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The history of African presence in London may extend back to the Roman period.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2008) |
| Part of a series on |
| Ethnic groups in London |
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The history of African presence in London may extend back to the Roman period.
Using bioarchaeology, DNA analysis and the examination of grave goods in Roman London have identified one woman from the southern Mediterranean who may have had African ancestry who had travelled to London during the Roman period. [1] [2]
The population density of Africans in 16th-century London is poorly understood. Due to the proliferation of documentation in the Tudor and Stuart periods, we know that Africans were present in most of the noble courts of this century. [3]
An African trumpeter, John Blanke served King Henry VII and King Henry VIII. Blanke is depicted on Westminster tournament roll in 1511, is said to have arrived in England with Catherine of Aragon in 1501, although a document from June 1488, lists a person named John Blank, a footman already in service of Henry VII. Documentation from the court of Queen Elizabeth I concerning the Baskerville campaign of 1595–96, documents a substantial number of Spanish and African prisoners of war captured in an assault by Sir Francis Drake on a Spanish pearl-fishing settlement in Rio de la Hacha in the Spanish West Indies during the Anglo-Spanish War. Later, she traded those prisoners for the return of English prisoners held in Spain and Portugal. [4] [5] [6] Elizabeth also employed an African court dancer named Lucy Negro who later became an infamous madam who ran a licentious house (brothel) in Clerkenwell, north London [7] and is considered one of the candidates to have been the inspiration for the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Aside from presence within the courts, parish documentation also establishes that African people were embedded in all echelons of London society, Reasonable Blackman a silk weaver who likely emigrated from the Netherlands, lived in Southwark around 1579–1592. Mary Fillis, a daughter of a basket weaver from Morocco, came to London around 1583–84 and ended up a seamstress from East Smithfield. Prince Dederi Jaquoah, the son of King Caddi-biah who ruled of a kingdom in modern Liberia was baptised in London on New Year's Day 1611 and lived as a merchant. [8]
By the middle of the eighteenth century, African people comprised somewhere between one and three percent of the London populace. [9] British merchants became involved with the transatlantic slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Many of those involved in British colonial activities, such as ship's captains, colonial officials, merchants, slave traders and plantation owners brought enslaved Africans as servants back to Britain with them. This marked the growing black presence in the northern, eastern and southern areas of London. There were also small numbers of freed slaves and seamen from West Africa and South Asia. Many of these emigrants were forced into beggary due to the lack of jobs and their low social status. [10] [11]
In 1610, Prince Dederi Jaquoah was brought, aged 20, to the City of London from West Africa by an English merchant, and records state that he was "sent out of his cuntrye by his father ... to be baptised" and that he stayed in London for two years. [12] In 1684, Katharine Auker was brought to England from Barbados by her enslaver, plantation owner Robert Rich. After Auker was baptised in 1688 at St Katharine by the Tower, she was made destitute by her enslaver. In 1690 she succeeded in a court petition to be discharged from his enslavement. [13] An official record of this is held in The National Archives. [14] In 1737, black Briton George Scipio was accused of stealing Anne Godfrey's washing, with the case resting entirely on whether or not Scipio was the only black man in Hackney at the time. [15]
Around the 1750s, London became the home of many African people, Jews, Irish people, Germans, and Huguenots. [16] [17] In 1764 The Gentleman's Magazine reported that there was "supposed to be near 20,000 Negroe servants." Evidence of the number of black residents in London has been found through registered burials. Leading African abolitionists of the period included Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. With the support of other Britons, these activists demanded that the slave trade and slavery be abolished. Supporters involved in this movement included workers and other emigrant nationals of the urban poor. At this time, slavery in Britain itself had no support from common law, but its definitive legal status was not clearly defined until the 19th century. Free African people could not be enslaved, but black people who were brought as enslaved people to Britain were considered the property of their enslavers. During this era Lord Mansfield declared that a slave who fled from his master could not be taken by force or sold abroad, in the case of Somerset v Stewart. This verdict fuelled the numbers of African people that escaped slavery, and helped send slavery into decline.
