DOMA charity’s publication “David Oluwale’s Leeds”

As outlined in our application, the grant kindly made by LPLS was used to defray the costs of designing and printing a second edition of the DOMA charity’s publication “David Oluwale’s Leeds”. In this report, we comment on how each objective listed in our application was achieved:
+ To inform the people of Leeds (and others) about the life and death of David Oluwale, a Leeds citizen, 1949-69:
The publication takes the form of an A3 double sided sheet that folds down to A5. The A3 face consists of a map of the city centre of Leeds with numbers that correlate with the places in Leeds, named alongside the map, where David Oluwale worked, slept, was imprisoned and hospitalised, and where he has been memorialised. The other faces of the publication provide further information about his life and the work of the DOMA charity. We have thus provided detailed information about David which will educate the people of Leeds (and elsewhere) about his life and death. As indicated in our application, the publication was given to the people who attended the Oluwale walk on 10.9.23. It has been circulated at several subsequent events, most notably the two occasions when the Hibiscus Rising sculpture for David Oluwale was launched on 24-25.11.23. Extra copies are available and many more people will obtain copies at our subsequent events. It will also form part of the pack of materials currently being prepared for use in schools.
+ To inform on the memory work undertaken the the #RememberOluwale charity, 2008-2023:
As indicated, this is the second edition of a publication first issued at the series of events in April 2019 commemorating the 50th anniversary of David’s death. The importance of the second edition is that it includes (in the A3 Leeds map) a note of each of the places where David’s life has been memorialised since 2019: the new plaque in the Mary Seacole Garden on Chapeltown Road with a poem for David by Ian Duhig; the siting of the Civic Trust’s Blue Plaque for David on Leeds Bridge; LCC’s David Oluwale Bridge from Sovereign Square; and the Yinka Shonibare sculpture Hibiscus Rising in Meadow Lane.
+ To provide this information in a visually interesting and readily accessible format:
This publication has been designed for us by Sai Murray and we consider it to be a stimulating format, providing an account of David’s life and death which is actually quite granular, but which can be absorbed at speed by those who do not want too much information all at once. It will repay further study if and when anyone wants more detail. Thus we are confident that it is an accessible publication which adds a new dimension to the history of Leeds.
DOMA is very grateful to LPLS for making this grant.
(Photos of the publication will be sent in email – – for some reason I can’t upload them right now.)