African/Black History, is a big part of the World’s History! One can’t exist without the other!! So here are some resources & suggestions to pass onto your child’s school & other parents.

Greetings readers,

Welcome to BLACKSTOP-The 1 stop info shop! From www.blacknews.uk

We advocate BH should be taught every month, And would go so far as to say without "African History" there is no accurate "World's History!" One can not exist without the other.

So we created some resources and suggested activities to be worked into and linked with your child's current curriculum. So please share share share and please pass on to other parents and lastly to your child's school, with a view to asking them to add it to thier curriculum review.

Where possible I have tried to:

The consensus among ancient historians is now that Egypt should be regarded as an African civilisation and forms part of a rich African heritage of invention, innovation (there is currently a debate amongst some archaeologists and ancient historians about whether the first iron working took place in Africa) and civilisation. The purpose of these resources is to give pupils an understanding that the roots of Black history lie in ancient Africa rather than with the slave trade and second that hugely important innovations and building blocks of civilisation came from ancient Africa.

If you want to expand on these resources:

Resources – Egyptian Inventions

Pyramids of Giza Egypt & the Pyramids of Meroe in Sudan

Hieroglyphics​​​​       Meroitic Script

Activities:

There are lots of other details on Ancient Egyptian inventions online at sites like Discovering Eygpt

Resources - African Inventions:

City of Timbuktu from Henry Barth’s Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa 1857

Some historians believe that people from the Empire of Mali in West Africa went to Central and South America in the 14th Century AD, around 200 years before Europeans discovered them: “The presence of Negroes in America before Colombus is proven by the representation of Negroes in early American sculpture. It is also proven by Colombuswho said that Negro traders from West Africa sold a gold alloy of precisely the same type as those he saw in America” (Leo Weiner, Africa and the Discovery of America, Volume III, 1922).

From the Pyramids onwards Africa has a great tradition of building. There were many great works of building (known as ‘Architecture’) in medieval Africa.

The great Mosque of Djenne in Mali built in 1204 AD

The Great Mosque of Kilwa in Tanzania built in 11th or 12thcenturies AD

The Church of St. George, Ethiopia, built in 12th or 13th Centuries AD, carved 12 metres down into solid rock.

This article also gives an overview of the great diversity of different buildings found in Africa

Leaders Who have Shaped our History

A chronological list of British Black and Asian change leadersthrough time, I have included both General questions and activity ideas as well as specific resources and questions on each individual that can be used in the general framework. These resources are designed to:

Dates of birth and death have been included where known. The main sources are:

100 Great Black Britons, Robinson.

Black and British a short, essential history, Macmillan

General Questions:

Queen Nanny led a community of formerly enslaved Africans called the Winward Maroons on the Island and British colony of Jamaica in the 18th Century. The Winward Maroons fought a war against and defeated the British authorities which were forced to recognise their freedom and to grant 500 acres of land for them to live on in 1746. Most of the Maroons kept their independence until the second Maroon war in 1795. After then the Accompong Maroons kept their independence until Jamaica ceased to be a colony. Queen Nanny was the first Black leader to achieve freedom for some enslaved people and negotiate on an equal footing with the British authorities. She is a national heroine of Jamaica.

This Video gives a good overview of Queen Nanny’s life

Sancho was a member of Georgian London’s high society, an intelligent, literate man, cultural icon, and businessman. He is the first Black Britain known to have voted in an election. Born around 1729 on a slave ship, he was brought to London aged around 2 and enslaved by three sisters from Greenwich. As a young boy he met John. 2nd Duke of Montagu who was impressed by Sancho’s “native frankness of manner as yet unbroken by servitude”. The Duke gave Sancho books and encouraged his education. Later, Sancho ran away from Greenwich and went to work for the Duke’s widow. When she died, she left Sancho £70 and an annual income of £30. With this money Sancho set up his own grocery business in London. He was also an accomplished composer (see below for his music – including ‘The Duchess of Devonshire’s Reel’) and wrote lots of letters (see below) to other educated people.

Sancho was clearly highly intelligent and capable man in many ways and a startling example of a high-status Black Briton in Georgian society.

