Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Black British History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 was a native Punic speaker who invaded Caledonia with about 50,000 men in 209, two years before dying of disease in the north.
Q 03Which driver became Formula One's first Black competitor in 2007 and won his first world title the following season?
Lewis Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton clinched that 2008 championship with a last-lap overtake in the final race of the season, becoming the then-youngest world champion.
Q 04Which rapper headlined Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage in 2019 wearing a stab vest designed by Banksy?
Stormzy
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.
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 represented Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987, which by 2024 made her the Commons' longest-serving female MP.
Q 06Which singer, born to a Nigerian father in Wales, sang the Bond themes Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker?
Shirley Bassey
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.
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 won the First Division with Forest that same year and then two European Cups, in 1979 and 1980, 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 lay less than a mile from the Coldharbour Lane labour exchange in Brixton, which is one reason so many arrivals 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 was succeeded by Sajid Javid, while commentators traced the scandal to the 'hostile environment' policy begun under Theresa May.
Q 10Who became the UK's first Black Cabinet minister in May 2002 when appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury?
Paul Boateng
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.
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's The Testaments, for a 'fusion fiction' novel told through twelve mostly Black British women.
Q 13Who became the first Black leader of a major UK political party when elected Conservative leader in November 2024?
Kemi Badenoch
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 also became the fourth woman to lead the Conservatives, after Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss.
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 chose the title because noughts and crosses is 'one of those games that nobody ever plays after childhood, because nobody ever wins'.
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 competed at six Olympics from 1976 to 1996 and also won javelin gold at three Commonwealth Games.
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 studied law at Makerere University and practised as an advocate in Uganda before ordination, and he held the archbishopric until 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's hit was also the first piano instrumental to reach number one, and she remains the only female instrumentalist ever to have done so.
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.
Q 24Windrush Day, marking the 1948 disembarkation of Caribbean passengers at Tilbury, is celebrated annually on which date?
22 June
22 June was introduced as Windrush Day in 2018 after a campaign by Patrick Vernon, the same year the Windrush scandal reached its height.
Q 25The National Windrush Monument by sculptor Basil Watson, unveiled in 2022, stands inside which London railway station?
Waterloo
Waterloo was criticised by the Windrush Foundation as having little relevance to the generation, which it argued should have been honoured in Brixton instead.
Q 26Britain's first law against racial discrimination, which led to the Race Relations Board, was passed in which year?
1965
1965's Race Relations Act followed a dozen failed attempts between 1951 and 1964 to legislate against racial discrimination in Britain.
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 28Bristol's statue of slave trader Edward Colston, pulled down in 2020, is now shown with its graffiti in which museum?
M Shed
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.
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 on the force, alongside a finding that the original 1993 murder investigation had been incompetent.
Q 30Which Tottenham MP, the first Black Briton to study at Harvard Law School, became Foreign Secretary in July 2024?
David Lammy
David Lammy went on to serve as Deputy Prime Minister, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor from September 2025 to July 2026.