Gus John

Augustine John (born 11 March 1945),Biography
Gus John website. . known as Gus John, is a Grenadian-born writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has worked in the fields of education policy, management and international development. As a social analyst, he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development. Since the 1960s, he has been active in issues of education and schooling in Britain's inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain.

He has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, as an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London,Gus John profile
at ''The Guardian''. and visiting professor at Coventry University. A respected public speaker and media commentator, he works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant.

Early life and education

Gus John was born in the village of Concord in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, to parents who were peasant farmers. At the age of 12, he won a scholarship to attend secondary school at the prestigious Presentation Boys College in St George's, the island's capital. When he was aged 17, he joined a seminary in Trinidad, where he spent two years as a theology student.Gus John
"Intercultural Dialogue and Mutual Respect between Europe and Islam – The challenge for Education"
27 October 2012.

At the age of 19, he went to England, transferring to the Theology programme at Oxford University. He became Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration (OCRI), and recalls:

Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with apartheid South Africa.Fran Abrams
"This is Gus John; they say he's not anti-racist enough"
''The Independent'', 21 July 1996. In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner-city youth club.

Community activism

Maintaining his interest in "schooling and education, youth development and the empowerment of marginalised groups within communities", John became a community activist. In the mid- to late 1960s, he became a member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the civil rights organisation led by David Pitt.Elizabeth Pears
"Professor Gus John: Fighting The Higher Power"
''The Voice'', 21 March 2015. In 1968, he started the first Saturday/Supplementary school in Handsworth, Birmingham, with a group of colleagues. After working on youth and race in Handsworth for the Runnymede Trust, he went in January 1971 to Moss Side, Manchester, where he continued organising and campaigning on four issues in particular: housing and the specific difficulties for young people to get houses on their own; employment for black school leavers; the way the community was policed; and the quality of schooling outcomes for black school leavers.Andrew Bowman interview with Gus John
A violent eruption of protest': Reflections on the 1981 Moss Side 'riots' (part one)"
''Manchester Mule'', 15 August 2011. Reprinted in Gus John, ''Moss Side 1981: More Than Just a Riot'' (2011). The following year, as he recalled:

He was a member of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations in the early 1970s. In 1972, ''Because They're Black'', a book on which he collaborated with Derek Humphry, was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for its contribution to racial harmony in Britain, and Gus John went on to produce many other notable publications. His 1976 work ''The New Black Presence in Britain'' was "One of the earliest texts written by a Black Christian in Britain that began to articulate a distinct and conscious experience of black religious sensibilities" and he has been called described as "a grand patriarch of black theology in Britain".

By 1981, John was the northern organiser of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, and one of the organisers of the "Black People's Day of Action" held on 2 March, a response to the New Cross Fire on 18 January in which 13 young black people died. Following the uprisings in Moss Side in July 1981 he chaired the Moss Side Defence Committee, and he was adviser to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee following the Toxteth Uprisings that same year.

He was the co-ordinator of the Black Parents Movement in Manchester, founded the Education for Liberation book service and helped to organise the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in Manchester, London and Bradford. He was a member of the 1987 Macdonald Inquiry into Racism and Racial Violence in Manchester Schools and subsequently co-authored (with Ian Macdonald, Reena Bhavnani and Lily Khan) ''Murder in the Playground: the Burnage Report''. He was a founder trustee of the George Padmore Institute

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