Bernie Grant

Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant was born on the seventeenth of February 1944 in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of schoolteachers. A scholarship carried him from Sacred Heart school to the Jesuit St Stanislaus College, and before he left the colony he worked for a time as a laboratory analyst. In 1963, at the age of nineteen, he settled in Britain to join his family, part of the generation who answered the call to the mother country.

In England he took a clerk's post with British Railways and later studied mining engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, leaving in protest at the treatment of Black students. He then spent years as an international telephonist, where his stand against racist practice made him a union representative. In 1978 he became a full-time Area Officer for the National Union of Public Employees, and that same year won a seat on Haringey Borough Council.

In 1985 Grant became leader of Haringey, the first Black person to lead a local authority in Britain. Two years later, at the General Election of the eleventh of June 1987, he entered Parliament as Member for Tottenham, among the first Black MPs of the modern era alongside Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng. In 1989 he founded and chaired the Parliamentary Black Caucus, and he laboured tirelessly for racial justice, African and Caribbean causes, and the dignity of his constituents.

He held the seat until his death from a heart attack on the eighth of April 2000, at the age of fifty-six. Bernie Grant broke a threshold that had held for a generation, and those who now sit where none like him had sat before walk through a door his courage opened.