In this same period many enslaved soldiers who fought on the side of the British in the American Revolutionary War arrived in London. Many of them became poverty-stricken and were reduced to begging on the streets. The black people in London lived among the whites in areas of Mile End, Stepney, Paddington, Isleworth and St Giles. The majority of these people worked as domestic servants to wealthy whites. Many became labeled as the "Black Poor" defined as former low-wage soldiers, seafarers and former plantation workers. [18] During the late 18th century there were many publications and memoirs written about the "black poor". One example is the writings of Equiano, who became an unofficial spokesman for Britain's Black community. A memoir about his life is entitled, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano . Equiano became a landowner in Cambridgeshire and married Susannah Cullen, from Soham. Both his daughters were born and baptised there.[ citation needed ] In 1787, 441 Black people emigrated from London for resettlement to the colony of Sierra Leone with help from the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. [19] Today the descendants of the Black Poor form part of the Sierra Leone Creole people. [20] [21]
Coming into the early 19th century, more groups of black soldiers and seaman were discharged after the Napoleonic Wars and some settled in London. These emigrants suffered and faced many challenges as did many black people in London. The slave trade was abolished completely in the British Empire by 1833. The number of black people in London was steadily declining with these new laws. Fewer black people were brought into London from the West Indies and parts of Africa. [18] During the mid-19th century there were restrictions on foreign immigration. In the later part of the 19th century there was a buildup of small groups of black dockside communities in towns such as Canning Town, [22] Liverpool, and Cardiff. This was a direct effect of new shipping links that were established with the Caribbean and West Africa.
Despite facing social prejudice, some 19th-century black people living in England achieved exceptional success. Pablo Fanque, born poor as William Darby in Norwich, rose to become the proprietor of one of Britain's most successful circuses during the Victorian era. He is immortalised in the lyrics of The Beatles song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" Another famous black Briton was William Davison, a conspirator executed for his role in the Cato Street Conspiracy against Lord Liverpool's government in 1820. Wales's first black high sheriff was Nathaniel Wells, the son of a slave from St Kitts and a Welsh slave trader. After his father's death he was freed and inherited a fortune. He moved to Monmouthshire's Piercefield House and became Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1818. One of the leaders in 19th-century chartism was William Cuffay, who was born on a merchant ship in the West Indies in 1788, and whose father, had been a slave in St Kitts. [23]
In 1909, the Sierra Leonese barrister and writer, Augustus Merriman-Labor published a travelogue where he wrote, "Negroes in London do not much exceed one hundred." [24]
One black Londoner, Learie Constantine, a cricketer from Trinidad and welfare officer in the RAF, was refused service at the Imperial Hotel in London in July 1943. He stood up for his rights and later was awarded compensation. That particular example is used by some to illustrate the slow change towards acceptance and equality of all citizens in London. [25]
In 1950, it was estimated there were no more than 20,000 non-White residents in the United Kingdom, mainly in England; almost all born overseas. [26] Just after the end of World War II, the first groups of post-war Caribbean immigrants started to arrive and settle in London. There were an estimated 492 that were passengers on the HMT Empire Windrush that arrived at Tilbury Docks on 22 June 1948. These passengers settled in the area of Brixton which is now a prominently Black district in the UK. From the 1950s-60s, there was a mass migration of workers from all over the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly Jamaica; who settled in the UK. These immigrants were invited to fill labour requirements in London's hospitals, transport and railway development. There was a continuous influx of African students, sportsmen, and businessmen mixed within British society. [27] They are viewed as not having been a major contributing factor to the rebuilding of the post-war urban London economy.
In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed in by the government, along with a succession of other laws in 1968, 1971, and 1981 that severely restricted the entry of Black Caribbean immigrants into the United Kingdom. In 1975, a new voice emerged for the Black population of London; his name was David Pitt and he brought a new voice to the House of Lords. He spoke against racism and for equality in regards to all residents of Britain. At the 1987 general election, the first-ever Black British MPs were elected to the House of Commons; Diane Abbott for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Bernie Grant for Tottenham and Paul Boateng for Brent South. All were elected for seats in London and all were candidates for from the Labour Party. Out of these three people; Abbott was the first Black British woman to be elected to the House of Commons, and the only one out of these three candidates to remain a continuous sitting MP to the present day.
