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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue"
Kavita Puri on explorations of the migrant experience
If you gaze up at the skyline in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, you might spot a new addition. Made from stainless-steel panels and shaped like a rollercoaster, the Tornado sits on top of the city’s newly opened Fenix, a museum that tells the story of human migration. Visitors climb to the distinctive Tornado up a sweeping staircase at the museum’s entrance, along a meandering route that represents the many different journeys people take to reach their destinations. On arriving at the viewing platform, you can take in a panoramic view of the city and its waterways where millions of Europeans once boarded ships in Europe’s largest port, many of them leaving for a new life in the US. Today, Rotterdam is home to more than 170 nationalities. It’s an interesting choice to open a museum to migration at a time when the subject has become so toxic, not least in the Netherlands. Designed by the Chinese firm MAD Architects, the museum displays have exhibits including thousands of suitcases, images of refugees, and a life-sized city bus. Perhaps reasoned discussions about migration can be inspired by art. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history This is not the first European museum dedicated to migration: they exist in many countries, including Germany, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Poland and France. So it is surprising that the UK does not have a permanent migration museum, only one that has spent years in makeshift venues. After all, millions of people have left Britain over the centuries, not least during the building of its empire, while inward migration – particularly during the postwar years – has shaped our language, culture, cuisine and art. Until recently, you could visit the Migration Museum in its temporary home in Lewisham Shopping Centre, housed in a former H&M store between Foot Locker and TK Maxx. Outside the entrance stood a sculpture entitled Wall, comprising two panels from the Berlin Wall painted by artists. During its five years in Lewisham, the museum displayed significant exhibitions including Taking Care of Business: Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Making of Modern Britain. In listening booths (repurposed H&M changing rooms), visitors could hear oral histories recounted by local businesspeople, including one Italian who ran a delicatessen and described how different Lewisham was from Puglia. More well-known voices including Lord Bilimoria who, frustrated by the lagers on offer at Indian restaurants, created his own hugely successful beer, Cobra. There was also an impressive installation replicating a Chinese takeaway. Read more | How has migration changed the world? Lewisham has a hugely diverse population, and in 1977 saw members of the far-right National Front clash with anti-racist protesters on its streets. It’s fitting, then, that the Migration Museum was embedded in the heart of that community – a place where anyone could feel comfortable, especially those who may never have crossed the threshold of a museum before. It has now closed, though, and the mall is being redeveloped. A permanent Migration Museum is planned for a new site in the City of London, which has been donated by a British Sikh entrepreneur. It’s due to open in 2028. The new space will span three floors, covering nearly 3,000 square metres. Members of the curatorial team are currently discussing how they might approach the project, including how they can co-curate with local communities. Subjects for temporary exhibitions might include local migrant stories from around the City, climate refugees, the role of humour in the migrant experience, and how protest has driven change. The story of migration in these islands is a long one, written by those who left and those who came. Britain today has been shaped by movements of people in both directions. A museum that tells this long and rich history – a shared story, one of interconnectedness – is long overdue. It does not need to be divisive, but can be a reflection and recognition of who we are today. This column was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"There's little understanding of the shared history of Britain and the subcontinent" | South Asian Heritage Month
As Britain celebrates South Asian Heritage Month, Shalina Patel, Sumita Mukherjee and Shrabani Basu talk to Matt Elton about how histories of the subcontinent can be better shared and explored
Matt Elton: What do you see as the value of South Asian Heritage Month? And do you think this kind of specific history month is generally a good thing? Shalina Patel: Black History Month was first marked in the UK in 1987, at a time when there was a huge absence of understanding about black history. Fast forward 30-plus years, and there are groups now advocating for black history 365 days a year. They feel that it shouldn’t be relegated to a specific month, but should be integrated [into conversations] all year. So if we think about the journey, I’d say that South Asian Heritage Month [SAHM, first held in 2020] is really important as a starting point, because there is currently an absence of understanding of the diversity within South Asian culture, communities and history. True, there’s a risk that this is the only time of year when people will talk about this topic, but we’re starting from a place where so few conversations are taking place on a public scale. So marking SAHM is really important now – and I hope that we will get to a point where we won’t need it anymore, because [South Asian stories] will be