We just don’t know exactly how many black people were living in Britain in the eighteenth century. When Francis Barber was living here in this house [Samuel Johnson]. But there are estimates from the time and they put the figure at between 10,000 and 15,000. ibid.
Among the men who served under Admiral Nelson were a hundred black sailors. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History II: Freedom *****
One of the most dramatic and shocking chapters in the history of black Britain. ibid.
Sierra Leone, West Africa: here beneath the trees are the ruins of a slave fortress. The first fortress was built here in the seventeenth century. It’s lain abandoned, forgotten, for almost two centuries. It was in places like this that the British slave trade began. Slaves were bought, sold and imprisoned here before being shipped to British colonies in North America and the Caribbean. ibid.
The British were masters of the slave trade. In total Britain transported more than three million people in slavery. ibid.
Some of them, and this included the children, had DY, or Duke of York, burned into their chest. ibid.
Tobacco is an extremely labour-intensive crop. It requires constant care and attention. And each leaf is picked by hand. At first these fields were worked by indentured servants … But there was never enough labour to satisfy demand. ibid.
This law makes it legal to kill a black person. ibid.
This [British] offer of freedom encouraged thousands of American slaves to escape, risking their lives to reach a fleet of ships waiting on the James River. ibid.
‘This was the first mass liberation of slaves in the British empire … Britain paradoxically was still the world’s largest slave trader.’ ibid.
A man who went on to take Georgian Britain by storm. One of the former slaves who managed to get out of America was a teenage boxer from Staten Island called Bill Richmond … And then in his early 40s he made the most bizarre decision: he gave it all up [high social status] to become a bare-knuckle boxer in London … He was challenged to a fight: it was the spark that set him on course to become a boxing star, and one of Georgian Britain’s most famous celebrities. The world of prize-fighting, of bare-knuckle boxing was special to the British in a way that no other sport was, because the fighter was said to be the embodiment of the national characteristics of bravery and manliness and resilience, all the things the British liked to believe made them who they were. Now, these were the same days when Britain was the biggest slave-trading nation power in the world, and yet by entering into this world, [Repton club], into this sport, Bill Richmond, a black guy, a former slave, was able to become not just a star but a national hero. ibid.
After fifty years of campaigning by the abolitionists and after centuries of rebellion and resistance by the slaves themselves, slavery in the British empire was finally over. As the moment of abolition approached, the slave owners had no idea what would happen next … They’d started to believe their own propaganda. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History III: A Moral Mission
The new Victorians saw the abolition of slavery as the dawn of a new age of progress and enlightenment for Britain and its empire. ibid.
Within thirty years this Victorian sense of moral superiority would come crashing down. ibid.
The adopted daughter of Queen Victoria … The Queen agreed to become Sarah’s protector … A royal protégé … Sarah had taken her place in Victorian high society … Part of the Victorian elite. ibid.
The main focus of the Victorian moral mission was America. ibid.
‘I came here because slavery is the common enemy of mankind … Rise up and crush this demon of iniquity.’ ibid. Frederick Douglass
The plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is relatively simple … Uncle Tom is murdered … every bit as famous as Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. They’ve been forgotten today but at the time everybody knew who they were. ibid.
Britain was making a fortune from cotton grown by enslaved Africans. ibid.
In Memory of the Rochdale Millworkers who supported the struggle against slavery during the American Civil War 1861-5. ibid.
Hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had no work and no land. To make matters worst Jamaica suffered the worst drought that anyone can remember. ibid.
At that point the militia opened fire on the crowds … The army was unleashed … Some were executed. It was a brutal act of vengeance even by the low standards of the nineteenth century. ibid.
In memory of over 1000 Jamaicans brutalised or killed following the Morant Bay Rebellion. ibid. plaque
The great battle of ideas that divided country and empire. ibid.
