Through their professional practice, as well as their rootedness in leading community-based activities in pursuit of the rights of minorities, the Trustees have made a significant contribution to the sense of confidence with which those communities now project themselves and can give expression to their cultural creativity, how they can influence policy and ensure the necessary delivery of services.

Dr Aggrey Burke

Born in Jamaica, Dr Aggrey Burke is a senior lecturer and consultant psychiatrist at St Georges Hospital, London. He contributes widely to medical and social journals and in 1984 edited a special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry on Racism and Mental Health, a subject about which he is one of the leading experts. Dr Burke is a member of the management committees for several groups related to childcare, mental health and communications issues. He helped to found the African and Caribbean Medical Society (1981) and is its current President. In 1982 he helped to set up the counselling and support group for the families who had suffered bereavement and injury through the New Cross Massacre. This group provided much needed counselling and other emotional support and was the first of its kind in the UK.

Janice Durham

Born in Grenada, Janice Durham came to Britain at the age of 12. She trained as a nurse but has been working with New Beacon Books since 1979. She is their Book Service Manager, dealing with the supplies of books to libraries, colleges, schools and overseas institutions. She was a member of the Black Youth Movement and an executive member of the Peoples War Carnival Band. She has been an active participant in the carnival movement.

Pat Harris

Born in Scotland, Pat Harris trained as both a nursery and a primary school teacher. After teaching in Scotland for four years, she moved to London where she has taught in a wide variety of schools in North London over the past 25 years. She currently specialises in issues of children’s language. She contributed to both editions of the popular New Beacon Calendar of Black Children in Britain. She has been a consistent supporter of, and volunteer worker at, New Beacon Books.

Remi Harris (Treasurer)

Remi Harris was a student at the George Padmore Supplementary School, founded by John La Rose. She studied at the University of Leeds and the University of Westminster and now works for the Association of Independent Music in London supporting small music companies. Remi also organises regular music events under the Afterglow Blu banner. Remi is the Treasurer of the George Padmore Institute and has been an active volunteer of the Institute for many years.

Roxy Harris

Roxy Harris is of Sierra Leonean descent. He has worked as a secondary school teacher and lecturer in further and adult education, including being Co-ordinator of ILEA’s Afro-Caribbean Language and Literacy Project (1984-92). He is now a senior lecturer in the Education Department of Kings College, University of London. He is the author of New Ethnicities and Language Use (2006), Being Black (1981) and joint editor of a number of books including Language and Power (1990), My Personal Language History (1988) and the George Padmore Institute’s Changing Britannia: Life Experience With Britain (1999) and A Meeting of the Continents (2005). He was a founder member of the Black Parents Movement, a member of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and was a co-ordinator for many years of the George Padmore Supplementary School.

Ali Hussein

Born in the Sudan, Ali Hussein came to the UK in 1972 and has lived and worked in the north of England ever since. He was a co-founder of Griot International Books, Creation For Liberation (North) and of the Independent Black Collective. He currently works as the co-ordinator for the Hall Place Studios at Leeds Metropolitan University, where he is responsible for policy training and education in the field of film, video and sound production.

Professor Gus John

Born in Grenada, Gus John has been involved in education, schooling and political activism in Britain’s inner cities since the 1960s. In 1989 he was appointed Director of Education in Hackney, the first black Director of Education in the UK. When the two departments were amalgamated he became Hackney’s first Director of Education and Leisure Services. Since leaving Hackney in 1996, Gus John has been working as an education consultant in Britain, Europe and Africa and is a Visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Education, University of London. He was co-ordinator of the Black Parents Movement in Manchester, founded the Education for Liberation book service and helped to organise the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in Manchester, London and Bradford. Gus John was a member of the Macdonald Inquiry into Racism and Racial Violence in Manchester Schools and co-authored the Burnage Report Murder in the Playground. He is currently Chair of Parents and Students Empowerment (PaSE) an organisation devoted to empowering students and parents in schooling and education, and President of Ujima, an alliance of community organisations in Manchester committed to tackling gun crime and gang violence in African communities. Gus John is also the author of numerous works, including Taking A Stand, published in 2006 and Emancipate Yourself … Choose Life, published in 2007. He is co-author of the National Union of Teachers’ (NUT) Charter on Raising the Achievement of Black Caribbean Boys and Chair of the NUT Round-table.

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Born in Jamaica, Linton Kwesi Johnson came to London in 1963. He performs all over the world both as a poet and a reggae artist and is known as the founder of reggae poetry. Johnson’s work has been acclaimed internationally and he has won numerous awards. His published poetry includes Dread Beat And Blood (1975), Tings An Times (1992) and Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2002), republished in 2006 as Selected Poems. He has also released a number of recordings with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band on his own label, LKJ Records, which he formed in 1981. His most recent album, LKJ Live in Paris with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band, is also the title of his first DVD. Also a committed political activist, in his youth Linton was a member of the Black Panthers in the UK and he was later part of the Black Parents Movement, the Race Today Collective, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice. His record label was one of the organisers of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books.