By the end of the 20th century, the number of Black Londoners numbered half a million, according to the 1991 UK census. An increasing number of these Black Londoners were London-born, or British-born. Even with this growing population and the first black members elected to the UK Parliament, many argue that there was still discrimination and a socio-economic imbalance in London amongst the Black community. In 1992, the number of Black members in Parliament doubled from three to six and in 1997, this was tripled from a decade previously to nine. There are still many problems that Black Londoners face; the new global and high-tech information revolution is changing the urban economy and some argue that it is driving unemployment rates among Blacks, higher relative to non-Blacks,[ citation needed ] something which, it is argued, threatens to erode the progress made thus far. [18]
As of June 2007, the Black population of London was 802,300, equivalent to 10.6% of the population of London; 4.3% of Londoners are Caribbean, 5.5% of Londoners are African and a further 0.8% are from other black backgrounds including American and Latin American. There are also 117,400 people who are mixed black and white. [28] At the 2011 UK census, the total Black population of London stood at 1,088,640 or 13.3% of the population. [29]
Olaudah Equiano, known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa, was a writer and abolitionist. According to his memoir, he was from the village of Essaka in modern southern Nigeria. Enslaved as a child in West Africa, he was shipped to the Caribbean and sold to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more before purchasing his freedom in 1766.
Ottobah Cugoano, also known as John Stuart, was a British abolitionist and activist who was born in West Africa. Born into a Fante family in Ajumako, he was sold into slavery at the age of thirteen and shipped to Grenada in the West Indies. In 1772, he was purchased by a merchant who took him to England, where Cugoano learned to read and write, and was emancipated. Eventually, he started working for the artists Richard and Maria Cosway, becoming acquainted with several promiment British political and cultural figures as a result. He joined the Sons of Africa, a group of Black abolitionists in Britain, and died at some point after 1791.
Black Loyalists were people of African descent who sided with Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War. In particular, the term referred to men enslaved by Patriots who served on the Loyalist side because of the Crown's guarantee of freedom.
Black British people are a multi-ethnic group of British people of Sub-Saharan African or Afro-Caribbean descent. The term Black British developed in the 1950s, referring to the Black British West Indian people from the former Caribbean British colonies in the West Indies, sometimes referred to as the Windrush Generation, and Black British people descending from Africa.
The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, also known as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and sometimes referred to as the Abolition Society or Anti-Slavery Society, was a British abolitionist group formed on 22 May 1787. The objective of abolishing the slave trade was achieved in 1807. The abolition of slavery in all British colonies followed in 1833.
The back-to-Africa movement was a political movement in the 19th and 20th centuries advocating for a return of the descendants of African American slaves to the African continent. The movement originated from a widespread belief among some European Americans in the 18th and 19th century United States that African Americans would want to return to the continent of Africa. In general, the political movement was an overwhelming failure; very few former slaves wanted to move to Africa. The small number of freed slaves who did settle in Africa—some under duress—initially faced brutal conditions, due to diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance. As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s, it spawned and energized the radical abolitionist movement. In the 20th century, the Jamaican political activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, members of the Rastafari movement, and other African Americans supported the concept, but few actually left the United States.
Black Nova Scotians are Black Canadians whose ancestors primarily date back to the Colonial United States as slaves or freemen, later arriving in Nova Scotia, Canada, during the 18th and early 19th centuries. As of the 2021 Census of Canada, 28,220 Black people live in Nova Scotia, most in Halifax. Since the 1950s, numerous Black Nova Scotians have migrated to Toronto for its larger range of opportunities. The first recorded free African person in Nova Scotia, Mathieu da Costa, a Mikmaq interpreter, was recorded among the founders of Port Royal in 1604. West Africans escaped slavery by coming to Nova Scotia in early British and French Colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many came as enslaved people, primarily from the French West Indies to Nova Scotia during the founding of Louisbourg. The second major migration of people to Nova Scotia happened following the American Revolution, when the British evacuated thousands of slaves who had fled to their lines during the war. They were given freedom by the Crown if they joined British lines, and some 3,000 African Americans were resettled in Nova Scotia after the war, where they were known as Black Loyalists. There was also the forced migration of the Jamaican Maroons in 1796, although the British supported the desire of a third of the Loyalists and nearly all of the Maroons to establish Freetown in Sierra Leone four years later, where they formed the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic identity.
