Black British history
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 912 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To mark Black History Month in the UK we look back at some landmark moments in British Black History. We hear how the famous cricketer Learie Constantine broke the colour bar, and about the Notting Hill race riots and the Bristol bus boycott. Plus, we speak to Britain’s first black female MP Diane Abbott, and one of the thousands of mixed race children born of relationships between black GIs and British women during the Second World War. With Professor Hakim Adi.
Photo: Sir Learie Constantine outside Westminster Abbey in 1966. Credit: Douglas Miller/Keystone/Getty Images.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson |
| 0:04.8 | and this week we're bringing to life the past century of black history in Britain, |
| 0:09.7 | a history characterized by incidents of rejection. |
| 0:13.0 | When we arrived, they said, |
| 0:15.0 | we're very sorry, we don't take foreigners. |
| 0:17.5 | Gloria was at the counter, and she came back to me and said, |
| 0:21.4 | we are in the wrong place daddy they don't take colored people by |
| 0:25.9 | incidents of violence you would see a bunch of youngsters running through the |
| 0:30.7 | streets with petrol bottles and when they got to where they knew |
| 0:36.4 | black people were living they were chugged through the window and start a fire. |
| 0:40.6 | By moments of resistance. |
| 0:42.1 | Whilst we can obtain white labour in this city, |
| 0:46.0 | we intend to go on engaging white labour rather than coloured labour. |
| 0:51.0 | And by moments of triumph. |
| 0:54.0 | All through the campaign, people had told me that I couldn't win. |
| 0:58.0 | Remember, I wasn't just black and female, I was young and radical. |
| 1:02.0 | I had a head full of braids done to my waist. |
| 1:05.0 | All those stories are coming up in this podcast and with me to help put some of those into context is |
| 1:10.9 | Professor Hakim Adi from the University of Chichester. |
| 1:13.7 | Hakim Adi is the first person of African heritage to become Professor of History in the UK, |
| 1:18.6 | so eminently qualified. |
| 1:21.0 | And is there anything that we can call a shared black experience in Britain? |
... |
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