When Pauli Murray attempted to enrol at the University of North Carolina in 1938, she was refused due to her race. She went on to study civil rights law at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, committed to ending Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation in the US. Graduating top of her class, Murray then tried to enrol at Harvard and was again refused, this time due to her gender. Highlighting the plight of black women, she wrote: “What I’m experiencing is Jane Crow.” In the legal career that followed, Murray made enormous strides in the fight against racial and gender ..read more

Please note that this article quotes instances of highly offensive racial language When Enoch Powell stood up at lunchtime on Saturday 20 April 1968, his audience of local Conservative activists at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham could hardly have known that they were about to hear the most inflammatory and divisive speech by a British politician in their lifetimes. Already intensely controversial for his views on economics and immigration, the Wolverhampton MP was the darling of the Tory activists, a brooding, saturnine intellectual whose contempt for his Shadow Cabinet colleagues was legendar ..read more

On 20 August 1955, Mamie Till Bradley reluctantly put her 14-year-old son Emmett – ‘Bo’, to his family – on the train from Chicago to Mississippi with his great-uncle Moses Wright, who had come up to Chicago for a family funeral. Bo’s favourite cousin, Wheeler Parker, was going down south with Uncle Mose for a summer holiday, and Bo didn’t want to miss out on the swimming and the fishing, the food from the gardens, the adventures and the starry nights. He was a confident, cheerful, kid, big for his age, a joker with a playful swagger in spite of the stutter left by a bout of polio. Mamie worr ..read more

From political agitators and artist’s muses to composers, sailors, asylum inmates and the goddaughter of the queen herself, black people led a variety of fascinating lives in Victorian Britain. Dr John Woolf shares some of their stories – both ordinary and extraordinary – with Ellie Cawthorne. https://media.immediate.co.uk/volatile/sites/7/2022/12/Blackvictorians-ee700c2.mp3 John Woolf and Keshia N Abraham are the co-authors of Black Victorians: Hidden in History (Duckworth Books, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones ..read more

In the spring of 1803, at a concert hall in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven performed Violin Sonata No 9 alongside the young virtuoso George Bridgetower, to whom the piece was dedicated. The composer played the piano, and the so-called “African Prince”, whose father was possibly from Barbados, played the violin. Beethoven was so moved by the performance that, in the midst of the piece, he leapt from his seat and shouted: “Once more, my dear fellow!” But by the time the sonata was published, the dedication had changed. Bridgetower was replaced by French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. The reaso ..read more

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose packed a sack containing a few precious items for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley. Ashley was then separated from her mother and sold, and it’s likely the two never saw each other again. This heart-wrenching story is embroidered on a tattered cotton sack now held in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In this episode, Professor Tiya Miles discusses her Cundill prize-shortlisted book on “Ashley’s sack” and what it can reveal about women’s experiences during slavery. https://media.immediate.co.uk/vola ..read more

For centuries, the British empire was one of the major European powers leading the largest forced migration of any people group in history: the transatlantic slave trade. Among the most immediate consequences was, of course, the African diaspora that spread across both the Americas and Europe, and, in the aftermath of slavery’s eventual abolition, the empire’s colonisation of whole sections of Africa. Until the 1940s, migration from Britain’s Caribbean and African colonies would be slow but steady, before rising sharply in the years immediately after World War II. As such, the face of Britain ..read more

The steamship slowly drifted across the harbour, as quietly as the paddlewheels slapping against the water and the chugging and grinding of the engine allowed. A fog helped to hide them, and those on board knew it was imperative to stay inconspicuous. They were on a secret and dangerous journey that dark May night, one that could change their lives – or end them. While there were no officers, a man in the captain’s coat and hat stood on the deck. His name was Robert Smalls, and on this stolen ship he intended to sail himself and everyone below decks to freedom from slavery. Smalls had been bo ..read more

If you visit Arbeia South Shields Roman Fort, which once guarded the main eastern sea route to Hadrian’s Wall, it will not be long before you encounter Victor. Or, at least, you will encounter a memorial to Victor: he has been dead for around 1,900 years, and time has not been overly kind to his rather grand tombstone since half of his likeness has long been destroyed. Still, there he is in sandstone form: reclining gracefully on a couch in a beltless tunic, holding a drinking cup in one hand and a garland in the other. Its size suggests he was a person of importance when he died in the secon ..read more

How far back does the story of black people in Britain stretch? Who was Cheddar Man? And what evidence do we have of black people in the medieval and Tudor eras? Historian Hannah Cusworth answers your top questions about black British history, in conversation with Charlotte Hodgman. https://media.immediate.co.uk/volatile/sites/7/2022/10/HistoryExtra20221009-e89a928.mp3 ..read more