[6] At the age of 12, he won a scholarship to attend secondary school at the prestigious Presentation Boys College in St George's, the island's capital.

As I engaged in the middle 1960s with the English schooling system and with academia at Oxford University, where I was a member of the African and Caribbean Students Society, I soon became convinced that Britain faced two momentous challenges.

The second and closely related challenge was to determine how it would deal with the legacy of Empire.Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with apartheid South Africa.

And they continued to gravitate back to Moss Side, they would be here until after the last bus left, some of them would be in the night time dives – shebeens as we used to call them – and there was generally a sense of drift and disaffection amongst them.

[12] In 1972, Because They're Black, a book on which he collaborated with Derek Humphry, was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for its contribution to racial harmony in Britain,[15] and Gus John went on to produce many other notable publications.

[18] Reviewing these recent works in the Camden New Journal, Angela Cobbinah said of John: "Never one to mince his words and with a stern public persona to boot, he has been a thorn in the side of successive governments from his position on the front line of the anti-racist struggle for the last six decades.

[44] In 2019, John quit from an advisory body to the Church of England, after Archbishop Justin Welby endorsed the criticism of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by the chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, making allegations of antisemitism.

John said: "What gives the archbishop of Canterbury the right to endorse the chief rabbi's scaremongering about Corbyn and adopt such a lofty moral position in defence of the Jewish population?

"[45] In October 1999, Gus John was asked by Tony Blair to accept a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year Honours List, 2000.

People think I'm being churlish campaigning against empire but I am struggling to end the injustice and inequality that whole damn thing is built upon.The journalist Jon Snow, who himself refused an OBE, made a special study of the honours system, writing in The Independent: "Gus John, the Afro-Caribbean former Director of Education for Hackney, explained to me what it felt like for him to be approached with the offer of being appointed CBE.

"[47] Snow subsequently commented to a Parliamentary Select Committee investigating criticism of the honours system on John's position: "As he had fought his whole life trying to unpick the consequences of British imperialism, he felt it was a pretty serious dishonour to have to wander round the planet henceforth as a Commander of the very institution he had tried to demolish.

[54][55] In October 2020, John was named by FutureLearn on a list of "12 Black history pioneers with careers that will inspire you", together with Lewis Latimer, Shirley Jackson, Lisa Gelobter, Yvonne Connolly, Susie King Taylor, Mary Seacole, Alexa Canady, Charles DeWitt Watts, Kanya King, Oprah Winfrey, and Madam C. J.