Olive Morris

Olive Elaine Morris was born in Harewood, Jamaica, in 1952 and moved to London as part of the Windrush generation at the age of nine, settling with her family in Lavender Hill, south London. Her introduction to activism came in 1969, aged just 17, when she intervened as police arrested a Nigerian diplomat in Brixton over a parking dispute — she was beaten, racially abused and arrested herself.

The incident drew Morris into the youth section of the British Black Panther Movement, where she became a committed organiser against police brutality and racial injustice. Frustrated by the movement's limited engagement with women's issues, she left in 1973 to co-found the Brixton Black Women's Group with Beverley Bryan and Liz Obi, and later helped establish the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD).

Morris became a leading figure in the 1970s squatters' rights movement, famously squatting 121 Railton Road in Brixton with Liz Obi in 1973 — an act captured in an iconic photograph of her climbing through a window that later appeared on the cover of the Squatters' Handbook. The building went on to house Sabarr Bookshop, one of the first Black community bookshops in Britain, and remained a hub of radical organising for decades.

In 1975 Morris enrolled at Manchester University to study social science, continuing her activism through the National Coordinating Committee of Overseas Students while also founding the Manchester Black Women's Co-operative. She died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1979, aged just 27. In 1986, Lambeth Council named a building in her honour — the Olive Morris House — an unusually early tribute to a Black woman activist in British public life.