The legacy of violent discrimination against Black people sadly continues to this day but it continues to act as a rallying call to powerful Black women who have risen up to help create a fairer Britain for everyone. Today, we salute those Black British women who have taken the political scene by storm and continue challenging the status quo in British politics.
Suffering from the intersectional oppression both as Black people and as women, Black women face communal microaggressions and exclusion in academia, as elsewhere, making an already steep career path even more difficult for them. This is reflected in the challenges …
Pioneering Black British women in education and research Read more »
Bringing an admittedly selective sweep of leading Black ladies up to the late twentieth century, we see how Black women have been instrumental in making up for deficiencies in the welfare state, building self-sufficient communities, neutralising some of the most dangerous periods of interracial strife in British history, while still making waves in popular culture.
Looking back over the Black History Month blog posts from last year, you will find descriptions of the many powerful Black women who successfully overcame the frightening violence and persecution that followed the uptick in racism and fearmongering in the 1950s following the post-war economic collapse. Figures such as Mavis Best who changed the law from a tool of persecution to a standard for equality that gave police sweeping powers of arrest without cause and allowed them to intimidate Black people with the threat of arbitrary arrest and instigated the Race Relations Act of 1965 that replaced colonial laws and established equal rights in law for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity. These figures are so important that I wanted to revisit them again briefly here.
Contrary to the prevailing myth that Black people arrived to an entirely white population mid-20th century on the Windrush, archaeological evidence suggests Britain was ethnically diverse from at least the time the Roman Empire arrived in Britain, facilitating international trade and mobility and have answered the call to aid Britain from every corner of her empire ever since.
Saluting sisters: celebrating the impact of Black British women This Black History Month, we are focusing on the history, legacies and lasting impact of Black women. With so much online content focused on Afro-Americans, I have tried to centre Black …
