Jackie Walker (activist)

Jacqueline Walker (born 10 April 1954) is a British political activist and writer. She has been a teacher and anti-racism trainer. She is the author of a family memoir, '' Pilgrim State'', and the co-writer and performer of a one-woman show, '' The Lynching''. She held the roles of Vice-Chair of South Thanet Constituency Labour Party and Vice-Chair of Momentum before being suspended and ultimately expelled from the party for misconduct.

Background

Walker has described her family background in both her family memoir, ''Pilgrim State'', and her play, ''The Lynching'' as being of mixed Jewish and African descent. According to Walker, her mother, Dorothy Brown, was a black Jamaican Sephardi Jew who was descended partly from a Portuguese Jew who came to the West Indies during the days of Christopher Columbus, and a female slave who converted to Judaism on marriage. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1915, she won a scholarship to study medicine in the United States, where she married and had a daughter, giving up her studies. In 1949, she was committed temporarily to a mental institution, where was on occasion held in isolation, placed in a straitjacket and subjected to ECT treatment, by her husband, who was seeking to end the relationship. Her eldest daughter was put into care and was ultimately fostered while her second child was returned to her on her release. Later, her mother attempted to retrieve her elder daughter but without success. Released, and active in the civil rights movement, she met Walker's Ashkenazi Jewish father, Jack Cohen, whose family fled anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire around 1918 and came to New York, where he became a jeweller.

Walker was born in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City in 1954. In 1956, her mother, with Walker and her step brother, were deported to Jamaica, which Walker attributes to McCarthyism. There, racial discrimination barred her mother from many jobs, and she had to leave her children with relatives for months while she travelled looking for work. In 1959, Walker's mother, with her children, moved to London. Her mother suffered from periods of severe depression since her 30s, as well as physical illness in later life. Family life was characterised by abject poverty, cramped, squalid and chaotic living conditions and continual racist attacks, despite her mother's best efforts: as a result, Walker and her step brothers spent time in care homes or with foster families. She was the only black child in her primary school and suffered from racial bullying both at school and when in care. When Walker was 11, she witnessed the sudden death of her mother at the age of 50, after which Walker lived in care homes and was then permanently fostered.

Career

Walker was in the National Youth Theatre but, as she thought that as a black person she would get few roles, went instead to Goldsmiths College and trained to become a teacher. In her first year, she married and had a baby, returning to her studies when her baby was six weeks old. She worked as a teacher at a pupil referral unit for emotionally and behaviourally disturbed young people.

Walker completed an M. Phil, in which she examined the development of identity in the work of Black British writers. Having completed two Arvon Foundation writing courses, she was awarded an Arts Council England grant to complete her family memoir '' Pilgrim State'', published by Sceptre in April 2006. It was placed on the reading list of the social worker training course at Brunel University London, where Walker gave bi-weekly lectures and was a member of the committee for social work training.

She has been an anti-racist trainer and charity worker and has a long record of anti-racist activism and as a political activist.
She has contributed to educational materials and written training manuals on anti-racism.

Labour Party

Walker joined the Labour Party in 1981. She was elected Vice-Chair of South Thanet Constituency Labour Party and played a leading role in the campaign there to prevent the election of the UKIP leader Nigel Farage in the 2015 general election. She was elected to Momentum's Steering Committee, becoming its vice-chair in September 2015 and is a member of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL). She was expelled from Labour for "prejudicial and grossly detrimental behaviour against the party" on 27 March 2019. Walker retained her JVL membership, however.

First investigation

In Walker's Facebook account, a private discussion from February 2016 was recorded in which a friend of Walker had raised the question of 'the debt' owed to the Jews because of the Holocaust. In the discussion, Walker had responded:

Her private comments were "uncovered" by the Israel Advocacy Movement which, it says, aims "to counter British hostility to Israel." ''The Jewish Chronicle'' published her comments on 4 May 2016 and notified the Labour Party about them. The Labour Party suspended her, pending investigation, on the same day that ''The Jewish Chronicle'' published its article. The Chair of Momentum, Jon Lansman, addressing the criticism of Walker, referred to "a 'lynch mob' whose interest in combatting racism is highly selective". The investigation and accompanying suspension concluded after a few weeks with the decision that not to proceed with disciplinary action.

In response to her critics, Walker said:

Dave Rich

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