Jessica Huntley [Robert Taylor / www.taylor-photo.co.uk]

EVERY day her husband Eric would leave his home in the London suburbs to go to his job as an insurance broker and every day she would stay behind with their three children.

But as soon as the front door closed, Jessica Huntley’s life as a conventional housewife ended and her work as an international publisher began.

As a seasoned activist with a mission to “rewrite our own history”, she helped found Bogle L’Ouverture Publications in 1969, one of Britain’s first black publishing houses that would play a key role in the fight for racial justice during the second half of the 20th century.

If Britain’s civil rights struggle is a little known story, so too is that of Jessica, who died in 2013 aged 86, having managed to overcome the restrictions of marriage and motherhood to spend more than six decades on the political frontline.

Resplendent in her flowing, greying locks and West African prints, she was a loved figure, much admired for her dedication and spirit. That is why this first academic study of her life, Jessica Huntley’s Pan-African Life, by historian Claudia Tomlinson is such a welcome corrective.

Jessica’s story as a campaigner begins not in the cold light of an English day but on the other side of the Atlantic in her native Guyana, then part of the British West Indies.

Drawing on extensive archive material and interviews with family, friends and associates, Claudia first takes us back to her humble beginnings in a tenement yard in the capital, Georgetown, growing up in a one-parent household, the youngest of four children.

Amid the gathering momentum of the anti-colonial movement and the influence of her Bible-thumping mother Hectorine, who drummed it into her that all God’s children were equal, her first act of political defiance came at the age of 18 when she organised a strike at the garment factory where she worked.

In 1949 she met her husband-to-be and together they would become pioneer activists in the radical People’s Progressive Party, with Jessica a leading voice of its women’s wing.

Intellectually driven and grassroots in approach, the PPP would sensationally form a short-lived government in 1953 before being forcibly removed by the British in a fit of Cold War paranoia.

After being locked up for six months as a PPP official and unable to return to his job in the civil service, Eric sailed for Britain, leaving Jessica and their two young sons behind.

Jessica, Claudia tells us, was faced with a fork in the road – follow him to Britain to sustain her marriage or stay in Guyana, where she remained politically prominent.

After failing in her bid to be elected to parliament in the 1957 ballot, she made the decision to join Eric, going from experienced politician who had broken the mould as a woman in a predominantly male sphere to lowly West Indian migrant in search of a job.

Life in Britain turned out to be “an old fight in new place”. Working as a secretary by day, she resumed her campaigning role by night, she and Eric forming a formidable – and devoted – husband and wife partnership as they mobilised as much against discrimination within the English schools system and police victimisation on the streets as political oppression in newly independent Guyana.

As suggested by the book’s title, Claudia argues that Jessica’s politics were chiefly informed by Pan-Africanism, a movement dating back to the turn of the 20th century to liberate Africa from its colonial shackles, both politically and in the mind.

Given her background in the expansive radicalism of the PPP, this is debatable.

Nevertheless, in the dark days of 1960s Britain, Bogle l’Ouverture Publications would prove to be the perfect vehicle for her – an “organisation of resistance” that would challenge the skewed rhetoric about black history and culture and inspire people to be proud of their African roots.

Jacking in her job, she made the decision to run the company from the cramped bedroom of their home in Ealing while the latest addition to the family, a daughter, sat on her knee.

Among its early publications were Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney’s seminal How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Dread Beat and Blood by then little know poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, as well as a unique line of black greeting cards and posters.

In 1975, the Huntleys opened up a bookshop of the same name in Ealing, with Jessica at the helm for the 15 years of its existence. Vandalised by the far right National Front on a number of occasions, the store was also a prized community space for activists, writers and performers.

It was an intense period of introspection and awakening, throwing up an impressive cadre of leaders advancing under the banner of self-help.

As one of them, Jessica was hailed as the matriarch of the black struggle.

That didn’t stop that “old foe, patriarchy” getting in the way, says Claudia, recalling how she stood down from the co-directorship of the International Bookfair of Radical and Third World Books, a hugely influential arts festival held annually between 1982 and 1995, after being sidelined by leading male comrades.

However, as the outspoken Jessica never referred to the incident publicly, this is speculation and the slight could have well been due to ideological differences.

In bringing the story of this remarkable woman to life, Claudia, a London-based associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society, documents in detail the political ferment of post-war Guyana and Britain, separate upheavals created by people’s mass refusal to be second-class citizens.
Like a lotus flower growing in the mud, Jessica Huntley emerged from both to flourish and bloom.

• Jessica Huntley’s Pan-African Life: the Decolonizing Work of a Radical Black Activist. By Claudia Tomlinson, Bloomsbury, £21.99.