48 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 came to Britain in 208 to conquer Caledonia and forced its tribes to give up territory, but he fell ill and died before the campaign was finished.

Lewis Hamilton, Formula One's first Black world champion, matched which driver's record of seven titles in 2020?

Michael Schumacher's seven titles had stood alone since 2004 until Hamilton clinched his seventh with a wet-weather win at the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix.

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

Stormzy, the first Black British solo artist to headline Glastonbury, broke up his set with a ballet interlude marking the arrival of ballet shoes made to match Black dancers' skin tones.

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

Diane Abbott has sat for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987; in 2019 she stood in at Prime Minister's Questions, the first Black MP to speak from the despatch box there.

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

Shirley Bassey, born in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, left school as a teenager for a factory job and sang in local clubs in her spare time.

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

Viv Anderson was pelted with bananas by rival fans as a young Forest full-back, yet went on to win the league in 1978 and two European Cups 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 left the newcomers looking for work at the nearest labour exchange, on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, which is one reason so many settled in that area.

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

Amber Rudd quit after admitting she had 'inadvertently misled' MPs by denying that the Home Office had targets for removing illegal immigrants; Sajid Javid replaced her.

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

Paul Boateng grew up in Ghana, where his father was a cabinet minister until a 1966 coup put him in prison; the family fled to Britain, and Boateng entered the Commons in 1987.

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 after the judges refused to pick one winner, flouting a rule against splitting it; her novel follows twelve characters, most of them Black British women.

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

Kemi Badenoch beat Robert Jenrick in a ballot of party members four months after the Conservatives lost the 2024 general election, taking over from Rishi Sunak.

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

Malorie Blackman turned the usual roles around in the series: the dark-skinned Crosses hold power, and segregation keeps the lighter-skinned Noughts beneath them.

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

Tessa Sanderson had failed to reach the final in Moscow four years earlier, placing 19th in qualifying; in Los Angeles she won with an Olympic record.

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

John Sentamu practised law in Uganda, where he was detained for 90 days after angering Idi Amin; he fled to Britain in 1974 and held the archbishopric from 2005 to 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 played her ragtime hits on a battered 'other piano' bought from a junk shop; as of 2023 she was the only female instrumentalist to have topped the UK singles chart.

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 won his case, though he was awarded only five guineas in damages; he was knighted in 1962 and entered the House of Lords in 1969.

Windrush Day, held each 22 June, marks the 1948 arrival of Caribbean passengers at which English port?

Tilbury, on the Thames in Essex, is where the Empire Windrush's passengers came ashore on 22 June 1948; the annual day was introduced in 2018 after a campaign by Patrick Vernon.

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

Waterloo was chosen because thousands of Caribbean arrivals first reached London there before starting new lives across Britain; the bronze shows a man, woman and child climbing a mountain of suitcases.

Which prime minister's government passed the Race Relations Act of 1965, Britain's first law against racial discrimination?

Harold Wilson's government outlawed the colour bar in pubs, hotels and other public places, but the 1965 Act left out housing and jobs, which a second Act covered in 1968.

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.

Whose statue did Black Lives Matter protesters topple in Bristol in June 2020 and roll into the harbour?

Edward Colston's bronze was hauled out of the water four days later and now sits in Bristol's M Shed museum, still daubed with the protesters' graffiti.

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

Institutionally racist was the inquiry's verdict; its call to end the double-jeopardy rule for murder became law in 2005, which let Gary Dobson be retried and convicted in 2012.

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

David Lammy won Tottenham at a by-election in June 2000, aged 27, after the death of the long-serving MP Bernie Grant.

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

Paul Ince took the armband against the hosts because regular captains David Platt and Tony Adams were both absent; England lost 2–0.

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, short for Music of Black Origin, exist because Kanya King remortgaged her home to pay for the first show, which reached television within weeks.

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 by his first biographer's account, though his own letters point to Africa; as a property-owning shopkeeper he voted in the 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, now regarded as Britain's first Black political organisation, was a group of educated former slaves who lobbied through letters to newspapers and to MPs.

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 own parents made the same journey: her father came to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 and her mother followed shortly afterwards.

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

Mary Prince, born enslaved in Bermuda, dictated her story in London to Susanna Strickland at a time when slavery was still legal in Britain's Caribbean colonies.

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; a third delegate, Hastings Banda, also went on to become his country's first president.

Claudia Jones launched which newspaper in Brixton in 1958, widely seen as 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 possibly of North African descent, was dug up in 1901 in which city?

York's Sycamore Terrace grave held ivory and jet bangles, a glass mirror and a plaque reading 'Hail, sister, may you live in God'; a 2010 study of her skull measurements is the basis for the North African link.

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

Moira Stuart, whose grandmother Clara Christian was Edinburgh University's first Black woman student, read her first Radio 4 bulletin in 1978 and left the BBC for Classic FM after nearly five decades.

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 won £5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and London's mayor in 2010 to turn the derelict Raleigh Hall into the UK's first national Black heritage centre.

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

Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped at about 13 and enslaved in Grenada before being brought to England in 1772; by 1784 he was working as a servant to the painter Richard Cosway.