A good read tonight on the BBC online magazine about David Louis Clemetson, a Jamaican who served in WWI, refusing to lie about his ethnicity, and was treated at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland alongside war poet Wilfred Owen. He was promoted to Lieutenant, the only black man to achieve this rank in the British Army at this time.

By telling the ( Read more... )

I saw a mention of this lady on a video clip on tumblr tonight where she was described as the US's first Native American ballerina, and then I had to go looking for more information!

Maria Tallchief, who has died aged 88, was the quintessential American ballerina. As the dancer Jacques d'Amboise put it: "The English have their Fonteyn; the French ( Read more... )

I hadn't seen this online exhibition on The National Archives website before. It's worth a look. It's called 'Black Presence' and focuses on people of African descent who lived in Britain from the 15th century (they were here before that but this is the starting point for the exhibition).

Africans have been present in Europe from classical ( Read more... )

This is interesting. A link I spotted on tumblr earlier takes you to a page on the Museum of the City of New York website with photographs and other items connected to an African American neighbourhood, or "colored district" of the city, around the turn of the last century and named as 7th Avenue around 30th Street ( Read more... )

Back in 2012 I posted a rec for an article in BBC History Magazine about the forgotten black citizens of Tudor England. The article appears to have now been posted in full on the HistoryExtra website and is well worth a read if you didn't catch it the first time around.


( Read more... )

This was supposed to be posted last night but I had some sad news and it went out of my head completely.

So (belatedly) here is a link to a great post about the US National Portrait Gallery's exhibition on Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

In time for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the National Portrait Gallery‘s newest exhibition, “One ( Read more... )

Today I've been reading about a very interesting African-American woman I'd never come across before - Frances Harper.

Frances E.W. Harper is considered the “Mother of African American Journalism” as well as the most famous nineteenth century African American poet and novelist. In her role as a political activist, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was ( Read more... )

Tonight, an interesting figure from history I had never come across before! Did you know that Queen Victoria (Queen of England 1837-1901) had a West African god-daughter? Sarah Forbes Bonetta had been orphaned through inter-tribal warfare at the age of 8 and captured by native slave traders, before being 'rescued' by Captain Frederick E. Forbes of ( Read more... )

Tonight's entry comes courtesy of thismaz, so thank you very much ( Read more... )

A link tonight to a really interesting BBC article by the historian, Michael Wood.

Britain's first Black community in Elizabethan London.

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you'll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane - so typical of ( Read more... )