Product Code Database
Olive Elaine Morris (26 June 1952 – 12 July 1979) was a Jamaican-born British-based community leader and activist in the feminist, black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s. At the age of 17, she claimed she was assaulted by Metropolitan Police officers following an incident involving a Nigerian diplomat in Brixton, South London. She joined the British Black Panthers, becoming a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. She squatted buildings on Railton Road in Brixton; one hosted Sabarr Books and later became the 121 Centre, another was used as offices by the Race Today collective. Morris became a key organiser in the Black Women's Movement in the United Kingdom, co-founding the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent in London.
When Morris studied at the Victoria University of Manchester, her activism continued. She was involved in the Manchester Black Women's Co-operative and travelled to China with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. After graduating, Morris returned to Brixton and worked at the Brixton Community Law Centre. She became ill and received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She died at the age of 27. Her life and work have been commemorated both by official organisations – Lambeth Council named a building after her – and by the activist group the Remembering Olive Collective (ROC). Friends and comrades recalled her as fearless and dedicated to fighting oppression on all levels. She was depicted on the B£1 note of the Brixton Pound and has featured on lists of inspirational black British women.
Despite the passage of the Race Relations Act 1965, Afro-Caribbean people (alongside other minority groups) continued to experience racism; access to housing and employment was restricted in discriminatory ways and black communities were put under pressure by both the police and British fascism groups such as the National Front. To combat these issues, black Britons used anti-colonial strategies and adopted African-inspired forms of cultural expression, drawing on black power movements, or black liberation movements in Angola, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Similarly, black British activists challenged ideas of respectability by the choices they made for their adornment, clothing, and hair styles. They listened to reggae and Soca music from the Caribbean and soul music from the United States, and displayed images of internationally known revolutionary figures, such as Che Guevara and Angela Davis. Their fashion sense was also influenced by the civil rights movement.
Morris was drawn into this movement because it allowed her to affirm her Caribbean roots and blackness, while also providing a means for her to fight against problems affecting her community. Just over five feet tall, she gained a reputation as a fierce activist. She was described by other activists as fearless and dedicated, refusing to stand by and allow injustice to occur. Oumou Longley, a gender studies and black history researcher, notes that Morris's identity was complex: "A Jamaican-born woman who grew up in Britain, a squatter with a degree from Manchester University, a woman with a long-term white-skinned partner and a woman who during this time had intimate relationships with other men and women". She deliberately appeared Androgyny, adopting a "queer revolutionary soul sister look". Morris smoked, preferred jeans and T-shirts, either went bare-footed or wore comfortable shoes, and wore her hair in a short-cropped Afro. Her personal style choices challenged not only notions of what it meant to be British, but also Caribbean. African-American scholar Tanisha C. Ford observes that Morris was gender-nonconforming in the same way as the activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the US, who cut their hair short and switched from wearing dresses and pearls to overalls.
The situation with the police officers escalated after the crowd began to confront them about their brutal treatment of Gomwalk. Morris recalled her friend being dragged away by police, shouting "I've done nothing" as his arm was broken. She did not relate exactly how she became involved, but did record that she was arrested and later beaten in police custody. Since she was dressed in men's clothing and had very short hair, the police believed she was a young man, one of them saying "She ain't no girl". (2025). 9781137392701, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137392701 According to Morris' account, she was forced to strip and threatened with rape: "They all made me take off my jumper and my bra in front of them to show I was a girl. A male cop holding a billy club said, 'Now prove you're a real woman.'" Referencing his club (truncheon or baton), he stated: "Look it's the right colour and the right size for you. Black cunt!" Morris's brother Basil described her injuries from the incident, saying that he "could hardly recognize her face, they beat her so badly". She was fined £10 and given a three-year suspended sentence of three months in prison for assaulting a police officer; the term was later reduced to one year. This was a formative experience for Morris, who became a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. Her politics were intersectional, focusing on racism worldwide whilst aware of the connections to colonialism, sexism and class discrimination.
In the early 1970s, there were many court cases involving black activists on trumped up charges. At the trial of the Mangrove Nine, the Black Panthers organised solidarity pickets; the accused were eventually found not guilty, the judge acknowledging that officers of the Metropolitan Police were racially prejudiced. During the trial of the Oval Four, Morris was arrested after a scuffle with police officers outside the Old Bailey alongside Darcus Howe and another person. The three were charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and took a political approach to their subsequent trial, requesting that members of the jury were either black, working-class or both. They researched the background of the judge, John Fitzgerald Marnan, and discovered that as Crown counsel in Kenya he had prosecuted participants in the anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising. When the case came to trial in October 1972, the nine police officers gave contradictory evidence, including about the footwear Morris had been wearing, a crucial point since she was accused of kicking an officer. The jury acquitted her and the other defendants.
