Gus John

Augustine John (born 11 March 1945), known as Gus John, is a Grenadian-born writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964.

He has worked in the fields of education policy, management and international development.

As a social analyst he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development.

In Blazing Trails, John pays tribute "to a truly heroic generation: twenty-two individuals whose lives were dedicated to the struggle for racial equality and social justice in post-war Britain", while in Don't Salvage the Empire Windrush he "debunks the notion that the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 marked the beginning of the evolution and growth of multiracial Britain", which narrative "displaces the history of those settled Black communities who had struggled against racism and marginalisation in Britain prior to its arrival".

He has contributed to such UK outlets as The Guardian and The Voice, and is a regular guest columnist for the The Jamaica Gleaner.

Since the 1960s he has been active in issues of education and schooling in Britain's inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain.

He has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, as an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London, and visiting professor at Coventry University.

A respected public speaker and media commentator, he works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant.

Gus John was born in the village of Concord in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, to parents who were peasant farmers.

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.

When he was aged 17, he joined a seminary in Trinidad, where he spent two years as a theology student.

At the age of 19, he went to England, transferring to the Theology programme at Oxford University.

He became Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration (OCRI), and recalls:

"OCRI as it was called then was run by a woman who became a veteran in the anti-racist movement, the late Ann Dummett and her husband the late Professor Michael Dummett. 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. One was to determine who and what it was and what its place in global politics was as it tried to remake itself after two devastating world wars, with only two decades separating them. The second and closely related challenge was to determine how it would deal with the legacy of Empire."

In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner-city youth club.

Maintaining his interest in "schooling and education, youth development and the empowerment of marginalised groups within communities", John became a community activist.

In the mid- to late 1960s, he became a member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the civil rights organisation led by David Pitt.

Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with apartheid South Africa.

In 1968, he started the first Saturday/Supplementary school in Handsworth, Birmingham, with a group of colleagues.

He was a member of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations in the early 1970s.

After working on youth and race in Handsworth for the Runnymede Trust, he went in January 1971 to Moss Side, Manchester, where he continued organising and campaigning on four issues in particular: housing and the specific difficulties for young people to get houses on their own; employment for black school leavers; the way the community was policed; and the quality of schooling outcomes for black school leavers.

The following year, as he recalled:

"I had got some money from the British Council of Churches to set up a hostel for young black people, because they were sleeping on their friends' floors or sleeping rough in Moss Side, the reason being that their parents had been decanted to places like Sale and Partington, as part of the whole so-called regeneration business. 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. That made them even more in danger of getting involved with the police."

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, and Gus John Went on to produce many other notable publications.

His 1976 work The New Black Presence in Britain was "One of the earliest texts written by a Black Christian in Britain that began to articulate a distinct and conscious experience of black religious sensibilities" and he has been called described as "a grand patriarch of black theology in Britain".

By 1981, John was the northern organiser of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, and one of the organisers of the "Black People's Day of Action" held on 2 March, a response to the New Cross Fire on 18 January in which 13 young black people died.

Following the uprisings in Moss Side in July 1981 he chaired the Moss Side Defence Committee, and he was adviser to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee following the Toxteth Uprisings that same year.

He was the co-ordinator of the Black Parents Movement in Manchester, founded the Education for Liberation book service and helped to organise the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in Manchester, London and Bradford.

He was a member of the 1987 Macdonald Inquiry into Racism and Racial Violence in Manchester Schools and subsequently co-authored (with Ian MacDonald, Reena Bhavnani and Lily Khan) Murder in the Playground: the Burnage Report.

He was a founder trustee of the George Padmore Institute under the chairmanship of John La Rose.

In 1989 John was appointed Director of Education in Hackney and was the first black person to hold such a position.

When the two departments were amalgamated he became Hackney's first Director of Education and Leisure Services.

John's writings encompass reports, journalism and a variety of non-fiction books, including in 2023 Don't Salvage the Empire Windrush and Blazing Trails: Stories of a Heroic Generation, both published by New Beacon Books.

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."

Since leaving Hackney in 1996, Gus John has worked as an education consultant in Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, and is director of Gus John Consultancy Limited.

He has been Chair of the Communities Empowerment Network (CEN), an advocacy and campaigning service working for equality and justice in education founded in 1999, and is Chair of Parents and Students Empowerment (PaSE), an organisation devoted to empowering students and parents in schooling and education.

Since 2006, John has been a member of the African Union's Technical Committee of Experts working on "modalities for reunifying Africa and its global diaspora".

He chaired the "Round Table" for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in October 2006/March 2007 and produced Born to be Great, the NUT's Charter on Promoting the Achievement of Black Caribbean Boys (2007).

In 2010, he produced The Case for a Learners' Charter for Schools, a charter that articulates the educational entitlement of all school students and the rights and responsibilities of everybody engaged in the schooling process – local authorities, school governors, teachers, pupils and parents.

He was a member of Channel 4's Street Weapons Commission and later adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson on serious youth violence in the capital.