Irma La Rose

Born in Venezuela, Irma La Rose worked for many years at the Institute of Education in London in their examinations department. She was also Welfare Officer of the NALGO branch at the Institute. She had previously worked as a bilingual secretary (Spanish/English). Irma La Rose was a founder member of the Black Parents Movement and the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, in which she played an active role in their Fact Finding Committee. She was an organiser and teacher in the George Padmore Supplementary School for many years.

Michael La Rose (Current Chair)

Born in Trinidad, Michael La Rose is a director of New Beacon Books and worked there as the distribution manager for over ten years. He is a cultural and political activist and has been committed to the movement to develop the Caribbean Carnival in Britain at Notting Hill Carnival, Europe's largest cultural festival. He was vice-chairman of the Carnival Development Committee and was later chairman of the Association for a Peoples Carnival APC. He was founder and co-ordinator of the Peoples War Sound System and later became band leader and mas designer of the Peoples War Carnival Band for 15 years until its disbanding in 1998. He is a writer, researcher and lecturer on popular culture of the African diaspora. He has been researching the Carnival movement in Britain and has published: Mas in Notting Hill: Documents in the Struggle for a Representative and Democratic Carnival 1989/90 (compiler), Police Carnival 1989 (co-editor), The Gerald Forsyth Story; The lifetime journey of a pan legend in the steelband movement (editor), Carl Gabriel; Carnival artist. He has also written many essays on Carnival and most recently co-edited the young people’s educational publication The History of the Steelband. Michael La Rose was a founder member of the Black Youth Movement, a member of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, and a member of the organising committee of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. He currently works as a health and safety professional in London.

Wole La Rose

Born in England, Wole La Rose works part time for New Beacon Books. He taught for several years at the George Padmore Supplementary School and works regularly as a volunteer at New Beacon Books and the George Padmore Institute.

Ian Macdonald QC

Born in Scotland, Ian Macdonald QC is a leading barrister and a specialist in the field of immigration law. He is the author of the key study and handbook, Immigration Law and Practice in the United Kingdom and other legal texts. He believes in bringing the power of the community into the courts and has been involved in a number of inquiries into racism and racial violence. In particular, he headed the Macdonald Inquiry into Racism and Racial Violence in Manchester Schools, which was set up after the murder of Ahmed Ullah at Burnage High School, and whose findings were published as Murder in the Playground. He is the President of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. He was a founding member of Islington Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in the 1960s and represented the Black Parents Movement in a number of cases they brought against the police. He was one of the three barristers giving their services free at the inquest into the New Cross Massacre in 1981 (the other two were Michael Mansfield and Rock Tansy) and he was co-chairperson of European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice. In 1998 he was appointed as a special advocate to represent the interests of Appellants before the Special Immigration Appeals Court (SIAC), but resigned in 2004 as an act of conscience against the indefinite detention of suspected foreign terrorists, brought in by the UK government after 9/11. He is currently involved in the Mumia Abu Jamal Campaign and writes, talks and litigates about the erosion of rights under international human rights and international humanitarian law as a result of the ‘War on Terror’.

Garry Morris

Born in Britain of Jamaican parents, Garry Morris is a trained librarian who has worked with the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, where he was closely involved with the setting up of the permanent Transatlantic Slavery Galleries there that opened in 1994. He helped to develop a number of outreach programmes and was also concerned with conservation issues in relation to community institutions. Garry Morris was part of the Bradford Black Collective that worked closely with the Black Parents Movement on a number of its campaigns, and he helped to organise the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in Bradford and Manchester.

Milverton Wallace

Milverton Wallace has been involved in digital media and online journalism since the 1980s. Wallace taught news writing, production design, Internet research and web authoring in the Department of Journalism, City University, London from 1992-2000. There he developed and taught the first Internet course for journalism students in the UK, beginning in 1992. He also founded and organised the annual NetMedia conference on the Media and the Internet and the European Online Journalism Awards from 1995-2003. At City University he was a founder-member of the Internet Research Study Group, now renamed the CIBER Group and located at University College, London. Before joining City University Milverton Wallace was London Desk Editor of South magazine (1980-84), Production Manager of the Third World Quarterly (1984-88) and Editor of the Jamaica Record (1988-91), a daily newspaper published in Kingston, Jamaica. Under his editorship, the Jamaica Record built the first networked newsroom outside North America. Wallace has extensive experience in magazine and newspaper journalism, print production and book design. He obtained a BA in Communications at Sheffield Hallam University (1979) and an MA in Publishing at Leeds University (1980). He writes and consults on digital media and is currently developing a series of digital media workshops for 16-19 year-olds.

Dr Sarah White (Secretary)

Born in England, Sarah White is a co-founder of New Beacon Books. She is a science historian by training and worked for some 15 years as the Soviet Science consultant to the New Science magazine. She is Managing Director of New Beacon Books, working in the bookshop, on the publishing and with the international book service. Sarah White was a founder member of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, and has been instrumental in promoting the use of multicultural and anti-racist resources in schools, colleges, universities and public libraries. She was a joint editor of Changing Britannia: Life Experience With Britain (1999) and of A Meeting of the Continents: The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books 1982-95 – Revisited (2005), both published by the George Padmore Institute.