Jessica Huntley

Jessica Elleisse Huntley (née Carroll; 23 February 1927 – 13 October 2013) was a Guyanese-British political reformer and prominent race equality campaigner. She was a publisher of black and Asian literature, and a women's and community rights activist. She is notable as the founder in 1969 of Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications in London.

Early life She was born in Bagotstown, British Guiana (now Guyana) on 23 February (the date on which day the 18th-century Berbice slave uprising is commemorated) 1927, the only daughter and the youngest of four children of James Carroll and his wife, Hectorine ( Esbrand) Carroll.

Jessica was three years old when her father died, and her mother struggled financially to raise her children, nevertheless instilling the values of independence, discipline, justice and loyalty that informed Jessica's life. Unable to finish high school on the family's meagre finances, Jessica attended evening classes in shorthand and typing. With the hope of a clerical position becoming available, she worked in a garment factory, where she took up the cause of exploited female workers.

In 1950, she married Eric Huntley, and in the following two years gave birth to their first two children. In May 1953, Jessica Huntley co-founded in then British Guiana the Women's Progressive Organization to focus on women's rights as part of the PPP's independence struggle. BLP went on to publish books by an expanding range of authors, including Andrew Salkey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay and Valerie Bloom.

Other activity

The Bogle-L'Ouverture bookshop, opened by the Huntleys in Ealing in 1975, was one of the first Black bookshops in the UK, renamed as the Walter Rodney Bookshop following Rodney's assassination in 1980, and was a central hub for community action and creativity.

Huntley was instrumental in the establishment of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, held between 1982 and 1995, of which she was joint director with John La Rose until 1984.

Among other activism, in the 1980s Huntley was a co-founder with Margaret Busby and others of Greater Access to Publishing (GAP), a voluntary group campaigning for greater diversity within the mainstream publishing industry.

Personal life In 1948, she first met Eric Huntley (1929–2026), who was at the time a postal worker and trade union activist.

Since 2006, the Huntley Archives at LMA have inspired an annual conference on themes reflecting different elements of the content of the collection.

A blue plaque, organized by the Nubian Jak Community Trust and others, was unveiled in October 2018 outside the Ealing home of Jessica Huntley and Eric Huntley to commemorate their work in founding Bogle-L'Ouverture.

In October 2024, a biography titled Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life: The Decolonizing Work of a Radical Black Activist, written by Claudia Tomlinson, was published by Bloomsbury Academic.