Jessica Huntley, 23 February 1927 - 13 October 2013

Jessica and her husband Eric Huntley were already politically engaged in their native Guyana before coming to Britain in the late 1950s. Their activism, advocacy and campaigning work continued in the UK and was epitomised in the founding in 1968 of the publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications (named in honour of two major figures in the history of Caribbean resistance, Toussaint L'Ouverture of Haiti and Paul Bogle of Jamaica), whose first publication was The Groundings with My Brothers, a collection of essays by historian, scholar and political activist Walter Rodney. As well as many other important authors, including Andrew Salkey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay and Valerie Bloom, BLP went on to publish Rodney's seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972. After his assassination in Guyana in 1980, the bookshop the Huntleys had also founded in West Ealing was renamed the Walter Rodney bookshop.

Jessica was involved with many important political, educational and cultural initiatives. She was a founding member and co-director of the First International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books and of the Black Parents Movement.

The Huntley archives, consisting of Jessica and Eric's papers from 1952 to 2011, were the first major deposit of records from the African-Caribbean community in London presented to London Metropolitan Archives and have formed the basis of annual conferences held at LMA since February 2006. Jessica always played a full part in the planning of the Annual Huntley conferences and the associated events, and she remained deeply committed to many political causes, insisting on attending meetings undaunted by her own failing health in recent years, supporting a range of community events across the capital whenever the logistics of transport permitted. She fell ill on Saturday night at her home in Ealing and was taken to hospital, where she died the following day.

The members of FHALMA (Margaret Andrews, Denise Baptiste, Margaret Busby, Janet Browne, Malcolm Cumberbatch, Noreen Dunn, Harry Goulbourne, Donald Hinds, Colin Prescod, Keith Waithe, Ewart Thomas, Kimani Nehusi, Anne Johnson and Clyde Williams) pay tribute to Jessica's remarkable life and extend our condolences to Eric, to their children Chauncey and Accabre (their elder son Karl tragically died two years ago) and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Details about funeral arrangements will be announced later.

FHALMA