The impact of the Slave Trade on Britain was not confined to the material. Our presence in eighteenth-century England was an accepted reality. Black women and men were sold openly at auctions; the busts of ‘blackamoors’, emblems of the trade, commonly adorned local townhalls. Black servants were common too, and our children were the inevitable appendages of slave captains and high-society women. Freed and runaway slaves were conspicuous among London’s beggars and were known as ‘St Giles Blackbirds’. Though in constant fear of recapture, we lived side by side with the white working class, intermarrying with them and taking part in life of the community. Indeed, many Black communities today, such as those in Bristol, Liverpool and Cardiff, were established long before the post-war immigration of recent years. And even when isolated and dispersed. we still made our mark on Britain. Black people were speaking out against racism and participating in British life as writers, musicians, actors, soldiers, nurses and in any other profession which was not barred to us, over two hundred years ago. Mary Seacole, the Black Crimean nurse, and William Cuffay the Chartist, made as great a contribution to Britain’s history as Florence Nightingale and Feargus O’Connor. This country’s past is littered with the names and deeds of Black women and Black men, frequently anonymous and unsung, who have helped to shape it into what it is today. By no stretch of the imagination can we be described as new arrivals.
