The Illustrator Celebrating Britain's Unsung Black Trailblazers

Black History Month never used to mean much to me. It seemed like a lazy, people-pleasing initiative that served mostly as an excuse for white kids and teachers to further ostracise me by reminding me that my historical timeline was a separate thing to theirs.

Every year I would catch the articles about the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush, spoken about not as the beginning of the government’s initiative to fill labour market shortages with Commonwealth citizens, but as if this was the beginning of Black British history itself. As if Black folk hadn’t existed in this country before 1948. As if the real purpose was not to commemorate that significant moment in our national history, but to remind us that we – Black people in Britain – were a new concept. And for the most part, I quietly bought into it.

I often find my cynicism and my ignorance operate in tandem, so for Black History Month 2018 I decided to stop indulging in my criticisms and participate in it instead. The challenge was this: every day of that month I doodle a different Black figure who had contributed in some way to British history before the Empire Windrush docked, and post it on my Instagram. Just to see if I could. Just to see if finding 30 figures was possible.

By the end of that month, I’d had several articles written about the project and over 100 messages from people who were just as shocked as me that we had never come across so many of these names before.

I’m always surprised by how wide the limits of my own ignorance can stretch. There was an instance four years ago when I was tasked with creating a timeline of Black women writers to be displayed at a literary event, and I was floored. On one end there was Mary Seacole, who published an autobiography in the late 19th century; another mark in the 1930s for the poetry of Una Marson; and then a gaping blank space of nothingness right up until Beryl Gilroy in the 1970s.

I called every significantly grown person I knew and asked what, if any, books they remembered reading by Black British writers when they were my age – surely they must have existed. But nobody could give me an answer. When the event was over, I stuck the timeline up on my bedroom wall, looked it over every night before I went to sleep, and resolved to try my best to find a way to fill in the gaps.

Black British Figures is my way of trying to do that. This year, I decided to expand it so that it exists on its own Instagram page and has a rolling update of figures I find. They come from all over the Black diaspora and cover a wide range professions, from Joe Clough, London’s first Black bus driver, to Winifred Atwell, the first Black person to have a UK number one – and still, to this day, the only Black woman instrumentalist to do so.

I’m a hobbyist historian, and I know my capabilities lie less in the excavation of history and more in the collation of work that has already been done. I find most of the names initially in textbooks and on Wikipedia, and finding one figure is usually a jumping off point that leads to another. But it’s hard. A lot of these figures have underwritten Wikipedia pages, or else information about their lives is hidden behind the paywalls of academic institutions. It’s disconcerting how unattainable a lot of these sources are to everyday Black people. Why should our history be reserved for academics? Why is it something to be studied rather than remembered?

The more figures I came across, the more their histories exposed to me an obvious and demoralising reason for why they had not been adequately commemorated.

Scott and Whaley, for example, were an African-American comedic duo who found fame in England. They appeared on British television screens and even starred in their own feature length film, but the pair got their big break on a BBC radio show called Kentucky Minstrels, produced by a white man and dedicated to mocking Southern African-Americans with racist stereotypes and jokes about plantation life. It ran from 1933 to 1950 and was incredibly popular with British audiences.

If we are to remember Black stars such as this, and to place them in the proper contexts in which they existed, we also have to reckon directly with Britain’s entanglement with racist entertainment. And that’s a thing I feel this country doesn’t like to do.

My hope is that Black British Figures will work as a jumping off point for curious minds, an accessible point to learn about these undersung figures. Despite being a totally diverse bunch, with sometimes incomparably different lives, what gets me about every single one of these people is their story; whatever they ended up pursuing in life, they did it against the odds, the odds being a country that struggled to see their identities as a part of it. A country that still reinforces the idea that Black people don’t quite belong.

Black British Figures is a gentle, colourful reminder against that notion: we have always been here, I want it to say. And let us not forget.

@blackbritishfigures