50 Fun Facts About Black British History

Who topped a 2004 poll of great Black Britons and was honoured with a 2016 statue outside St Thomas' Hospital in London?

Mary Seacole won the 2004 vote for greatest Black Briton nearly 150 years after running her 'British Hotel' for sick and convalescent officers near Balaclava during the Crimean War.

Which Roman emperor, born at Leptis Magna in North Africa, died at Eboracum in AD 211 while campaigning in Britain?

Septimius Severus was a native Punic speaker who invaded Caledonia with about 50,000 men in 209, two years before dying of disease in the north.

Which driver became Formula One's first Black competitor in 2007 and won his first world title the following season?

Lewis Hamilton clinched that 2008 championship with a last-lap overtake in the final race of the season, becoming the then-youngest world champion.

Which rapper headlined Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage in 2019 wearing a stab vest designed by Banksy?

Stormzy was the first Black British rapper to headline Glastonbury, and he had scored his first UK number-one single, 'Vossi Bop', that same year.

Who became the first Black woman elected to Parliament in 1987, and in 2024 earned the title Mother of the House?

Diane Abbott has represented Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987, which by 2024 made her the Commons' longest-serving female MP.

Which singer, born to a Nigerian father in Wales, sang the Bond themes Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker?

Shirley Bassey is the first woman to land a Top 40 album in seven consecutive decades in the UK, having begun performing as a teenager in 1953.

Which Nottingham Forest defender became the first Black footballer to play for England's senior men's team, in 1978?

Viv Anderson won the First Division with Forest that same year and then two European Cups, in 1979 and 1980, under Brian Clough.

Windrush arrivals without lodgings in 1948 were housed in a deep-level air-raid shelter under which Tube station?

Clapham South's shelter lay less than a mile from the Coldharbour Lane labour exchange in Brixton, which is one reason so many arrivals settled in that area.

Which Home Secretary resigned in April 2018 over the Windrush scandal of wrongly detained Commonwealth citizens?

Amber Rudd was succeeded by Sajid Javid, while commentators traced the scandal to the 'hostile environment' policy begun under Theresa May.

Who became the UK's first Black Cabinet minister in May 2002 when appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury?

Paul Boateng had entered the Commons for Brent South in 1987 and went on to finalise the 2002 Spending Review in his new Treasury post.

Which 1999 Turner Prize winner directed 12 Years a Slave, the first Best Picture Oscar winner with a Black director?

Steve McQueen's film took Best Picture in March 2014, and he later made Small Axe, five films set in London's West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

Who became the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize, sharing the 2019 award for Girl, Woman, Other?

Bernardine Evaristo shared the prize with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, for a 'fusion fiction' novel told through twelve mostly Black British women.

Who became the first Black leader of a major UK political party when elected Conservative leader in November 2024?

Kemi Badenoch also became the fourth woman to lead the Conservatives, after Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss.

Which author of the Noughts & Crosses series, set in an alternative Britain, was Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015?

Malorie Blackman chose the title because noughts and crosses is 'one of those games that nobody ever plays after childhood, because nobody ever wins'.

Which javelin thrower won gold at the 1984 Olympics, becoming the first Black British woman to be an Olympic champion?

Tessa Sanderson competed at six Olympics from 1976 to 1996 and also won javelin gold at three Commonwealth Games.

Which Ugandan-born bishop became the Church of England's first Black archbishop in 2005, serving as Primate of England?

John Sentamu studied law at Makerere University and practised as an advocate in Uganda before ordination, and he held the archbishopric until 2020.

Which youth worker acted as spokesman for the 1963 Bristol bus boycott against the Bristol Omnibus Company's colour bar?

Paul Stephenson fronted the West Indian Development Council, whose campaign ended the company's refusal to employ Black or South Asian bus crews.

Claudia Jones, who founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, lies in Highgate Cemetery beside which thinker's tomb?

Karl Marx was her hero, and her funeral weeks after her death in December 1964 was a large political ceremony that placed her plot to the left of his tomb.

Which Hull-born MP led the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade for twenty years until its abolition?

William Wilberforce saw the Slave Trade Act pass in 1807 and died in 1833, three days after hearing that the Slavery Abolition Act was assured of passing; he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Which Trinidad-born pianist became the first Black artist with a UK number one, 'Let's Have Another Party', in 1954?

Winifred Atwell's hit was also the first piano instrumental to reach number one, and she remains the only female instrumentalist ever to have done so.

Which Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town footballer was commissioned as a British Army second lieutenant in 1917?

Walter Tull, the Folkestone-born son of a Barbadian carpenter, was killed in action in March 1918, less than a year after his commission.

Which Ghana-born 1880s Preston North End goalkeeper is regarded as the world's first Black professional footballer?

Arthur Wharton was the son of a Grenadian missionary and a mother from Fante royalty, and he left Preston in 1888 to concentrate on his running.

Which Trinidadian cricketer sued London's Imperial Hotel over a 1943 colour bar and became the UK's first Black peer?

Learie Constantine was knighted in 1962 and made a life peer in 1969, having also served as Trinidad and Tobago's High Commissioner in London.

Windrush Day, marking the 1948 disembarkation of Caribbean passengers at Tilbury, is celebrated annually on which date?

22 June was introduced as Windrush Day in 2018 after a campaign by Patrick Vernon, the same year the Windrush scandal reached its height.

The National Windrush Monument by sculptor Basil Watson, unveiled in 2022, stands inside which London railway station?

Waterloo was criticised by the Windrush Foundation as having little relevance to the generation, which it argued should have been honoured in Brixton instead.

