The Mapping Black London project is built from two large databases, together containing 1013 rows of data (as of 28 April) – a number only set to increase over the coming months. Given the vast amount of data that we are working with, one of the challenges presented to the Mapping Black London team has […]
Creating a Visual Historiography
Secondary literature has played an important role in shaping the Mapping Black London project. As of the 20 April 2020, eighty different secondary sources, be they monographs, edited volumes or academic articles have been consulted for the project and 70% of points found on the Map of Black London in World War II come from […]
Ladipo Solanke
No figure embodies the excitement and tensions inherent in the black student politics of 1930s London quite like Ladipo Solanke, founder and long term secretary-general of the West African Students Union Association, (WASU). In a career of activism spanning three decades, Solanke rubbed shoulders with countless celebrities and politicians, both black and white, and helped […]
The Florence Mills Social Parlour
Amy Ashwood Garvey’s life would be remarkable by the standards of the twenty-first century let alone the first half of the twentieth. Born in Jamaica in the late 1800s, married to the most famous pan-African leader in the world in Harlem, and an active anti-colonial protestor as well as an entrepreneur in her own right, […]
African-American Red Cross Social Clubs
‘A permanent jukebox, a weekly orchestra, drinks on the very soft side, and charming red cross hostesses who savvy how to keep the boys clear of the doldrums’. Such was the description provided of the Duchess Street branch of the American Red Cross service clubs by David H. Orro, war correspondent for the Chicago Defender. […]
Aggrey House
Accused of being a ‘little Jim-Crow hostel’ by the Trinidadian writer George Padmore, Aggrey House was an institution founded by the British government to offer temporary accommodation to black students in London. Throughout the nine years of its existence from 1934 to 1943, the House was torn between its twin founding missions to both support black […]
A note on periodization
When did the Second World War start? On the surface this question is too easy even for a pub quiz. In the UK, most are familiar with Neville Chamberlain’s radio address on 3rd September 1939 dolefully telling the nation that the Nazi invasion of Poland had forced the British government to stand by its promise […]
An introduction to sources and method
As this introduction to the project explained, certain black people’s many and varied activities in the wartime city have been documented before. In this post, we’ll look at what we know so far and how using a GIS map helps join the dots in new ways, while introducing some of the new primary evidence on […]
A short introduction to Mapping Black London in WWII
The Second World War is hardly under-studied, to put it mildly. But there’s still a tendency to marginalize black people – as diverse a collection of individuals and communities as could be imagined – or skip them over altogether. This post delves into the reasons why the Mapping Black London in World War II project […]