Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please cite or link the materials you are using.
This is an educational, non-commercial project. The images and documents have been provided courtesy of the named archives and organisations.
ABOUT
US
This project started as an exhibition in 2017 at the Old Low Light Heritage and Community Centre sponsored by the AHRC and British Academy’s Being Human Festival. Paths Across Waters aims to foreground the diverse and global history of the North East –and Britain more generally— that started long before the post-war period and the so-called Windrush generation.
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The website is copyright of Dr Vanessa Mongey. Dr. Mongey is a historian and the author of Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2020 Description, Table of Contents, and More) and an article "Celebrating African culture in the north-east of England" in Anti-racism in Britain. Traditions, histories and trajectories, c. present (Manchester University Press, 2024). You can learn more about Dr Mongey's research here.
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Links to additional information are included in each essay. Here is a short bibliography of works on Black British history:
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Adi, Hakim. West Africans in Britain: 1900-1960. Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998 and “African Political Thinkers, Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile, c. 1850-1970.” Immigrants & Minorities 30: 2-3 (2012): 263-291
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Armstrong, Craig. “Aliens in Wartime: A Case Study of Tyneside 1939-1975.” 25: 2 (2007): 119-140
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Bressey, Caroline. “Reporting oppression: mapping racial prejudice in Anti-Caste 1888-1895.” Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 401-411
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Collins, Marcus. “Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain” Journal of British Studies 40 (2001): 391-418
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Collins, Sidney. “Moslem and Negro Groupings on Tyneside/ A Comparative Study of Social Integration in Terms of Intra-Group and Inter-Group Relations.” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1952
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Creighton, Sean.“Black People and the North East.”North East History 39 (2008): 11-24
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Flint, John. ‘Scandal at the Bristol Hotel: Some Thoughts on Racial Discrimination in Britain and West Africa and its Relationship to the Planning of Decolonisation, 1939–47.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 12, no. 1 (1983): 74–93
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Frost, Diane. Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers Since the Nineteenth Century. Liverpool University Press, 1999
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Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1984
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Gopal, Priyamvada. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. London: Verso Books, 2019
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Killingray, David. “‘To do something for the race’ Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples.” in West Indian intellectuals in Britain. Manchester University Press, 2018
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Little, Kenneth. Negroes in Britain. London: Routledge, 2000
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Lorimer, Douglas A.”Legacies of slavery for race, religion, and empire. S.J. Celestine Edwards and the (1894)”Slavery and Abolition (2018)
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Mack, Sheree. “Black Voices and Absences in the Commemorations of Abolition in North East England.”Slavery and Abolition 30: 2 (2009): 247-257
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Matera, Marc. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. University of California Press, 2015
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Murray, Hannah-Rose.“’With almost electric speed’: mapping African American abolitionists in Britain and Ireland, 1838-1847.” Slavery and Abolition (2018)
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Olusoga, David. Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
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Perry, Kenetta Hammond. “Black Britain and the Politics of Race in the 20th Century.” History Compass 12: 8 (2014): 651-663
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Rose, Sonya O. “Race, Empire and British Wartime Nation& Identity, 1939-1945.” Historical Research 74: 184 (2001): 220-237
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Schwarz, Bill. West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. Manchester University Press, 2003
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Sherwood, Marika. Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain (1939-1945). London: Karia Press; 1985
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Stockwell, A.J. “Leaders, dissidents and the Disappointed: Colonial Students in Britain as empire ended.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36: 3 (2008): 487-507
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Tabili, Laura. “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925.” Journal of British Studies 33: 1 (1994): 54-98
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Whittall, Daniel. “Creating Black Places in Imperial London: The League of Coloured Peoples and Aggrey House, 1931-1943.” The London Journal 36:3 (2011): 225-246
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Walvin, James. The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro. London, Orbach and Chambers, 1971
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Ward, Brian. Martin Luther King in Newcastle: The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in the North East of England. Newcastle: Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2017