This Video is a great introduction to Ignatius Sancho, giving insight into his everyday life. Also including a very illuminating interview with actor Patterson Joseph on what Sancho means to him.

Brycchan Carey’s website also has a very good short biography of Sancho as well as selections of his letters, links to his biography by Joseph Jekyll, bibliography of Sancho’s studies and other resources all of which could be used for lesson/activity planning.

There is also a playlist of some of Sancho’s music here

100 Great Black Britons pp. 324-28

Born in Benin, modern Nigeria, in 1745 Equiano was captured by other African people as a child and eventually sold to white slave traders. He found himself a slave to several ship’s Captains, refusing to go by the name Gustavus Vassa that was given him by one of them. In 1766 he was freed from slavery and went on to spend most of the rest of his life at sea, going on some amazing voyages of exploration. After gaining his freedom he became an abolitionist working with other famous abolitionists such as Granville Sharp, bringing the case of the slave ship Zong (where 132 Africans were thrown overboard in order to make a fraudulent insurance claim) to Sharp’s  and the British public’s attention. He also was a friend of Ignatius Sancho. During debates in the British Parliament about whether the slave trade should stop, Equiano led several Black delegations. He drew on his first-hand knowledge of slavery to refute many of the pro-slavery arguments he heard in these debates. Equiano also put forward a case for trade in commodities rather than humans in a letter to the president of the Privy Council for Trade. The work for which Equiano is best known is his Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. In it he details his earlier life in the Igbo Kingdom of Benin, the horrors of slavery, becoming free and his fantastic journeys of exploration. The book was very influential, subscribers included the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cumberland and the Duke of York, going on to be published in 9 editions and making Equiano the most famous and richest Black man in Britain. Most importantly, like the later work of Mary Prince, it helped to shift British public opinion to the side of abolition.

This Video is an extract from Equiano’s Narrative detailing how he was enslaved.

Brycchan Carey’s Website also has a good biography of Equiano and includes other resources such as extracts from the Narrative, a more in depth illustrated bio, bibliography and further reading, a map of Equiano’s travels and a summary of arguments and evidence about where Equiano was born. These could provide much excellent material for lesson planning and activities.

100 Great Black Britons pp. 160-65

Jones, born Claudia Vera Cumberbach, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, moved to Harlem New York with her parents aged 9. Later she became a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), campaigning against discrimination towards Black workers and women. In 1955 she was deported from the United States on immigration offences. As she was born in Trinidad, at the time a British colony, she was deported to Britain. In Britain she began organising the London Caribbean community, founding the West Indian Gazette. After outbreaks of racially motivated violence against Black people and communities in Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958 and the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959, the Gazette’s offices became a hub for advice for the Black Caribbean community in Britain. The Gazette also served as a means of promoting Black artists and their art, including Cy Grant, Edric Connor, Nadia Cattouse and Nina Baden-Semper(Link to art). Perhaps the thing that Claudia Jones is best known for is the Notting Hill Carnival. After the violence in 1958 Claudia had the brilliant idea of an event to celebrate Caribbean culture which would allow Black people to celebrate their identity whilst encouraging white people to learn about and celebrate black culture. Today the carnival is a huge outdoor event and has been very successful in bringing peopleof different races and backgrounds together, through sharing food, music, dancing and dressing up! It has helped to change British culture.

This Video is a great introduction to Claudia Jones and the Notting Hill Carnival and also covers Rhaune Laslett-O’Brien.

In this CBBC Video Jay Blades talks about Claudia Jones and Dr Harold Moody and their campaigns against racial injustice in Britain.

