Black people have inhabited the British Isles for centuries. Eminent professor Paul Gilroy,
educational & interesting reading
Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. Stretching back to the Roman conquest, encompassing the court of Henry VIII, and following a host of characters from Mary Seacole to the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, Peter Fryer paints a picture of two thousand years of Black presence in Britain.
From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers - race and class have shaped Akala's life and outlook.
Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony, and contemporary interviews, this history reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, and Shakespeare's Othello. It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain's global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the 19th century was built on American slavery.