Black British History Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
48 free Black British History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Black history in Britain runs far deeper than 1948. An African-born emperor died in Roman Britain, a Black trumpeter played at the Tudor court, and Georgian London had a Black community of thousands whose writers and campaigners helped end the slave trade. Every era since has its firsts, and most of them are barely taught. This quiz covers the whole sweep: Roman and Tudor figures, the abolition campaign and the court cases that drove it, the Windrush generation, a famous bus boycott, the carnival that grew out of a winter dance, the laws that first outlawed racial discrimination, and the people who broke barriers in Parliament, on the pitch, in the charts and on the page. It suits Black History Month lessons in October, pub quiz rounds and anyone who wants to test how much of this history they actually know. Every answer is sourced and explained, so you learn something whether you get it right or not.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who topped a 2004 poll of great Black Britons and was honoured with a 2016 statue outside St Thomas' Hospital in London?
Mary Seacole
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.
Q 02Which Roman emperor, born at Leptis Magna in North Africa, died at Eboracum in AD 211 while campaigning in Britain?
Septimius Severus
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.
Q 03Lewis Hamilton, Formula One's first Black world champion, matched which driver's record of seven titles in 2020?
Michael Schumacher
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.
Q 04Which rapper headlined Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage in 2019 wearing a stab vest designed by Banksy?
Stormzy
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.
Q 05Who became the first Black woman elected to Parliament in 1987, and in 2024 earned the title Mother of the House?
Diane Abbott
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.
Q 06Which singer, born to a Nigerian father in Wales, sang the Bond themes Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker?
Shirley Bassey
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.
Q 07Which Nottingham Forest defender became the first Black footballer to play for England's senior men's team, in 1978?
Viv Anderson
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.
Q 08Windrush arrivals without lodgings in 1948 were housed in a deep-level air-raid shelter under which Tube station?
Clapham South
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.
Q 09Which Home Secretary resigned in April 2018 over the Windrush scandal of wrongly detained Commonwealth citizens?
Amber Rudd
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.
Q 10Who became the UK's first Black Cabinet minister in May 2002 when appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury?
Paul Boateng
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.
Q 11Which 1999 Turner Prize winner directed 12 Years a Slave, the first Best Picture Oscar winner with a Black director?
Steve McQueen
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.
Q 12Who became the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize, sharing the 2019 award for Girl, Woman, Other?
Bernardine Evaristo
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.
Q 13Who became the first Black leader of a major UK political party when elected Conservative leader in November 2024?
Q 21Which Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town footballer was commissioned as a British Army second lieutenant in 1917?
Walter Tull
Walter Tull, the Folkestone-born son of a Barbadian carpenter, was killed in action in March 1918, less than a year after his commission.
Q 22Which Ghana-born 1880s Preston North End goalkeeper is regarded as the world's first Black professional footballer?
Arthur Wharton
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.
Q 23Which Trinidadian cricketer sued London's Imperial Hotel over a 1943 colour bar and became the UK's first Black peer?
Learie Constantine
Kemi Badenoch
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.
Q 14Which author of the Noughts & Crosses series, set in an alternative Britain, was Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015?
Malorie Blackman
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.
Q 15Which javelin thrower won gold at the 1984 Olympics, becoming the first Black British woman to be an Olympic champion?
Tessa Sanderson
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.
Q 16Which Ugandan-born bishop became the Church of England's first Black archbishop in 2005, serving as Primate of England?
John Sentamu
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.
Q 17Which youth worker acted as spokesman for the 1963 Bristol bus boycott against the Bristol Omnibus Company's colour bar?
Paul Stephenson
Paul Stephenson fronted the West Indian Development Council, whose campaign ended the company's refusal to employ Black or South Asian bus crews.
Q 18Claudia Jones, who founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, lies in Highgate Cemetery beside which thinker's tomb?
Karl Marx
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.
Q 19Which Hull-born MP led the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade for twenty years until its abolition?
William Wilberforce
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.
Q 20Which Trinidad-born pianist became the first Black artist with a UK number one, 'Let's Have Another Party', in 1954?
Winifred Atwell
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.
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.
Q 24Windrush Day, held each 22 June, marks the 1948 arrival of Caribbean passengers at which English port?
Tilbury
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.
Q 25The National Windrush Monument by sculptor Basil Watson, unveiled in 2022, stands inside which London railway station?
Waterloo
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.
Q 26Which prime minister's government passed the Race Relations Act of 1965, Britain's first law against racial discrimination?
Harold Wilson
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.
Q 27Which port city's International Slavery Museum opened on 23 August 2007, bicentenary year of the Slave Trade Act?
Liverpool
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.
Q 28Whose statue did Black Lives Matter protesters topple in Bristol in June 2020 and roll into the harbour?
Edward Colston
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.
Q 29The Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence case concluded in 1999 that the Metropolitan Police was what?
Institutionally racist
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.
Q 30Which Tottenham MP, the first Black Briton to study at Harvard Law School, became Foreign Secretary in July 2024?
David Lammy
David Lammy won Tottenham at a by-election in June 2000, aged 27, after the death of the long-serving MP Bernie Grant.