100 Great Black Britons pp. 224-9

Dame Jocelyn Barrow was a fearless champion of racial equality in Britain. She once remarked: “My parents brought me up to feel that nobody could stop me from doing what I wanted to do”. Her life seems to bear this out. A qualified teacher, Dame Jocelyn moved from Trinidad to Britain in 1959 to begin postgraduate studies at the Institute of education in London. This exposed her to the level of discrimination against black and Asian children that existed at the time in British education. As a result, she, along with other activists, founded the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) in 1964. CARD lobbied to introduce legislation to make discrimination illegal and worked hard to bring evidence of discrimination to light. She was crucial in bringing more protection from Racial discrimination into British law. Working alongside the Observer newspaper, as general secretary of CARD, Dame Jocelyn helped expose the levels of discrimination in the employment practices of London Transport. This was central to convincing MPs to pass and strengthen the 1968 Race Relations Act. Dame Jocelyn continued in her role as a teacher throughout this period. She was made a BBC governor in 1981, working to ensure that Black people could become news reporters and presenters. She also worked hard to get the BBC to make more programmes reflecting the lives, struggles and cultural creativity of Black and Asian Britons. She received a DBE (Dame of the British Empire) for her services to broadcasting.  Dame Jocelyn deployed her formidable skills to other areas, working as chair for the Camden Community Housing Association where she worked to ease the problem of poor housing. The Inns of Court Law School asked Dame Jocelyn to investigate why Black barristers were not being successful in their training. Her findings led to a change in the century’s old tradition of training barristers only in London. Mentoring others was also a passion of Dame Jocelyn’s and she helped many individuals who went on to have successful careers in politics, the law and broadcasting.

This Video gives a good idea of how Dame Jocelyn went about making the change detailed above.

100 Great Black Britons pp. 67-71

In the 1940s and 1950s many Black people came to Britain from the Caribbean to find work and help Britain rebuild after World War Two. These people faced discrimination in employment, finding it hard to get well paid jobs or that the only jobs available were ones well away from the public eye. Employers felt that the public would not want to interact with Black people. Many like Jocelyn Barrow felt this was unfair. While Paul Stephenson was not Caribbean (he was born in Essex to British and West African parents), he agreed and worked to put an end to racial discrimination. In 1962 he arrived in Bristol, where large numbers of Black Caribbeanpeople had settled, to work as the city’s first Black youthofficer. The city’s biggest employer the Bristol Omnibus Company, operated a ‘colour bar’ – an unofficial policy that meant no Caribbean’s could work as drivers or conductors. Paul became part of the West Indian Development Council, an organisation dedicated to exposing the colour bar. He exposed the colour bar by setting up an interview for a bus driving job for a young man called Guy Bailey. Bailey’s qualifications got him an interview, but when Paul revealed that he was West Indian, the interview was cancelled, and the general manager confirmed that the company did not employ ‘coloureds’ as bus crew. The Development Council then announced that no Black people would use Bristol Omnibus Company services. This was known as the Bristol Bus Boycott. Bristol Omnibus Company was forced to end its colour bar in 1963 after receiving much local and international criticism. The boycott heavily influenced the 1965 Race Relations Act passed by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government after meeting with Paul Stephenson and the other founders of the West Indian Development Council. It forbade employment discrimination on grounds of colour, race, or national origins. Jocelyn Barrow’s 1968 Act built on this extending it to both employment and housing.

Paul continued his anti-racism work, in 1965 refusing to leave a pub until he was served, in 1972 beginning work for the Commission on Racial Equality, working with US boxer Muhammed Ali to set up a sports foundation for BAME children and setting up the Bristol Black Archives Partnershipin 1992. In 2009 he was awarded an OBE for his services to equal opportunity and in 2017 received the Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award.

This Article on the Black History Month 2020 website gives more detail on the boycott

This Article provides excellent background

This Video has Paul describing the boycott in his own words  

Page 3 of this Pdf of sources on the Transatlantic Slave Trade at Bristol City Records Office gives an idea of the kind of information collected by Paul Stephenson and the Bristol Black Archives Partnership

100 Great Black Britons pp. 343-7

Valerie Amos came to Britain from Guiana aged nine and was brought up in Kent. Her parents were teachers and Valerie credits them with building her confidence and ability to navigate living in a new country. She also says that her parents encouraged her and her sister to have an opinion, become good debaters and think logically. This led Valerie to become passionate about equality and social justice. She went on to study sociology at Warwick University and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. There, she became involved with a group of Black and Asian students – Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Errol Lawrence and Pratibha Parma producing publications on race, racism and social inequality. Valerie’s career shows a woman who tirelessly works to further the causes of racial and gender equality, cares deeply about humanitarian issues and works hard to change the world for the better.