Upon the demise of the British Black Panthers, Morris founded the Brixton Black Women's Group with Obi and Beverley Bryan in 1973. The collective explored the experience of women in the Black Panther Party and aimed to provide a space for Asian and black women to discuss political and cultural matters more generally. (2025). 9781134700257, Routledge. ISBN 9781134700257 It was critical of white feminism, finding that issues such as abortion and wages for housework were not central to the black experience, since participants were more concerned about childcare and getting paid for their cleaning jobs. The group was organised non-hierarchically; it published the newsletter Speak Out and produced , which was published by Virago Press in 1985. Three women from the collective were credited as authors because the publisher refused to use a collective name. Dedicated to Morris, the book was republished by Verso Books in 2018.
The 121 squat later became an anarchist self-managed social centre known as the 121 Centre, which existed until 1999. Anthropologist Faye V. Harrison lived with Morris and her sister in the mid-1970s; she later recalled that Morris saw housing as a human right and squatting as direct action to provide shelter, so she was keen to encourage other people to squat. Morris was also involved with the Race Today collective, which featured Farrukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, Darcus Howe and Gus John. When it split from the Institute of Race Relations in 1974, she helped it find a base in the squats of Brixton. (2025). 9781474218450, Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474218450 The offices were eventually located at 165–167 Railton Road, where the collective produced the magazine and held discussion sessions in the basement. C. L. R. James lived on the top floor of the building. The offices later became the Brixton Advice Centre.
Morris helped to establish a supplementary school after campaigning with local black parents for better education provision for their children, and a black bookshop. As part of her internationalist perspective she participated in the National Co-ordinating Committee of Overseas Students and travelled to Italy and Northern Ireland. In 1977, she travelled to China with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding and wrote "A Sister's Visit to China" for the newsletter of the Brixton Black Women's Group. The article analysed anti-imperialist praxis and community organisation in China.
At the conference, 300 African, Asian and Caribbean women from cities including Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, London, Manchester and Sheffield came together to discuss issues that concerned them, such as housing, employment, health and education. OWAAD aimed to be an umbrella group linking struggles and empowering women, whilst also opposing racism, sexism and other forms of oppression. Alongside the Brixton Black Women's Group, OWAAD was one of the first organisations for black women in the United Kingdom. Morris edited FOWAD!, the group's newsletter, which continued to publish after her death.
The naming of the building followed the 1985 Brixton riot, which had been triggered by the police shooting of Cherry Groce; it was demolished in 2020. A playground was also named after Morris in Myatt's Fields.
In 2000, Obi put on an exhibition about Morris at Brixton Library. Ana Laura López de la Torre launched the "Remember Olive Morris" blog in 2007 to commemorate Morris' legacy and the following year the Remembering Olive Collective (ROC) was launched, with members including Ford and Obi. It commemorated the life of Morris, collating information and situating her experiences within a broader history of black Brixton; the pamphlet Do You Remember Olive Morris? was published in 2010 and distributed to local schools in Lambeth. ROC set up the Olive Morris Memorial Awards in 2011, in order to offer financial support to women of African or Asian descent aged between 16 and 27. In 2019, the collective was re-launched as ROC 2.0 since the council building bearing Morris's name was scheduled for demolition and the group wanted to ensure that she would continue to be remembered.
Ford sees ROC as driven by community historians, who in the UK are often behind projects such as the Black Cultural Archives, the Feminist Library and the George Padmore Institute. De la Torre and Obi deposited the materials they had collected into the Olive Morris Collection at the Lambeth Archives. The archives were based at the Minet Library until it was announced in 2020 that they would move to the new Olive Morris House, which would be constructed on the site of the old building as part of the Your New Town Hall housing project.
Morris is depicted on the B£1 note of the Brixton Pound, a local currency. In 2017, a mural entitled "SAY IT LOUD" was painted in the Blenheim Gardens housing estate in Brixton, as part of the Watch This Space initiative. It was painted by the South African artist Breeze Yoko and draws on his character "Boniswa", while also paying homage to Morris. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of most women gaining the right to vote in 2018, The Voice listed eight black women who have contributed to the development of Britain: Morris, Kathleen Wrasama, Connie Mark, Fanny Eaton, Diane Abbott, Lilian Bader, Margaret Busby, and Mary Seacole. Morris was also named by the Evening Standard on a list of 14 "Inspirational Black British Women Throughout History" alongside Seacole, Mark, Busby, Abbott, Claudia Jones, Adelaide Hall, Joan Armatrading, Tessa Sanderson, Doreen Lawrence, Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Sharon White, Malorie Blackman, and Zadie Smith. Morris was recognised with a Google Doodle in the UK on 26 June 2020 to mark what would have been her 68th birthday. Morris's life and activism was dramatised in the BAFTA-nominated 2023 short film The Ballad of Olive Morris.
In 2021, Olive Morris Court opened in Tottenham, on the site of a former storage yard. The project included 33 modular-homes designed to support people experiencing Homelessness .
In October 2024, Morris was commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque that was unveiled at 121 Railton Road.
|
|