I was fourteen when my family were attacked in a house; one night bricks came through the window and on one of the bricks was an elastic band, was a note that said, ‘Wogs, go home’. And then a few nights later the same thing happened. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History IV: The Homecoming
The Victorian era when the empire was nearing its height, an age in which skin colour separated the coloniser from the colonised, the ruler from the ruled. ibid.
Rhodes got rich in the South African rush for gold and diamonds. ibid.
Rhodes was sowing the seeds of racial segregation. ibid.
There’s been a black community in Liverpool since the 1700s due largely to the shipping industry and the slave trade. ibid.
In the aftermath of [WWI] war there were similar outbreaks of violence in Glasgow, London, Newport, Cardiff and on Tyneside. They brought a underlying racism on to the streets of Britain. ibid.
Leslie Hutchinson: an air of exotic mystery … Hutch was a star but he could never escape racism. ibid.
By 1944 over a million US soldiers had landed in Britain. And around 130,000 were black GIs. ibid.
White GIs would regularly attack black allied soldiers. ibid.
In 2014 black British citizens legally settled in the UK since they were children were told by the government to prove they have the right to be here. They faced deportation back to countries they could barely remember. They lost jobs, homes, savings and much more. It became known as the Windrush Scandal and it shocked the nation. But another story went untold: the story of seventy years of political panic, bad faith and racial prejudice in the corridors of power. David Olusoga, The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, BBC 2019
Sarah, Anthony and Judy are all victims of the so-called Hostile Environment, a crackdown on illegal immigration first introduced in 2014 … Now the authorities required proof of their right to be here and an extensive documentary records for the whole of their lives in the UK. ibid.
The Empire Windrush was a converted German troops ship commandeered after the war. ibid.
As it headed to British the Windrush became a serious embarrassment, and even in the words of prime minister Clement Atlee ‘an incursion’. ibid.
By its own estimate the government required an extra 1.3 million workers to help rebuild a country shattered by five years of war. ibid.
At its most extreme, it was government policy to give preference to men who had fought against Britain over men who were veterans of British forces and all because those veterans were black. ibid.
Churchill is reported to have said that immigration was the most important subject facing the country but complained that he couldn’t get his ministers to take any notice. ibid.
Many of the second wave of migrants travelled by air … The government machine now had the new arrivals firmly in its sights. ibid.
The children of the Windrush Generation who not for the last time would pay the highest price. ibid.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill had surprised cabinet colleagues by suggesting the Conservatives fight the next election on the slogan, Keep England White. ibid.
Since the 1971 Act successive British governments have passed more than a dozen nationality and immigration laws. ibid.
The first shot fired by a soldier of the British army was fired by an African here in Africa, three days after war declared … From the moment [Alhaji] Grunshi fired that first shot, the Great War became the World’s War. More than four million non-European, non-white soldiers and auxiliaries were sucked into the World’s War: one and half million from British India, more than two million from the French colonies in Africa and Indo-China, four hundred thousand African Americans, one hundred thousand Chinese labourers. They came as professional soldiers, conscripts, volunteers and mercenaries. But all had to grapple not just with a new and terrible warfare but with the fears and prejudices that swirled around the questions of race in the 20th century. David Olusoga, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire I: Martial Races, BBC 2014
To imagine the level of disorientation they must have felt: these were men from villages in rural India; they’d never left their homeland before and many of them will have known very very little about the outside world. To make matters much worse, when they’d left India, they hadn’t even been told where they were going. It was only in the last days of their journey they were told the truth. ibid.
Alongside units from the regular army, it was made up of men from a dozen different ethnic groups led by white British officers who had made their careers in British India … The authority of the India Corps’ British officers drew much of its self-confidence from a racial theory that was rooted in the imperial experience in British India. ibid.
‘Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry which I am inclined to regard as a rather ominous sign of mental disquietude’. ibid. Captain Howell’s letter of perceived ethnic traits
Mangin would get the chance to take his arguments a stage further at Verdun in 1916. Of all the human meat-grinders of the First World War, the Battle of Verdun was surely the most pitiless. ibid.