Could you name a British black intellectual, now Stuart Hall has gone?

We have a strong tradition of black thinkers in the UK, yet interest and coverage is rare outside Black History Month  

By Paul Warmington

theguardian.com, Saturday 15 February 2014

As a pioneer of cultural studies and coiner of the term "Thatcherism", Prof Stuart Hall, who died this week, was in the truest sense a public intellectual. He was also something else: probably the only black British intellectual who most people could readily name.
A bit of prompting might produce mention of Paul Gilroy of King's College, author of The Empire Strikes Back and Black Atlantic, who has recently returned to Britain after several years in America's more fertile ebony towers. But how many other black British thinkers have a public profile?
When I began writing a book called Black British Intellectuals and Education, even friends sympathetic to the project asked, "Are you sure about the title? What do you mean by black British intellectuals?" This is not a state of affairs Hall would have relished. But let's be clear. Britain has a powerful black intellectual tradition: from Olaudah Equiano and the black anti-slavery campaigners, to those who arrived in the mid-20th century, (think, for instance, of Claudia Jones, founder of the Notting Hill carnival), up to the present day. Yet, Hall and Gilroy aside, most struggle to gain coverage in our classrooms, lecture halls or TV screens. Moreover, while it is certainly not the case that all great intellectuals are academics (the great polymath CLR James, for instance, was not university educated), British academia has offered poor soil for the coming generation of black thinkers.

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