Blog post

Essential Books for UK Black History Month

Our key reading.

Verso Books13 October 2023

Essential Books for UK Black History Month

This October, during UK Black History Month, we are proud to publish Speak Out: The Brixton Black Women's Group. The group was a Black socialist feminist organisation active in the 1970s and 80s. They were central to radical struggles against racism, fascism, sexism and class oppression, in London and beyond.

They organised extensively around the policing and criminalisation of Black people, reproductive justice, housing, labour, legislation on immigration and nationality, education and more. As fascism sees a resurgence around the world, as the struggle against police brutality continues unabated, as attacks on reproductive rights rage on, and as border regimes continue to exact their deadly toll, the work and legacy of the Brixton Black Women’s Group remains as vital and necessary as ever.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

Further Reading:

[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]

Speak Out!

Speak Out!

"We came to Britain in search of better opportunities or to get some of the wealth which had been misappropriated from the Caribbean, but what in reality did we find?"Speak Out brings together the ...
Making the Revolution Global
Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...
A Kick in the Belly
The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation.Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical r...
Heart Of The Race

Heart Of The Race

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...
The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain
This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...
Imperial Intimacies
‘Where are you from?’ was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post–World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh ...
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...
Decolonial Marxism

Decolonial Marxism

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...
The Hard Road to Renewal
Stuart Hall was one of the most insightful and incisive critics of the Thatcher era. In this essential selection of his essays during the period, he elaborates both how Thatcher's rise to power exp...
Britain's Empire
As the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain’s Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative ...
Toussaint Louverture
The end of slavery started in what was then San Domingo. In 1791, the enslaved people of the most prized French sugar plantation colony revolted against their masters. For over twelve years, agains...
Red Africa
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...