Eric Huntley obituary | Black British culture

Eric Huntley, who has died aged 96, was the co-founder with his wife Jessica of the radical publishing house Bugle Louverture, which was founded in London in 1968 to showcase black writing talent. Initially run in a print shop in a living room in west London, the project soon outgrew those temporary premises, and in 1975 became the Bogle L’Ouverture bookshop, establishing itself as a community center and informal advice center as well as a place to buy books outside the mainstream.

Authors championed by Bogle Louverture include Linton Kwesi Johnson, Valerie Bloom, Lyman Sissay, Beryl Gilroy, and Donald Hinds, while the Huntley family also co-created the International Book Fair for Radical and Third World Books, which ran from 1982 to 1995, to unite and amplify the ideas of black intellectuals, creators, and activists across the continents.

Aside from his work in publishing, Huntley has been involved for many years in racial justice campaigns in the UK. He was a key figure in the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association and the Black Parents Movement. The first was formed in response to the racial categorization of large numbers of black children as “educational substandard”, and the second a campaign against “SOS” laws that allowed police to stop, search and arrest individuals on suspicion of intent to commit a crime – a facility that was disproportionately deployed against black youth in the 1970s and 1980s.

He was also closely involved in the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981, which followed the horrific police response to what was widely suspected to be a racist arson attack, the New Cross fire in south-east London in January 1981, when 13 young black men lost their lives (one survivor later killed himself, bringing the death toll to 14).

Eric was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), and was one of 12 children of Frank, a prison guard, and Selina, a housewife. An intelligent and attentive student, he attended Smith Memorial Elementary School in Georgetown, but was unable to go to high school due to family difficulties. When his father was posted to Berbice, Eric worked at the local post office as a messenger, and also briefly trained as a Methodist preacher. But he soon abandoned the cloth, much to the consternation of his religious father, and returned to Georgetown, where he continued his work as a postal worker.

In 1948 he met Jessica Carroll, a trainee writer, and in 1950 they married and moved to nearby Buxton, where Eric was a postman.

As tensions rose between trade unions and the British authorities, the Huntley family teamed up with Marxist politicians Chidi and Janet Jagan and their colleague Forbes Burnham to help form the People’s Progressive Party in 1950, to fight for independence.

The party’s victory at the ballot box ended in 1953 with the British government declaring a state of emergency and suspending the colony’s constitution, claiming that the revolution was afoot. In 1954, Huntley was arrested for violating curfew, and spent a year in Georgetown Prison, where his father was working at the time. He later spoke of the “psychological torture” to which both of them were subjected.

After his release in 1955, the unstable political climate led him to seek a better, safer life in Britain in 1957. This was a difficult decision to make; He had to leave behind Jessica and their two young sons, Carl and Chauncey. When he arrived in cold and foggy Southampton, the flaws in his wedding suit quickly became apparent. He managed to secure work at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in London, and taught at night school while saving money for passage for Jessica and the boys. They joined him in 1962, and in London they had a third child, Akaber.

Struggling to obtain housing in the capital, the family at some point settled in the home of some Trinidadian friends, John and Irma La Rose. The La Rose household was a place filled with political discussions about the decolonization movement. Huntley described it as a “university”, and while there he met the young Guyanese political activist Walter Rodney, who was pursuing postgraduate studies at SOAS in London.

Rodney made a deep impression on the Huntley family, and in 1968 they decided to set up Bogle L’Ouverture (named after two black resistance heroes, Paul Bogle and Toussaint L’Ouverture) to distribute Rodney’s speeches in the UK. At the time, La Rose’s New Beacon Books (founded 1966) and Allison & Busby (1967) were the only black-owned publishers in London.

Self-financing and out of the Huntley family home in Ealing, the press published its first title, Rodney’s The Groundings With My Brothers, in 1969. They later released Kwesi Johnson’s Dreadful Blow and Blood (1975), several books by Andrew Salke, Gilroy’s Black Master (1976), and poetry collections by Bloom, Sissay, Sam Greenlee, Lucinda Roy, Imroh Bakare and John. Lyons. The Bogle L’Ouverture Library opened in 1975, and was renamed the Walter Rodney Library after Rodney’s assassination in 1980.

Between 1977 and 1979, when support for the National Front was at its peak, the store was the target of numerous racist attacks. When windows were shattered in the eleventh such incident, Huntley, along with fellow black bookstore owners, staged a sit-in in front of the Home Office, forcing the police to provide adequate security for their stores and take the crimes seriously. Bogle L’Ouverture continued until 1991, with Huntley blaming its decline on rising rents and cuts in grants.

The business was never designed to make a profit, and while Jessica focused full-time on running it, Eric worked part-time as an insurance salesman. After closing the store, they moved operations back to their home, where they continued to publish sporadically.

Eric’s advocacy for community issues continued into his 10s, when he observed that “the struggle never ends: there is always something to fight for.” Papers relating to the activity and publication of the Huntleys are now held in The Friends of the Huntley Archives at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Karl died in 2011, and Jessica in 2013, after which Eric created a community garden in Ealing in her honour. He leaves behind Chauncey and Akaber, nine grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren, and a great-great-grandchild.