The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was a charitable organisation founded in London in 1786 to provide sustenance for distressed people of African and Asian origin. It played a crucial role in the proposal to form a colony for blacks in Sierra Leone. The work of the Committee overlapped to some extent with the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.
The Book of Negroes is a document created by Brigadier General Samuel Birch, under the direction of Sir Guy Carleton, that records names and descriptions of 3,000 Black Loyalists, enslaved Africans who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolution and were evacuated to points in Nova Scotia as free people of colour.
The Nova Scotian Settlers, or Sierra Leone Settlers, were Black Canadians of African-American descent who founded the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone and the Colony of Sierra Leone, on March 11, 1792. The majority of these black American immigrants were among 3,000 African Americans, mostly former slaves, who had sought freedom and refuge with the British during the American Revolutionary War, leaving rebel masters. They became known as the Black Loyalists. The Nova Scotian Settlers were jointly led by African American Thomas Peters, a former soldier, and English abolitionist John Clarkson. For most of the 19th century, the Settlers resided in Settler Town and remained a distinct ethnic group within the Freetown territory, tending to marry among themselves and with Europeans in the colony.
Sierra Leoneans in the United Kingdom are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom who are of Sierra Leonean descent. In 2001, there were 17,048 Sierra Leonean-born residents of the UK.
The Igbo of Igboland became one of the principal ethnic groups to be enslaved during the Atlantic slave trade. An estimated 14.6% of all enslaved people were taken from the Bight of Biafra, a bay of the Atlantic Ocean that extends from the Nun outlet of the Niger River (Nigeria) to Limbe (Cameroon) to Cape Lopez (Gabon) between 1650 and 1900. The Bight’s major slave trading ports were located in Bonny and Calabar.
The history of African-American settlement in Africa extends to the beginnings of ex-slave repatriation to Africa from European colonies in the Americas.
Sierra Leonean Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of full or partial Sierra Leonean ancestry. This includes Sierra Leone Creoles whose ancestors were African American Black Loyalists freed after fighting on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Some African Americans trace their roots to indigenous enslaved Sierra Leoneans exported to the United States between the 18th and early 19th century. In particular, the Gullah people of partial Sierra Leonean ancestry, fled their owners and settled in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, where they still retain their cultural heritage. The first wave of Sierra Leoneans to the United States, after the slavery period, was after the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the American Community Survey, there are 34,161 Sierra Leonean immigrants living in the United States.
Igbo people in Jamaica were trafficked by Europeans onto the island between the 18th and 19th centuries as enslaved labour on plantations. Igbo people constituted a large portion of the African population enslaved people in Jamaica. Jamaica received the largest number of enslaved people from the biafra region than anywhere else in the diaspora during the slave trade. Some slave censuses detailed the large number of enslaved Igbo people on various plantations throughout the island on different dates throughout the 18th century. Their presence was a large part in forming Jamaican culture, Igbo cultural influence remains in language, dance, music, folklore, cuisine, religion and mannerisms. In Jamaica the Igbo were often referred to as Eboe or Ibo. There are a substantial number of Igbo language loanwords in Jamaican Patois. Igbo people mostly populated the northwestern section of the island.
Henry Smeathman (1742–1786) was an English naturalist, best known for his work in entomology and colonial settlement in Sierra Leone.
For a history of Afro-Caribbean people in the UK, see British African Caribbean community.
Black Barbadians or Afro-Barbadians are Barbadians of entirely or predominantly African descent.
The Sierra Leone Creole people are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.
The African-American diaspora refers to communities of people of African descent who previously lived in the United States. These people were mainly descended from formerly enslaved African persons in the United States or its preceding European colonies in North America that had been brought to America via the Atlantic slave trade and had suffered in slavery until the American Civil War. The African-American diaspora was primarily caused by the intense racism and views of being inferior to white people that African Americans have suffered through driving them to find new homes free from discrimination and racism. This would become common throughout the history of the African-American presence in the United States and continues to this day.
