Gerlin Bean
Gerlin Bean (born 10 February 1939) is a Jamaican community worker who was active in the radical feminist and Black nationalist movements in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s.
From the time Jennifer was six months old, Bean arranged foster care for her with a local family so that her child's life would remain stable whilst she worked.
[10] In 1969, the Caribbean Education and Community Workers' Association, based in North London, organised a conference to evaluate how West Indian children were faring in the British school system.
A paper presented at the symposium by Bernard Coard demonstrated the systemic bias of administrative policies, which routinely placed Caribbean children in special classes for students with learning disabilities.
[11] Parents from Brixton met to discuss a pioneering solution brought forward by Bean, Reverend Anthony Ottey, and the teacher Ansel Wong to hold supplementary schools to help children with their homework and reading.
[12] Bean, Ottey, and Wong also provided information to the Lambeth Council for Community Relations, which launched a temporary housing and counselling service for runaway youth.
[15] Bean was also involved with Wong, Lu Garvey, and Tony Soares in 1972 in establishing a cooperative in the basement of 61 Golborne Road in Kensal Town, where community experts were able to train unemployed young people in various skills, including barbering, electrical repair, and typesetting.
The staff of the facility worked in conjunction with the Afiwe School, providing advice and counselling services, vocational training, and serving as a youth club.
These were not central problems for Black women who sought to be paid sufficient wages to provide child care for their children, needed adequate housing and educational opportunities, and called for protection from racism and violence.
[33][34] In 1974 Bean, Zainab Abbas and Wong formed part of the British delegation to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, which was hosted in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
In 1973, Bean joined with Abbas, Beverley Bryan, Olive Morris, Liz Obi and other activists to found the Brixton Black Women's Group (BBWG).
[37]Of paramount importance to the women were the lack of available housing; Sus laws, which allowed police to stop and search anyone who might be suspected of having the intent to commit an offence; and education.
[10][38] Sus law arrests were often directed at Black youth and police at the time were given broad latitude in interpreting the terms "suspect" and "intent".
[39][Notes 2] The Brixton Black Women's Group worked to obtain state funding to expand the Sabarr Bookshop, using the store as a link to provide educational materials both for schools and activists.
[52] As a volunteer for the Catholic Institute for International Relations in Harare, Bean recruited doctors and nurses from the UK, encouraging them to move to Zimbabwe and work in rural areas to improve education and health facilities and programmes.
[56][57] She co-wrote a chapter titled "Mobilising Parents of Children with Disabilities in Jamaica and the English Speaking Caribbean" with Marigold J. Thorburn for a book published in 1995.
[62] Bean participated in the University of the West Indies lecture series titled "That Time In Foreign — Life Stories of Jamaican England Returnees", which ran from 2006 to 2007.
[56][64][65] She worked as the chair of the gender section on the Council for Voluntary Social Services in 2007 and served as a member of the Saint Catherine Parish Committee from 2008 to 2011.
The event was criticised for being predominantly white and middle-class and Bean told The New Yorker that, as a Black woman, she "couldn't really pick on the relevance" of the conference.
[69] When the book The Heart of the Race (1985) was in the planning stages, Bean worked with Dadzie and Bryan to ensure that it involved as many varied experiences of women activists as possible and to show that they had united in the common cause to resist economic exploitation, imperialism, racism, and sexism.
[75][76] The sculpture featured bronze casts of the clenched fists (to represent boxing or fighting) of 15 Black women activists, including Bean.
