In the 90s, I studied under the notorious racist lecturer Frank Ellis. At a time when I should have felt liberated to explore, it chipped away at my self-esteem
In 2006, Dr Frank Ellis, who taught Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, was suspended from his post as lecturer after he told a student newspaper that he supported the theory that Black people were less intelligent than white people. In the pages of the Guardian at the time, he was described as a “lecturer who insisted that black people and women were genetically inferior”. This was six years after his views first received national coverage.
When I saw Ellis’s views make it to the national press, I felt angry. I had known Ellis was a racist because when I was a student of Russian studies between 1996 and 2000, he taught many of my classes and I had to endure hearing his views on a regular basis. He would regularly tell us that nothing good had ever come out of Africa, and he would share how he wrote for white supremacist publications and attended conferences in the US alongside members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ebony Riddell Bamber is the programme director of the Scott Trust’s Legacies of Enslavement programme
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