She and Partibha Parma contributed to the development of feminism, co-writing “Challenging Imperial Feminism”arguing that many of the gains made by white women by the 1980’s were at the expense of and excluded black women (a debate that continues within feminism today). After working for several Local Authorities in London, Valerie got her big break as Chief Executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission from 1989. During her time at the commission she used a special legal process called a judicial review to challenge government employment law that was unfair to women. After this she worked as an adviser to the government of Nelson Mandela in Africa and held positions as the British High Commissioner to Australia, United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and United Nations Emergency Relief Co-ordinator. While at the UN she pushed through a resolution to allow international aid to be sent to Syria. In 2015 she was appointed Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). 2017 saw Valerie collaborate with the Guardian newspaper, Operation Black Vote and Green Park Recruitment to produce the ground-breaking research project ‘The Colour of Power’. It was discovered that in a study of one thousand top jobs, only 3% were held by Black and minority ethnic individuals and 23% by women. Given that Black and minority ethnic people are 14% of the British population and Women 50%, this demonstrated unfairness at the highest levels of British society. August 2020 saw Valerie taking up her current role as Master of University College, Oxford.

In this video Valerie tells her story

100 Great Black Britons pp. 48-51

Before David Olusoga’s books and pioneering TV shows, many aspects of Black British history were effectively hidden from public view, because they were rarely discussed outside of universities. Born on in Nigeria to an English mother and Nigerian father and coming to Britain as a young child, David grew up on a council estate in Gateshead. He has said that he experienced “racism from my schoolteachers, from bus drivers, from the people I passed in the street” and his home was attacked by the racist organisation the National Front. Trying to make sense of these experiences, David turned to the study of history, obtaining a history degree from the University of Liverpool. After university he became a television producer for the BBC where he made several TV programs that challenged some of the stories we tell ourselves about our history. In 2014 David presented the documentary The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, exploring the contributions of four million troops and support personnel from India, Africa and the Caribbean to the British war effort. Fighting for King and Empire: Britain’s Caribbean Heroes followed in 2015,focussing on the stories of veterans like Sam King and Allan Wilmot. These series were very important as they brought the huge and often ignored contributions of Black and Asian people like Hazel Carby’s father to the attention of the British public in a way that had not been done before. Building on the work of historians such as Eric Williams and University College London, David’s next series, the BAFTA winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (2015), painted a vivid picture of the importance of slavery profits to the British economy. His next work, the book Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016) builds on the work of historians such as Peter Fryer, James Walvin and Folarin Shyllon was part of what David called “the wider process of historical salvage [that] recovered lost people, reclaimed lost events….a wave of new research that [was] in part an attempt to compensate for the failures….of mainstream history”. Black and British shows us that Britain and its history have always been part of a bigger global story and so it should not be surprising that there has been Black Britons as far back as the Romans. Olusoga’s latest series, The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files (2019) was made in response to 2018’s Windrush Scandal, where thousands of Black Britons were made homeless, jobless or deported to the Caribbean as a consequence of the immigration policies of the British government. David used this series to trace the hostile policies towards Caribbean migrants enacted by several British governments over the last 70 years. He undermines the national myth of the Windrush generation as simply people who came to Britain and found a better life.

David Olusoga is able to present some of the darker aspects of our history it in a way that has connected emotionally with a whole generation of modern Britons. His and the work of others like him, shines a light on part of our past that is often forgotten.

In this video David gives his perspective on Black British history

100 Great Black Britons pp. 277-80

Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1949, John Tucker MugabiSentamu was the sixth of thirteen children. He studied law in Uganda, rising to become a judge in the High Court of Uganda, before fleeing to Britain in 1974 due to persecution by the government of dictator Idi Amin. He had refused to overlook the crimes of one of Amin’s family and spent 90 days in prison . In Britain, John became a part of the church in 1979, rising through the ranks of the Church of England, becoming Bishop of Birmingham in 2002 and Archbishop of York in 2005. He retired in June 2020.

During his time in Britain he has served as adviser to the Stephen Lawrence Judicial Enquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the response of the Metropolitan Police. In 2002 he also chaired the Damilola Taylor reviewinto a case where a young boy was murdered in London in 2000, the review criticised the Police for not learning the lessons of the Stephen Lawrence case and not acting quickly enough.

