Yvonne Singh, INK!: From the Age of Empire to Black Power, the Journalists who Transformed Britain, (The History Press, 2025)
Giving a voice to forgotten black voices
Black journalism in the UK has been scandalously undervalued. Black voices have died unlauded, unrecorded, unpreserved. A poem by Una Marson was read on the radio as ‘by a Jamaican poet’, without listing her name or her credentials as the BBC’s first Black presenter. Claudia Jones’ grave in Highgate Cemetery went unmarked for two decades.
Journalist and daughter of Windrush, Singh tells the tales of seven heroes of history whose writings need to be read and whose stories need to be heard.
These heroes had to overcome heart-wrenching ordeals to become strong voices of history. Darcus Howe’s Black Dimension was closed under accusations of libel over its frank reportage on police brutality. Jones’ West Indian Gazette was threatened by Nazis.
Claude McKay, George Padmore and Claudia Jones were Communists. Having received sponsorship for his trip to revolutionary Moscow, McKay was pickpocketed and his tickets stolen. Claudia Jones’ youth was blighted by poverty and illness, and she was deported from the US in 1955 during Hoover’s ‘Red Scare’.
Singh’s account contradicts other sources as to Howe’s familial relationship to CLR James (correctly, he was his great-nephew).[1] She also includes some questionable speculation, which is fun. Did similar CVs mean Dusé Mohamed Ali was an alias created by Rev. William Rand?[2]
The style is straightforward, respecting the journalistic who-what-when-where format.
These seven journalists were instrumental in, as Darcus Howe’s biographer put it, bringing ‘reason to race’.[3] Have we learned, yet? We owe it to the cause of human liberation to make sure these stories are remembered.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
[1] She says CLR James was Darcus Howe’s second cousin; Wikipedia says his uncle. Genealogy sites say great-uncle.
[2] This source, Jacob S Dorman, also claims Ali was not Egyptian, an origin attested everywhere else.
[3] Bunce, Robin, and Field, Paul, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Susie Helme 
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