African and Caribbean Communities in Britain

The black fraction of the British population has a long and honourable history, as has this book, which started life in 1995, was updated 10 years later and now makes it into paperback.

It gives a whistle-stop trip through the last two millennia from Roman times to the mid ’60s. ‘Windrush’ doesn’t dock until the penultimate page. So, although the reader will find nothing specific about the last 40 years, the stops along the way are full of informative interest.

Against a backcloth of social and political climates, the straightforward text and well-researched illustrations spotlight noteworthy black individuals. Starting with ‘Victor’ the Roman Moorish legionary, we speculate about Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’, move through the slavery years (check out the autobiographies of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, 1770, and Mary Prince, 1831) and chart the nineteenth-century emergence of black communities in mercantile centres, with figures as diverse as composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Chartist William Cuffay. The 1900s bring us black sportsmen – Arthur Wharton and, my own childhood hero, Learie Constantine. They also bring us the ‘Colour Bar’ and the Notting Hill riots.

So this is what it says, a history; it lays a valuable foundation for a look at the last 40 years of black Britain.