Britain's first law against racial discrimination, which led to the Race Relations Board, was passed in which year?

1965's Race Relations Act followed a dozen failed attempts between 1951 and 1964 to legislate against racial discrimination in Britain.

Which port city's International Slavery Museum opened on 23 August 2007, bicentenary year of the Slave Trade Act?

Liverpool's museum grew out of a gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum and opened on the UN day that remembers the slave trade and its abolition.

Bristol's statue of slave trader Edward Colston, pulled down in 2020, is now shown with its graffiti in which museum?

M Shed first exhibited the statue in its graffitied state in summer 2021 and permanently from March 2024, after it was recovered from the harbour.

The Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence case concluded in 1999 that the Metropolitan Police was what?

Institutionally racist was the inquiry's verdict on the force, alongside a finding that the original 1993 murder investigation had been incompetent.

Which Tottenham MP, the first Black Briton to study at Harvard Law School, became Foreign Secretary in July 2024?

David Lammy went on to serve as Deputy Prime Minister, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor from September 2025 to July 2026.

Who became the first Black player to captain England's football team, on a 1993 tour of the United States?

Paul Ince wore the armband against the hosts on only his seventh cap, with regular captains David Platt and Tony Adams both absent.

The 1968 D'Oliveira affair, over an England cricketer's selection, led the MCC to cancel a tour of which country?

South Africa's apartheid laws had barred Basil D'Oliveira from its all-white Test team, which is why he had moved to England in the first place.

Which reggae band from Handsworth, Birmingham, was the first non-Jamaican act to win the Best Reggae Album Grammy?

Steel Pulse formed at Handsworth Wood Boys School and were initially refused gigs in Birmingham's Caribbean venues because of their Rastafarian beliefs.

Which British music awards, founded by Kanya King in 1996, first aired regionally on Carlton Television?

The MOBOs honour 'music of Black origin' across hip-hop, grime, R&B, soul, reggae, jazz and gospel, and the ceremony returned to the BBC in 2020.

Which dub poet, whose verse was known around Handsworth by the time he was 15, publicly rejected an OBE in 2003?

Benjamin Zephaniah said the word 'empire' reminded him of slavery; he had been expelled from school at 13, unable to read or write because of dyslexia.

Which Westminster grocer, painted by Gainsborough in 1768, left the first published letter collection by a Black writer?

Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in the Middle Passage and, as a property-owning shopkeeper, voted in the general elections of 1774 and 1780.

Olaudah Equiano, whose 1789 Interesting Narrative ran to nine editions, belonged to which group of Black abolitionists?

Sons of Africa members were educated, formerly enslaved Africans in a London Black community then estimated at around 10,000 people.

Which Chief Justice of the King's Bench ruled in 1772 that James Somerset could not be forcibly removed from England?

Lord Mansfield held that slavery was 'incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law', and no such English statute existed.

Whose 2004 novel Small Island, following Hortense and Gilbert from Jamaica to post-war London, won the Orange Prize?

Andrea Levy's novel also took the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the BBC adapted it in two parts in 2009.

The 1783 hearings over the slave ship Zong, which Equiano brought to campaigners' attention, were what kind of case?

An insurance claim was all the owners pursued, since the enslaved people had been insured as cargo; in 1791 Parliament barred insurers from paying out in such cases.

Francis Barber, born in Jamaica, was made residual heir in 1784 of which writer he had served since boyhood?

Samuel Johnson left Barber £70 a year plus his books, papers and a gold watch, wishing him to settle in Lichfield, where Barber opened a draper's shop.

Whose 1831 History, the first enslaved Black woman's life story published in Britain, was reprinted twice that year?

Mary Prince was born enslaved in Bermuda, and her narrative appeared while slavery was still legal in the British Caribbean, galvanising the abolition movement.

The 1945 Pan-African Congress, attended by future leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, met in which English city?

Manchester's Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall hosted the congress from 15 to 21 October 1945, after a planned Paris venue was dropped.

Claudia Jones launched which newspaper above a Brixton barber's shop in 1958, Britain's first major Black paper?

West Indian Gazette folded eight months after Jones's death, but her indoor Caribbean carnivals from 1959 helped seed what became the Notting Hill Carnival.

The 'Ivory Bangle Lady', a rich 4th-century woman of likely North African descent, was dug up in 1901 in which city?

York's Sycamore Terrace yielded her grave goods and a piece of bone inscribed 'Hail, sister, may you live in God', in a Roman cemetery where male burials usually outnumbered female.

Who in 1981 became the first woman of Caribbean heritage to read the news on British national television, on BBC News?

Moira Stuart had read her first Radio 4 bulletin in 1978, and her grandmother Clara Christian was Edinburgh University's first Black woman student.

Which trumpeter, paid 8d a day by Henry VII, is pictured twice on the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll?

John Blanke successfully petitioned Henry VIII to double his wage to 16d, and the 60-foot roll recording the 1511 tournament is held by the College of Arms.

Jacques Francis, the first African to give evidence in an English court, salvaged guns from which Tudor warship?

Mary Rose's guns belonged to Henry VIII, and opponents in the 1548 case tried to discredit Francis as a 'slave' and 'infidel' even though he was paid wages.

Which Brixton heritage centre, founded in 1981 by Len Garrison, opened its permanent home at Raleigh Hall in 2014?

Black Cultural Archives became the UK's first national Black heritage centre after winning £5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2010.

Which Gold Coast-born Londoner, Equiano's friend, published Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery in 1787?

Ottobah Cugoano, also known as John Stuart, was born into a Fante family close to the local chief at Ajumako in what is now Ghana.