me, I would love to see a sort of community gathering—a creative gathering—in which people are allowed to and actively encouraged to explore that part of themselves. I think that through the neoliberalism of our time—and also because of the disconnected ways in which we move and navigate the world—everything feels so disparate. In an ideal world, I’d love to see all of that brought together under an umbrella of celebration that isn’t just siloed into something like carnival, for example.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Where was Exodus 85?

HOLLY COOPER: Exodus 85 was spread across the city, with part of it actually being a carnival. It was Coventry's first Caribbean carnival, I believe. But it was also based at the Herbert, in the art gallery. Quite a lot of the materials that I found relating to Exodus are based in the Coventry Collections archive.

You know, they had breakdancing showcases and they had a fashion show and all these other different things. I looked through the catalogues of the artworks and artists from all across the UK and all the way back to the Caribbean; they were welcome to Coventry to showcase their art. It seemed like the sort of time that I would love to see recreated and brought back into this current moment in which we find our community so disenfranchised and so individualised. I think for me, with doing this research and being grounded in the community today, I see those distinctions between the past and the present, and it's really disheartening to see how individualised we've all become and how this idea of community belonging and investing in your local area has kind of been lost.

I speak to a lot of young people, and their main ambition is to leave Coventry because they feel like there's no way that they can create the spaces in which they can see themselves being represented. This has been an issue across time, but what people have historically done is that they forced their spaces into being. I think the rebirth or the reintroduction of Exodus, as a month-long festival, would perhaps re-incentivise and bring back young people and older people from this sort of disengagement from their local community. So, in an ideal world, that’s what I'd love to see happen.

NIRMAL PUWAR: So, the Herbert was a central point for it?

HOLLY COOPER: The Herbert was one of the spaces that hosted it, and they facilitated it. The festival had several different funders, but one of them was the City Council; the actual steering committee was naturally made up of community members, almost entirely.

It had Viva Cummings on the committee. There was Irma Whitehead, who was the leader of another black women's group in Coventry. There was Joss Williams, who opened a supplementary school in Coventry called Clearview College. They all sat on this board together, bringing these minds together, to curate this festival, made by them, for them. But yes, the Herbert was a physical space that helped facilitate that.

NIRMAL PUWAR: You've spent some time in those archives, as you say, looking at that event, but also looking at others, trying to work with the gaps. In a way, you've woven together this rich, textured understanding of black Caribbeans’ lives across time in Coventry.

HOLLY COOPER: Yes, the time I've spent in the Coventry Archives, which is based inside the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, has been a difficult period. I mean, Coventry is well known for its industrial history, for its motor industry and also for its reconstruction, so quite a lot of the archivists are very familiar and very well acquainted with the materials relating to that. When I approached the archives about the black histories in the archive, they were relatively unsure, and they would just kind of say, come in and see what you can find. I do find it somewhat disappointing that there is such little understanding among those working in the archives of these materials, and I don't necessarily think that's because they don't want to know; I don't think that that's the case at all.

I think it's that they don't have the capacity to explore it for themselves, but when you don't have someone who is specialised in that area or knows how to navigate these materials on your team, it's even more difficult. The archives in most cities across England are sort of the last consideration within the art sector in that city or in the City Council. It's sort of at the bottom of the pile when it comes to funding and resources. So, I understand why, but I do find it ever so sad that I go in there and I find resources that are largely neglected.

I mean, I kind of resent traditional archives in that respect anyway, for the stagnation of the materials and how these materials that were once so full of life and purpose now just sort of sit in boxes decaying. They aren't properly catalogued, and it takes individuals like yourself to come into these spaces to actively engage with them and breathe new life into them. However, there are just so few of us who are able to do that work and have the capacity to do it. It's just sad, but I know that at the heart of it, they do their best.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It reminds me of Stuart Hall's work on archives and his famous thinking around “living archives”. The way you put it—they sit there, nothing's happening, the life has been lost—that's in between those archives, he calls it a “living heritage”.

I'm hoping that you bringing your specialism—because you are a specialist in this area now—into the cathedral and across the city, it's basically a gift, to be honest. You're so closely related to those knowledge bases, and you've managed to navigate and entwine and build links, not only for serious scholarship, but serious scholarship that is situated and grounded in communities, which is a very unique skill in itself.

Holly, it’s been great having you with us. Of course, in a few months, in September, we have an event in the cathedral, which will work with small elements from the archive on an exhibition and a round table. I'm really pleased that you will be there alongside Monica Brown.

HOLLY COOPER: Thank you for bringing me into this conversation and listening to me talk for however long it's been about my research. I very rarely get this freedom to just talk and talk and talk.

References

Lewis, Sarah E (2024) The Unseen Truth: when race changed sight in America, Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674238343_sample.pdf

Stephenson, Paul and Lilleith Morrison (2011) Memoirs of a Black Englishman: Paul Stephenson.