By Janaya Pickett, Research Associate for Heritage Collections
“No, you won’t be naming no buildings after me to go down dilapidated”
— Erykah Badu, A.D. 2000
In 2021, students and staff at the University of Liverpool voted to rename Greenbank Student Village’s former Gladstone Halls in honour of anti-racist campaigner, educator, and community leader Dorothy Kuya. The decision to remove the name of 19th-century Prime Minister William Gladstone – whose family fortune was built on transatlantic slavery – marked a historic moment of institutional reflection and accountability. By choosing Dorothy Kuya Halls, the University chose to elevate a Black woman who dedicated over seven decades dismantling systemic racism in Liverpool and across the UK.
Between 2022 and 2023, I had the honour of managing the Dorothy Kuya Creative Archive Project. Immersing myself in her personal documents, letters, diaries, and photographs gave me a firsthand view of Kuya’s extraordinary life. The Dorothy Kuya archive is now catalogued and held at the Liverpool Record Office.
As part of Black History Month 2026, this blog explores the woman whose name lives on in lectures and buildings, while the full scope and impact of her incredible life remains a mystery.
Early Roots in Liverpool 8 and Political Awakening (1933–1950s)
Born in Liverpool on 16 March 1933 to a white English mother and West African father, Kuya’s early life was shaped by the vibrant and challenging environment of Liverpool’s historically mixed Black community. With a keen awareness of racial discrimination from a young age, her political consciousness developed early. In 1946, aged just 13, she began attending Young Communist League (YCL) meetings.
Her early career saw her train as a nurse in Liverpool hospitals during the mid-1950s, but her focus remained firmly on civil rights and tackling the British Colour Bar. She served as secretary for the women’s section of the Colonial People’s Defence Association, campaigning against systemic discrimination in employment, housing and the police force, and helped establish the Liverpool Council for the Movement for Colonial Freedom (now Liberation).
Education, Movement Building, and Radical Politics (1960s–1980s)
During the 1960s, Kuya’s activism expanded beyond Liverpool. After living and working in Geneva for 18 months, she returned to England, earning a scholarship to study at Hillcroft Adult Residential College for women in Surbiton, followed by teacher training at Philippa Fawcett College. She went on to work as a primary teacher at Edith Neville Junior School in Camden. Her personal experience in education, as well as her work as an educator, exposed her to the extent of racial bias in the classroom, fuelling her determination to campaign for reform.
Around this time, she served as secretary of the West African branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Representing the CPGB, she attended the Racial Discrimination Committee at the House of Commons and remained an active member of the party until the 1980s. Through her CPGB activism and civil rights involvement, she moved in key radical networks alongside influential figures such as Claudia Jones, founder of the West Indian Gazette and Notting Hill Carnival.
In 1970, Kuya returned to Liverpool to take up the role of Liverpool’s first Senior Community Relations Officer, for the newly established Community Relations Council. During her time, she led vital community initiatives, including South Liverpool Personnel, the Help on Arrest scheme for young people, theatre workshops, supplementary schools and the Liverpool 8 Writers’ Workshop.
Combining her background as a teacher and community leader, Dorothy pioneered campaigns against racism in children’s literature. In the early 1970s, she monitored racial bias in school textbooks, leading to the influential Liverpool publication Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Racial Bias in the Books we Teach (1976) and the founding of the National Committee on Racism in Children’s Books.
This expertise took her back to London in 1979, where she became the first Ethnic Minority and Race Relations Advisor for Haringey Council, working alongside prominent figures such as Bernie Grant MP and Jeremy Corbyn. Throughout the 1980s, she remained at the forefront of national policy, co-founding the consultancy Affirmata (one of the earliest race awareness training bodies), chairing the Ujima Housing Association, and serving as a panel member on the Inquiry into police conduct during the 1985 Broadwater Farm disturbances.
The Twilight Years: Return to Liverpool, Housing Rights, and Historical Justice (1990s–2013)
In the early 1990s, Kuya made her permanent return to Liverpool, embarking on a final chapter of activism that focused heavily on grassroots housing rights, reparations, and public history. She found the neighbourhood she grew up in severely impacted by decades of disinvestment, council clearance schemes, and managed decline. Refusing to see L8 demolished, she became a founding member of the Granby Residents Association (GRA) in 1993. The aim of GRA was to fight for the rights of remaining residents, defend local social housing, and push for community-led regeneration – work that laid the essential groundwork for what later evolved into the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust.
Kuya also turned her attention toward how Liverpool confronted its colonial past. From the early 1990s, she served on the advisory committee for the pioneering Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, which opened in 1994. She remained a persistent and driving force in what ultimately became the International Slavery Museum which opened in 2007. To bring this history directly to the public, she also teamed up with fellow activist Eric Lynch to develop and lead Liverpool’s first guided walking tours documenting the city’s deep historical links to the transatlantic slave trade.
Internationally minded until the end, Kuya took on a leading role in the fight for global reparations. She worked closely with Bernie Grant MP on the Africa Reparations Movement (UK), chairing the 1993 Preparatory Conference on Reparation at Birmingham University and continuing to push for historical accountability into her final years.
When Dorothy Kuya passed away on 23 December 2013, the city gathered to mourn and honour an icon of Black British civil rights. Her funeral service at Liverpool Cathedral brought together hundreds of family members, community members, activists, and civic leaders from across the UK to pay tribute to her extraordinary legacy. Following her death, National Museums Liverpool renamed the annual Slavery Remembrance Day keynote address as the Dorothy Kuya Slavery Memorial Lecture, ensuring her name remains permanently attached to the cause of historical education and truth-telling. In 2023, Liverpool City Council awarded Kuya a posthumous Citizen of Honour award, formally acknowledging her as one of the city’s most significant anti-racist pioneers and community leaders. Her extraordinary life stands as an enduring blueprint for how unwavering grassroots activism can positively impact institutional change and she remains well remembered by Liverpool’s Black community.
Find out More
Join Janaya Pickett in person for a special talk about the life and legacy of Dorothy Kuya, at the Sydney Jones Library KnowHow Space, Friday 9th October, 11am.
Explore the Collection
The research and timeline in this post are drawn directly from primary source material preserved in the Dorothy Kuya archive collection at Liverpool Record Office. You can request an archive catalogue and access to view the physical collection via the Liverpool Record Office website.