John has often spoken out about institutional racism and inequality. In 1999 he challenged the Church (and other British institutions) to address institutional racism, he is regarded by many in the Church as a moderniser.  He campaigned against the US led war in Iraq in 2003 and criticised the US for breaking international law with it’streatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

During his time as Bishop of Birmingham he supported and advised workers who lost their jobs when the Rover car factory shut down in 2005 and campaigned against gun crime after the killings of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare.

He has stated that for him homosexuality is not a dividing issue, saying “I want to treat every human personality as loved by God”.

More recently he said that the killing of George Floyd in the US showed that US authorities were not “listening to the real problems of African Americans and people of colour”.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his other views and work, John has been critical of multiculturalism saying that “Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly for me, let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys and its pains”. He said that the British Empire and the English teachers and missionaries who worked in Africa made it possible for him to be where he is today.

Recently, many people were angered when the government did not make John Sentamu a Lord, when it had done so with the last two Archbishops of York, who were white.

In this video Archbishop John Sentamu discusses his views on inequality in Britain

https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/people/johnsentamu_1.shtml

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/church-of-englands-racial-justice-crusader-sentamu-retires/ar-BB159zHy

    Marcus Rashford MBE was born on 31st October 1997 in Manchester. During his childhood, his family was poor, and despite working hard, his mother sometimes struggled to feed them. She often went without food so that Marcus and his brothers could eat. He has said that he remembers hearing his mother sometimes crying herself to sleep. He also remembers that sometimes the only hot meal he would get was the meal he was given at school or if he went to a friends’ house for dinner.

Despite this hardship, Marcus worked hard and with encouragement from his brothers, became a very talentedfootballer, joining the academy system at Manchester United aged 7. In 2012 he was part of the Manchester United under 15 squad and in 2015 made his debut as part of the first-team in a UEFA Europa League match against Danish club Midtjylland, scoring two goals. Since then he has gone on to have a very impressive football careerplaying for both Manchester United and England.

Equally impressive is Marcus’s activism (where someone tries to promote reform to change society in a way they think is good). In 2019 he set up the In the Box campaign with Selfridges and local Manchester charities to give homeless people essential items over Christmas. He and his mother visited homeless shelters to personally hand the boxes out.

In March 2020 Marcus teamed up with poverty and food waste charity FareShare to deliver meals to those in Greater Manchester area who were no longer receiving free school meals, due to the Covid-19 lockdown imposed by the government. Marcus cleverly used his fame and platform to promote this work and the initiative quickly grew and attracted funding from the public allowing it to go nationwide. On June 11th 2020 Marcus revealed that the charity had been able to reach over three million children across the country. This rose to four million the next month.

On 15th June Marcus wrote a letter to the government calling on them to end child poverty and extend the free school meals voucher system to cover the summer holidays and the rest of lockdown. A day later the government changed it’spolicy to provide free school meals during the summer holidays. Not satisfied with this, Marcus set up the Child Food Poverty Task Force alongside several UK food shops, manufacturers, charities and delivery companies. Later he said he had been “disappointed with the lack of empathy” being shown by some MPs.

In October 2020 Marcus was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire). Vowing to continue his campaign, he launched a petition on the UK parliament petitions website demanding expansion of the free school meals program, provision of meals and activities during school holidays and an increase in the value of Healthy Start vouchers. The petition has been very successful, becoming only the sixth petition to attract over one million signatures. Despite extending free school meals being voted down in Parliament, on November 8th 2020, the government announced that because of Marcus’s campaign, funding of almost £400 million would be provided over the next year to support the cost of food and household bills for poor families.

