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This is an edited version of a keynote speech to the annual conference of the Archives and Records Association 2016 in which a leading black British cultural curator, using the concept of ‘reparative histories’, charts his own involvement in and knowledge of recent milestones in black cultural heritage intervention in the UK. Referencing the London Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage, the museum world’s marking of the ‘2007 bi-centenary of the Act abolishing the Atlantic slave trade’ and the significant ‘No Colour Bar’ archive and art exhibition of 2015, he challenges archivists to understand the issue not as the need to simply ‘include’ Black experience, but to allow Black agency in the making of the record.

Originally published in The Black Liberator: theoretical and discussion journal for black revolution (1978), the author reports on the inaugural meeting of the Black People Against State Harassment (BASH) campaign. Arguing that sections of the British Left had conflated anti-racism with anti-fascism, the article describes the widely-felt need for Black self defence campaigns, especially against police incursions into Black communities. The author speaks of the need for a broad alliance of Black and Asian resistance to state violence, and hints at the implications that the formation of specialist policing units will have on the working class as a whole.