Part eleven of a series exploring the history of Leeds, using books and other stock resources held in the Leeds Libraries collections. For all the entries in this series, see our dedicated page.

In our tenth part we explored collections relating to Leeds United and its important role as a carrier of the Leeds name in the latter half of the 20th-century; including a civic ceremony held by Alderman Joshua Walsh, the Lord Mayor of Leeds, to celebrate the football club’s involvement in England’s victorious 1966 World Cup winning campaign.

Just one year after Alderman Joshua Walsh, the second Lord Mayor of Leeds, welcomed the Leeds United squad to Civic Hall, another migrant community made a defining mark in the city’s cultural sphere. Roughly contemporary with the first trophies won by Leeds was a further event that is just as essential a building block for any history of Leeds in the last 50-years: the first Leeds West Indian Carnival in 1967.

The context for the emergence of the Carnival was the post-war migration of Commonwealth citizens from Caribbean islands to British cities, including Leeds. The African-Caribbean population of Leeds grew from around 1,000 in 1951, to around 4,000 in 1961 and around 11,000 in 1971.

The Leeds encountered by these settlers was not always welcoming. The weather was cold and damp and grey; housing was cramped and inadequate, with most arrivals forced to live in hugely unsatisfactory old and worn Victorian housing in Chapeltown; and jobs were hard to come by, even for those many individuals with the necessary qualifications.

But that very gathering of the African-Caribbean population in a specific area had its positive consequences too: the fostering of a spirit of unity among people hailing from different Caribbean backgrounds, leading directly to the creation of clubs and organisations playing a central role in giving a strong voice to that community, including the United Caribbean Association, the Caribbean Cricket Club and the West Indian Carnival itself.

Local newspapers and magazines also sprang up, providing a platform to explore the issues and tell the stories of individuals and communities more usually portrayed through local and national media in negative ways. Several of those publications are now in the collections at the Central Library, including Chapeltown News from the 1970s and The Voice from the 1980s. Together, their news reporting, their creativity, their authenticity as subjective expressions of essential personhood, provide a vital insight into the lived experience of people and communities whose voices are more normally erased, obscured or underrepresented in the stories the City tells about itself.