Marcus continues his activism, using his twitter account to highlight local businesses that have helped his campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Rashford

Black British Women through Time

A chronological list of Black and Asian British women through time. I have included both General questions and activity ideas as well as specific questions and resources on each individual that can be used in the general framework. These resources are designed to:

Dates of birth and death have been included where known. The main sources are:

Black British History: New Perspectives. Zed Books. Kindle Edition

100 Great Black Britons, Robinson.

General Questions & Link to Enquiry Question:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, people digging in a street in York discovered a 1,700-year-old stone coffin of a woman. She had been buried with jewellery, including jet and ivory bracelets, as well as other possessions and was undoubtedly of elite status. It was not until 2010 that archaeologists were fully able to analyse the skeleton, which they found to be of a young woman, probably between eighteen and twenty-three years old, and of North African origin.18 The archaeologists were even able to make a reconstruction to show us what this African ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’ may have looked like.19 This and other research has shown that those of African heritage, including African women of all classes, were a settled population before the arrival of the Angles and Saxons. Such findings prompted one leading archaeologist to conclude that ‘analysis of the “Ivory Bangle Lady” and others like her contradicts common popular assumptions about the make-up of Roman-British populations as well as the view that African immigrants in Roman Britain were of low status, male and likely to have been slaves’.20

18    S. Leach, H. Eckardt, C. Chenery, G. Müldner and M. Lewis, ‘A Lady of York: Migration, Ethnicity and Identity in Roman Britain’, Antiquity 84 (2010), pp. 131–45.

19    https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/roman-britain-the-ivory-bangle-lady; https://www.yorkshiremuseum.org.uk/collections/collections-highlights/ivory-bangle-lady/, accessed 25 January 2018.

20    https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR270747.aspx, accessed 25 January 2018.

Black British History: New Perspectives (p. vi). Zed Books. Kindle Edition.

Beachy Head Lady was so named because her skeletal remains were first discovered near Eastbourne, in southern England. The remains are thought to date from the mid-third century CE, in the middle of the Roman period, and are of a young woman. Although she is thought to have grown up in the area, analysis of her remains suggests that she was of African origin. She was evidently from a part of Africa that was not included within the Roman empire, and she was probably either born in Sussex or brought to Britain at a very young age. Such evidence poses fascinating questions about the past and about the possibility of families of Africans living in Britain in ancient times.22

22   http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology/art474162-beachy-head-lady-was-young-sub-saharan-roman-with-good-teeth-say-archaeologists, accessed 31 January 2018.

Black British History: New Perspectives (p. vi). Zed Books. Kindle Edition.

• Cattelena of Almondsbury (16/17thCenturies AD d.1625) –

The Black Tudors website has an excellent short bio of Cattalena who is important and relevant to children in rural settings as she was a Black Tudor that lived in a rural setting. Cattalena also owned various goods which, along with other evidence, suggests that Cattalenaand other Africans in Tudor England were not slaves but possessed property themselves.

Ask pupils what does Cattalena’s inventory of goods (Listed in Black Tudors) tell us about her life and the lives of Black people in Tudor England?

Black Tudors pp.259-79 .Kindle Edition

• Queen Charlotte (18th Century AD 1744-1818)– Link to Stuarts – great people approach to history

Dr Stephanie Myers discusses Queen Charlotte’s black ancestry, her talents, achievements and involvement with the abolition movement

100 Great Black Britons p.126

• Mary Prince (18th & 19th Centuries AD 1788 - ?)

Mary Prince is the first Black British woman to be able to tell the story of her experiences of enslavement in the Caribbean. It is hugely significant as a first-hand account of the poor treatment and brutality experienced by enslaved people. After having spent the first 32 years of her life enslaved in the Caribbean, Mary came to England in 1828 with her owners and promptly escaped (as she learned that legally she was free in England) to the Anti-Slavery Society who transcribed and published her account of her life in 1829. In 1833 Parliament passed the Abolition Act, outlawing slavery in the British West Indies. Mary’s account, showing its popularity by being in its third edition by this time – arguably had a great influence on British public opinion and the change in the law.

This Video gives a good overview of Mary’s life.

100 Great Black Britons p.309

Listen to Winifred Atwell’s music

Born in Trinidad in 1914, Winifred Atwell was a hugely popular ‘ragtime’ and ‘boogie woogie’ musician in the 1950’s and 1960s. She was a major recording artist and one of the first African Caribbeans to become a TV star, having her own TV shows on both ITV and BBC. She was hugely influential inspiring modern artists such as Elton John and popularising American musical styles in the UK, hence being part of the same kind of cultural influence that we discussed in the early years.

