Eric Huntley, pictured in September 2025 [Angela Cobbinah]

ACTIVIST, publisher, eminence grise, Eric Huntley, who has died aged 96, was all of these and more in a life dedicated to the furtherance of racial and social justice.

A pivotal figure in the plethora of civil rights campaigns that dominated the last half of the 20th century, particularly those around education and police harassment, Eric’s most enduring legacy is Bogle L’Ouverture Publications that he founded with his beloved wife Jessica.

Aside from championing a long list of writers that included Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay and Beryl Gilroy, Bogle L’Ouverture and its bookshop arm served as a mobilising force in their own right, inspiring a new generation of political and cultural activists.

Eric also played an influential role in a number of landmark events and institutions, among them the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, which opened at Islington Town Hall in 1982 and became a fixture at the Camden Centre over several years, and the Keskidee Centre off Caledonian Rd, where he served on the governing body.

“Eric was a pioneer and part of a bold vision responding to an urgent need – the need for young black people to have a sense of belonging, to understand who we were and what we bought, to demand a space for cultural expression, to validate ourselves outside the frame of British acceptability,” said fellow campaigner Gus John in tribute. “

Born in British Guiana, present day Guyana, Eric was a seasoned activist by the time he arrived in Britain in 1956, having been a leading member of Cheddi Jagan’s radical People’s Progressive Party alongside Jessica, whom he’d recently married. After Jagan sensationally won the 1953 election on a socialist ticket, the British forced him out of power and Eric was locked up for 12 months in the ensuing crackdown.

Unable to return to his job as a postman, he decided to make his way to England, finding work at Mount Pleasant sorting office and attending night school. Jessica, who had unsuccessfully stood for parliament in Guyana, followed on and by 1961 the Huntleys and their two sons were reunited in London, eventually settling down in Ealing with their third child, a daughter.

The couple quickly became part of a tight network of gifted Caribbean activists like John La Rose of New Beacon Books, forming a formidable husband and wife partnership as they threw themselves into the anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles of the day in between earning a living, in Eric’s case as an insurance salesman.

Bogle L’Ouverture was launched from the front room of their home in 1968 with the publication of the seminal The Groundings With My Brothers by Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney, financed by passing around the collection bucket. Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop opened in 1975, doubling up as a community mecca visited by the likes of Angela Davis.

Jessica died in 2013 but Eric remained a community stalwart to the end of his days and deeply committed to the outreach work of the Friends of the Huntley Archives, which was launched by the City of London in recognition of the couple’s achievements.

Reflective, modest and a true gent, he was also blessed with the good health that enabled him to travel to Ghana for the first time in his 94th year to attend an exhibition and, until succumbing to a stroke on January 21, able to remain living in the house where history was made.

Eric always took the long view of the political struggle, unfazed by setbacks or disappointing outcomes.

“You can’t struggle up the hill all the time,” he once told me. “We get tired and we need to catch our breath. Everything goes round in cycles and each generation faces different problems. They will eventually find the solutions to them – we just have to keep the faith.”