The veteran activist Sarah White, who has died aged 80, was for more than half a century a stalwart of initiatives dedicated to anti-colonialism, anti-racism and multiculturalism. Co-founder with John La Rose in 1966 of New Beacon Books, the UK’s first black bookshop and publishing company, where she worked until recent years, she was also a founder member of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in the early 1980s, and a trustee and secretary, from 1991 onwards, of the George Padmore Institute, a home for documents relating to the black presence in Britain.
Born in Welwyn, Hertfordshire, Sarah grew up in a family steeped in politics and the arts. Her mother, Dorothy (known as Dodo, nee Swinburne), was politically active with the Liberal party in Hampstead, north London, where Sarah was raised, while her father, Eric Walter White, was the Arts Council’s first literature director, as well as being a translator, editor, poet and author.
