black and british a forgotten history book

Fryer took his readers back through the centuries and introduced us to an enormous pantheon of black historical characters, about whom we had previously known nothing. For me and for thousands of black and white people who read Fryer's book its effect was transformative. It allowed me to understand my own experiences as part of a longer story and to appreciate that in an age when black men were dying on the floors of police cells, my own encounters with British racism had been relatively mild. This history of the black presence in Britain was published in 1984, the year in which my family had been besieged in our home, and it set the racism that had so deeply affected our lives within a historical context. It was, I believe, the first book I ever bought for myself with my own money. In 1986 I came across the book Staying Power by the British journalist Peter Fryer. I was alerted to those stories of presence and participation by my white mother, and I stumbled across more and more stories of black British people as my interests took me further back, into the nineteenth and then the eighteenth century. I never expected that there I would encounter black and brown people who were like me and my family.

I wandered into history looking for excitement. It had changed the lives of my white grandparents, whom I loved deeply, and I was intoxicated by the thought that German bombers had prowled the skies above my home town and that my grandfather had scanned those skies while on watch on the roof of the Vickers Armstrong factory by the River Tyne, where he worked building tanks. For the white working-class community that I grew up in, the war was the most exciting and significant event ever to collide with our terraced streets and decaying factories. Britain of the 1980s was a nation still saturated in the culture and paraphernalia of that conflict.

I stumbled upon the subject that was to become my vocation out of a simple love of story, and because of a gung-ho fascination with the Second World War that was almost obligatory among boys of that period, whatever their racial background.

Black and british a forgotten history book