'Growing Out' from racism to awareness

In 1968, seeking a change from her job with a London public-relations company as executive for the Jamaica Tourist Board account, 24-year-old Jamaican journalist Barbara Blake applied for a job as a journalist with the new Thames TV daily magazine programme Today. She was invited to audition as an on-screen presenter and, within days, was invited to be one of three daily reporter/interviewers on the show, hosted by TV personality Eamonn Andrews.

It was the first time a black person had appeared on British TV in a news capacity, other than as entertainers, and the news made national front pages.

Hate messages

However, racists sent hate messages to the station daily, which bowed under the pressure after nine months. In Growing Out, Barbara, now Blake Hannah, writes about her early years growing up in Jamaica and how, from childhood, black women's hair influences their self-esteem negatively. She carries this self-hate to a decade in England called the 'Swinging '60s', where the racism she encountered was counterbalanced by an education in black consciousness generated by the cultural, political and racial events of the time. Growing Out describes how the psychological and actual experience leads her to grow out her natural hair.

It was the decade of 'Black is beautiful', 'Make love, not war', Angela Davis and George Jackson, The Black Panthers, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and the Supremes, the Marishi and the hippies, whose philosophies and actions changed the thinking of that generation and ended the Vietnam War. Woven within Growing Out is the sub-story of 'Mr Jones', a narrative that illustrates the typical lives of Jamaican immigrants in the 1960s.

Blake Hannah is a strong advocate for black self-awareness and credits her years in England as a profitable experience, which opened her mind to the full knowledge of her racial history and pride in her natural self.

Published by Hansib Publications, UK, the soft-cover book will be launched in Jamaica on October 30 by Novelty Trading Company at its Bookland, New Kingston store, with guest speaker Beverly Anderson Manley.