THE HEART OF THE RACE: Black Women's Lives in Britain

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Published by Virago Press Limited 1985
Centro House, 20-23 Mandela Street
London NW1 0HQ United Kingdom

Reprinted 1986, 1988

Copyright © Bryan, Dadzie, Scafe 1985

All rights reserved

ISBN 0-86068-361-3

Cover illustration by Stella Dadzie

All royalties from this book have been donated to the education of students at the ANC's Solomon Mahlungu School in Tanzania.

The authors received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1985 for this remarkable and important book.


The Heart of the Race is unique in British black women's literature because it covers the wide spectrum of topics involving black women's lives: history, politics, poetry, and personal life. This book serves as an encyclopedia of the daily realities of black women in Britain over the past forty years. The authors use the voices of women to record what life is like for black women in Great Britain. These voices denounce the false perceptions society holds on their womanhood and on their culture.

(MORE TO COME)