By Leonard Butingan, PhD Candidate in History, University of California, Santa Cruz

The George Padmore Institute (GPI) is one of the world’s foremost archives of the British and global African diaspora. Yet the GPI is not simply a place to consult primary sources. Through its online shop, the GPI makes important books and films accessible to a wider public, allowing people to have a piece of history at home with them. As a graduate student in history researching Black transnational activism, cultural politics and colonial memory in twentieth-century Britain, one item particularly caught my attention: the 2006 documentary Dream to Change the World: A Tribute to John La Rose. Directed by path-breaking Black British filmmaker Horace Ové, this documentary is an invaluable historical record and an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of Black radicalism, Caribbean intellectual thought and anti-colonial movements.

Born in 1927, John La Rose was a poet, writer, educator, bookseller, trade unionist, publisher, activist and archivist. His remarkable life and work spanned Trinidad, Venezuela and Britain, where he settled in 1961. Across these settings, he helped shape anti-colonial, cultural, educational and liberation movements. Despite his extraordinary contributions, La Rose remains comparatively unknown. Partly, this reflects his own reluctance to position himself as a political vanguard. But his relative absence from mainstream historical accounts also reflects how his life does not easily fit into often sanitized versions of British historiography and state commemoration. La Rose refused to live as a respectable colonial subject, challenging the very structures that sought to define and contain Black political life.

This is exactly why Dream to Change the World is so important. It extensively preserves La Rose's voice, ideas and political experiences at a depth rarely available even in the age of YouTube, social media and internet streaming. Directed by Horace Ové, whose groundbreaking film Pressure (1976) was the first feature-length film directed by a Black filmmaker in Britain, the documentary continues a longstanding creative relationship between Ové and La Rose. Their media collaboration dates back to the Mangrove Nine (1973), which documents the landmark Black Power trial and is also available through the GPI online shop. Dream to Change the World is both a personal and intellectual autobiography, enriched by interviews with prominent academics, activists and cultural figures, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brian Alleyne, Anne Walmsley, Sarah White, Gus John, Akua Rugg, David Abdulah and Errol Lloyd. Its significance extends beyond biography as it sets out to document a network of people and ideas central to the cultural infrastructures and social movements established by La Rose in Britain.

The film traces La Rose's early political and cultural formation in Trinidad. Interestingly, the late Anne Walmsley recalls that he initially gravitated towards classical European music and literature. Yet his intellectual horizons expanded through encounters with Marxism, Leninism, the Russian Revolution, and Caribbean literary and political movements. He credits his friend, poet Neville Giuseppi, with introducing him to Marx and Lenin, while the influential Beacon Group of CLR James, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, helped shape his thinking. The Group's legacy would even inform the name of his publishing venture, with partner Sarah White, New Beacon Books. Arguably most central were the Caribbean's popular and sonic cultures including steelband, calypso, mento and Carnival. La Rose explains how steelband groups and trade unions collaborated, provoking colonial authorities fearful of a Caribbean revolution. Mento flourished despite colonial attempts to suppress drumming and the forms of communication rooted in enslaved people's cultural practices. Calypso, meanwhile, offered a powerful means of expressing everyday Caribbean experiences and social criticism. These examples reveal how culture could challenge colonial authority and become a vehicle for political consciousness. They also illuminate one of La Rose's enduring convictions, expressed during the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books (1982–1995):

Culture cannot simply be ornament.

The film makes clear that Caribbean migrants arriving in post-war Britain brought with them extensive experiences of transformation, independence and liberation. They were not simply members of a marginalised minority. They carried the political consciousness of societies in which the struggle for majority rule and self-determination had been central. As La Rose reminds viewers:

This talk about minorities and ethnic minorities, this was not language that we came with. We came with the language of majorities and majority consciousness.

This perspective shaped the cultural and political infrastructures La Rose helped establish in Britain. New Beacon Books, founded in 1966, sought to connect Caribbean histories and contemporary struggles while challenging the Eurocentric exclusions of conventional publishing and historical scholarship. Its earliest publications, including works on Marcus Garvey and J. J. Thomas's Froudacity, helped restore Caribbean intellectuals and political figures to the historical record. La Rose's work also intersected with the Caribbean Artists Movement, which interrogated definitions of Caribbean culture and considered what shape cultural identities took in the postcolonial era.

The documentary's title captures the political impetus behind these activities. La Rose discusses the influence of figures such as CLR James and George Padmore, whose lives demonstrated the possibility and necessity of actively working to ‘change the world’. This commitment extended into Britain's struggles for racial justice and educational equality. La Rose's involvement in supplementary education and the New Cross Massacre Action Committee demonstrates how cultural work, political organising and community activism were inseparable. So, too, did the International Book Fairs of Radical Black and Third World Books, which brought together writers, publishers, activists and intellectuals from five continents, creating international connections through the politics of culture and publishing.

Ultimately, Dream to Change the World is far more than a documentary about one remarkable individual. It is a vital historical resource that recovers the intellectual, political and cultural networks underpinning Black radical activism across the Caribbean, Britain and the wider world. It allows viewers to encounter La Rose in his own words – while hearing from the people who worked alongside him – and understand the movements he helped build. The ideas and struggles documented in the film did not disappear with La Rose. They live on in the enduring institutions he helped establish, particularly New Beacon Books and the George Padmore Institute. Therefore, Dream to Change the World offers an opportunity not only to learn about this history but also to engage with its continuing relevance. It is a meaningful piece of the GPI archive to take home.

Purchase Dream to Change the World: A Tribute to John La Rose DVD here.