Anna Freud Centre celebrates Black History Month

1st October 2021  |  By: Tim Linehan

Today and throughout October, the Anna Freud Centre will join millions of others around the UK in celebrating Black History Month by promoting events and activities, honouring key figures, and sharing resources.

In line with this year’s ‘Proud to Be’ theme, the Centre will be kicking off the month by mailing 14,000 primary and secondary teachers and educationalists a toolkit of resources. The toolkit from the Centre’s Mentally Healthy Schools site includes short films, assembly plans, lesson plans and guides to support schools to explore ideas around diversity, self-belief, identity and the impact of racism on those who experience it.

The Centre will also be celebrating the life of Marie Battle Singer, Britain’s first Black child psychotherapist who moved from the United States to study under Anna Freud at the Hampstead Clinic and became an important figure in the 1950s and 1960s. As well as a clinician and lecturer, Marie Battle Singer was an influential writer and contributed a series of articles in national newspapers following the race riots in Notting Hill.

Earlier this week The Centre ran one of its Transformation Seminars by Professor Guilaine Kinouani, award winning writer and psychologist and author of Living While Black: the essential guide to overcoming racial trauma published by Penguin. A video of Guilaine Kinouani’s seminar, Whiteness as pathology: shifting the location of disturbance to dismantle social inequality, will be promoted on social media to celebrate Black History Month.

In addition the Centre will be promoting a range of events and blogs celebrating the month.

Professor Peter Fonagy, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre, said: “The Anna Freud Centre has a great deal to learn from the communities we serve and from people of colour whose presence has been made invisible through an exclusive telling of history. Black History Month provides a focus for that learning and an opportunity to celebrate some of the great figures of the past while promoting the values of diversity and inclusion through the eyes of the Black diaspora. We are delighted to be supporting it.”