Una Maud Victoria Marson
(February 6,1905-May 6,1965)
Pioneer Writer, Poet and Activist
First Black woman to be employed by the BBC during WWII.
Jamaican feminist, activist, and writer, producing poems, plays, and radio programs.
She was a pioneer Jamaican feminist, poet, playwright and social activist. In 1932 after relocating to London, She the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II.
In 1942 she became the producer of the program Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work. Her involvement with Caribbean Voices was important to publicizing Caribbean literature internationally, as well as spurring nationalism within the Caribbean islands that she represented.
Una Marson was born on 6 February 1905, in Santa Cruz, Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth. She was the youngest of six children of Rev. Solomon Isaac Marson (1858–1916), a Baptist parson, and his wife Ada Wilhelmina Mullins. She had a beautiful and well-educated middle-class upbringing.
Marson emigrated to work in London in 1932, producing plays, poems, and programs for the BBC during World War II. She was the epitome of a black political artist.
Her biographer Delia Jarrett-Macauley described her (in The Life of Una Marson, 1905–1965) as the first “Black British feminist to speak out against racism and sexism in Britain”.British civil rights leader Bily Stachan credited Una Marson with educating him on political and racial issues.
She passed away on May 6, 1965. There is not enough accurate information on the last portion of her life spent on Earth. Too many Hearsay conversations have been done and recorded which is not unfair to this lady of stature. She passed away at the age of 60 on May 6, 1965, following a heart attack. I do know that her unpublished papers and works are in Jamaica West Indies at the Institute of Jamaica in the city of Kingston where you can go online and request to view them. In October 2021, the London Borough of Southwark announced the naming of the Una Marson Library, to be opened in 2022 near the Old Kent Road in south London, recognising Marson as a “local hero. The limited record of her writings during this time period. Many of her works were left unpublished or circulated only in Jamaica. Most of these writings are only available in the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, as a special collection at the National Library of Jamaica
Source Jamaica West Indies and WIKI