100 Great Black Britons p.64

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Dame FloellaBenjamin is an actor, children’s TV presenter, TV producer and author. She is remembered by many people (perhaps some parents and teachers!) as a well-loved children’s TV presenter from the 1970s and 1980s. She received the Lifetime Achievement Prize at the Women in Film and Television awards in 2019. She is less well known for her work on behalf of children, lobbying successfully for a Minister for Children and Families role to be created. Dame Floella was installed as Chancellor of Exeter University in 2006. In 2010 she became a member of the House of Lords, fulfilling her childhood dream of meeting the Queen.

Read Dame Floella’s children’s book Coming to Englandwith the children or watch this video version narrated by David Olusoga

100 Great Black Britons p.74

Sonia Boyce is a leading Black British artist and also an accomplished Academic, she is professor of Black art and design at the University of the Arts. Currently she is working on producing artwork for the 1.8km wall for Crossrail in the Royal Docks, and in 2020 was selected to be the first Black female artist to represent the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2021.

100 Great Black Britons p.100-101

Discuss She ain’t Holding up, She’s Holding On by Sonia Boyce

Link to Art – possibly ask pupils to create their own paintings on themes discussed above

100 Great Black Britons p. 98

Dawn Butler is only the third Black British Woman to become an MP, after Diane Abbott and Oona King. She has been the race and equality officer for the GMB Union, adviser to the Mayor of London, Labour MP for Brent South since 2005, has served as Minister of State for Youth Affairs in the Labour Government of Gordon Brown and was Shadow Women and Equalities Minister in 2019.Butler has been a tireless advocate for equality issues, many times highlighting the difficulties faced by being black and female (see below) and founder of the Parliamentary Black Caucus – a cross party group concerned with issues facing ethnic minorities. She is the first MP to ask a question in Parliament using sign language to highlight issues faced by people with hearing impairments and push for sign language to be legally recognised. A supporter of transgender rights, Butler has said that minority groups should stand together to fight for each other’s rights.

100 Great Black Britons p.112

Priti Patel is currently Home Secretary in the Conservative Government. She is the first person of Indian origin to hold this very important post. Born in London in 1972, her parents owned a chain of Newsagents. She attended a comprehensive girl’s school before going on to Study Economics at Keele University. She has worked in public and press relations for the Conservative party, the Referendum Party, a public relations company representing British American Tobacco and British multinational alcoholic drinks company Diagio. In 2010 she was elected MP for Witham, has served as Secretary of state for International Development and Home Secretary. Her political hero is Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Despite being a member of a minority group, Priti Patel has  said that she feels the term BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) is “patronising and insulting” because she was born in Britain and considered herself British first and foremost. She has also sought to distance herself from claims that she said there were “racist attitudes” and “a lot of bigotry around” in the Conservative party in 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel

https://www.priti4witham.co.uk/

Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch (nee Adegoke) was born in London in 1980. Her childhood was spent in Lagos, Nigeria (Link to Geography find Lagos on a map/globe and discuss human & physical geography) and the United States. She moved to Britain aged 16 and studied Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex. Her career has involved roles as a software engineer at Logica, a systems analyst at RBS, associate director at Coutts bank and a director at The Spectator magazine. In 2017 she was elected as MP for Saffron Waldon, becoming the first woman to represent that constituency. Badenoch has also served as Under Secretary of State for Children and Families (a position created by the lobbying of FloellaBenjamin), Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and Under Secretary of State in the Department for International Trade. Like Priti Patel she has sought to distance herself from positions often adopted by members of minority groups. In a Black History Month debate in the House of Commons in October 2020, she reiterated the Governments’ opposition to British Schools teaching White privilege and “elements of political race theory” as uncontested facts.

The example of Kemi Badenoch could be used to ask similar questions as for Priti Patel above and to discuss:

How could we avoid doing this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemi_Badenoch

https://www.kemibadenoch.org.uk/

Minutes of Black History Month Debate, House of Commons 10th October 2020 – Hansard

100 Great Black Britons also gives more examples of great British Black Women from all fields that could serve as examples for lessons:

Article By Alton Anderson a big thanks to Rob Taylor