Black History Month at CAPA College

This October, CAPA College have been celebrating Black History Month and this has given both students and staff the opportunity to reflect on, share, and understand the impact of black heritage and culture.

Tutorials were organised, offering a forum for discussion of key topics, and allowed students across all pathways to collaborate and to organise and lead tutorials themselves. Topics included racial identity, how we can learn from Black History to make a better future, and what we can do to support our peers from the black community who identify as LGBTQIA+.

In addition to tutorials, students were given the opportunity to study and attend plays by British black playwrights. One play was My Voice Was Heard But It Was Ignored by Nana-Kofi Kufuor, which focuses on systemic racism in a UK context and explores issues around overt police brutality. The play was inspired by Nana-Kofi’s own experiences as a young British-Ghanaian man growing up in Stockport.

Some of our Year 2 students also visited the Leeds Playhouse to see a performance of Nine Night by Natasha Gordon. This was part of Jamaica Society Leeds’ Out of Many Festival, an extensive Leeds-based festival to celebrate 60 years of Jamaican independence. ​

To continue our discussions, CAPA College will soon premier the original film PLEDGE to our students. CAPA College students and a team of professional artists worked together to create PLEDGE, a new film about the impact of racism created by and about young people seeking to address hate crime in West Yorkshire. This original piece of work is a celebration of how much our young people are open to questioning their own experiences and understanding of racism.