really integrated into people’s understanding. Sumita Mukherjee: I agree that it’s really important to increase the diversity of history that is being told. SAHM gives us the opportunity to have this conversation – it encourages the media and other forums to showcase stories and histories around South Asia. I would say that there’s an issue, though, with the timing as it stands, because most schools and universities are closed in late July and August, and lots of people are on holiday. Shrabani Basu: I think the important thing is to make it inclusive – it shouldn’t just be South Asians eating curries and watching dances. The point is to make it a national festival that everybody looks forward to. It’s the holiday season, so go for that – make it something that excites people. The danger with all these things is that they lose momentum. To keep it fresh and popular we need to raise the bar, make it exciting, make people want to see what’s on the agenda, and take it forward that way. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/shutterstockeditorial12129324a-1e62406.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A family gather together. They are dressed in white robes and the woman is balancing a jug on her head. She is carrying a child. A man next to her is carrying a child on his shoulders" title="A family undertakes a lengthy migration following the partition of India in 1947. Millions of Muslims left India for Pakistan, with Hindus and Sikhs trekking in the opposite direction; perhaps 1 million died (Image by Shutterstock)" /> So it has a value as a springboard for these kinds of conversations, but also as a way of connecting South Asian history to wider society? SB: Absolutely. Far too little is known about South Asian history – which is the history of undivided India to some extent, and our cultures from all these countries that make up the region. Even many South Asians don’t know much about it. SP: I agree. SAHM is also a really important opportunity to unlock those conversations within the community itself. I think that we as a community are not necessarily great at talking about our history, partly because of things that happened within the memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents. SAHM is about having those internal family conversations as well as having conversations on a public scale. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" SM: This idea of inclusion and celebration is a great thing, but sometimes – and we see this with Black History Month – there’s a focus on celebrating certain figures and palatable histories without looking at the dark side of history. There’s a tendency to celebrate South Asians and not criticise their roles in history. Also, a lot of the focus is on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – places that were part of the British empire. But South Asia is a much broader region than just those places, and that inclusiveness has not yet come through in the events and celebratory elements I’ve seen so far. SB: Absolutely. Very few people in north India know anything about Sri Lanka, for example. The whole region is so vast and so varied that we ourselves don’t know everything about it. As Sumita said, we have a very dark history, too: partition, riots, wars within the region – there are a lot of dark, dark patches for which our own countries are to blame, not just outside forces. SP: This month provides a really good opportunity to celebrate that diversity and to push the idea that the South Asian community is not some kind of monolith. Sometimes I put myself in a category – as ‘British South Asian’ – but what does that mean? There are so many different types of people and different experiences within that. We need to engage with all of those differences, even within the communities. SAHM is still relatively new, so I hope we will see more and more of that kind of diversity and those different types of stories coming through. How can this process work better, to foster research across communities – particularly on migration and movement, a major theme of this year’s SAHM? SP: I’ve been a teacher for 15 years now, and I’ve been very lucky to work in a secondary school in north-west London that is very diverse. My school is so positive about making sure that we share histories that are relevant to our students, so there is a huge amount of South Asian history explored. But that’s been a real journey. Ten years ago, it was just me and my department researching these things on our own, because there weren’t the resources out there. Now I’m really proud to say that I’ve helped write material about a lot of these issues. Just a couple of months ago, a textbook called Asian Empires in the Silk Roads was published [by Oxford University Press], for which I wrote the chapter on Mughal India. I’ve also helped write a textbook about the British empire. So things are definitely changing, and many more resources are available. The problem is that it’s up to individual schools whether they teach the British empire at all, and whether India is part of that story. It’s so important that we don’t teach only the British Raj as South Asian history. Students also love learning about the Mughals, because they are fascinating and dramatic – much more interesting than the Tudors. But I also teach my students about South Asian migration, as well as stories of more modern South Asian people – [Second World War spy] Noor Inayat Khan, for example, and [Sikh princess, suffragette and Queen Victoria’s god-daughter] Sophia Duleep Singh. The big problem is that there’s still little understanding of how much shared history there is between Britain and the subcontinent. If kids are learning about the First and Second World Wars but not hearing about the contributions of Indian soldiers, then that is not telling the full story. Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism” SB: I feel that there is still little knowledge about that topic. During the recent VE Day celebrations, there was only a little mention of how many Indian soldiers played a part. I do understand that time is very limited in a commentary but a few more lines, a little more emphasis, would’ve been great. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1278032407-1db2f2d.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A group of British Indian soldiers stand and sit around a single chair with a draughts board on it. Two men are playing draughts" title="British Indian Army troops play draughts following evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. The role of the 2.5 million Indian troops who served in the Second World War is sometimes overlooked (Image by Getty Images)" /> At the front of the procession were the FANYs [First Aid Nursing Yeomanry] – women who also served as secret agents in the Second World War. I would’ve loved to hear that these secret agents came from all parts of the world: Noor Inayat Khan was half Indian, and Krystyna Skarbek was from Poland. The war was fought on the shoulders of the people of the empire, and I think that point should have been raised. More than 2.5 million Indian troops served in the Second World War – the biggest volunteer army in the conflict – and they didn’t merit a single mention at the VE Day concert. So this narrative is still not there – and it needs to be told, to be taught in schools. That is the only way forward. SM: British history itself is South Asian history. It’s not just about the history of the empire, because South Asians have been in Britain since the 17th century. Migration is not just a contemporary phenomenon: in the 19th century, South Asians of all ilks were influencing culture in Britain and working in its port cities. South Asians also went to Mauritius, to Malaysia, to Uganda, to South Africa, to Guyana, to Jamaica, and to other places – the South Asian diaspora has such a vibrant, interesting history. When discussing migration, I’d return to the problem of centrism around India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – there’s so much to say about other parts of the region such as Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal. SP: When I teach the transatlantic slave trade, I also speak about indentured labour. Because the root cause of more than a million Indians going to places such as Mauritius was the abolition of slavery. So the histories of the Caribbean, South Asia and Britain all intersect. SM: And of course the history of Windrush, which is relatively well known and taught in schools, is also about Indo-Caribbean people who came over with that generation. Do tensions, such those that arose between India and Pakistan in May, make researching the region’s histories harder? SB: Oh, absolutely. Because the first thing when you have a situation of conflict is that visas get cancelled. So researchers can’t go, academics can’t travel. India cancelled visas for people of Pakistani origin, and the same probably happened for British Indians wanting to travel to Pakistan. So British Asians of Indian or Pakistani origin who want to study [on the subcontinent] will find it difficult to access archives or do any sort of research. That’s the first practical block. Then it spreads to filmmaking and cultural life as well. The minute you have conflict, these barriers go up – filmmakers can’t travel, musicians can’t travel. It doesn’t help anybody. SM: It’s been very difficult over the past few years anyway, with geopolitical tensions in the region, for people with Indian passports to research in Pakistan and vice versa. So the current conflict has only escalated things. It’s important to note that, though these recent conflicts are rooted in present-day issues, they also have longstanding historical reasons. So there’s an opportunity to reiterate and understand the history behind these troubles, especially in Kashmir. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2215785244-c282475.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="An Indian soldier is in the centre of the image, wearing a black mask and green helmet. Behind him, there is a crowd and two Indian flags" title="An Indian soldier stands on alert in Srinagar, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, following the terrorist attack that killed 26 people in Pahalgam in April 2025 (Image by Getty Images)" /> SB: I don’t think people know the real story of what happened in Kashmir – how this line of control was drawn, how the Hindu maharaja went over to India, how the invasion happened, why this conflict started. SM: It’s also coupled with geographical literacy – understanding the geography of the region, Kashmir’s location, the environmental reasons, the water lines and so on. SP: There’s a real absence of understanding of the partition story, of how these borders were drawn. Again, this is a shared history with Britain – the story of partition is a British story as well as a South Asian story. It was framed as a peaceful takeover, which we all know was absolutely not the case. This history shouldn’t be contentious, but it is, because Britain portrayed partition as a peaceful handover, which undermined the reality of the violence and bloodshed that engulfed these new nations in 1947. There’s also been an absence of personal stories about this history because of the horrific things that happened at that time. The personal, the political, the geographical – so many factors involved, which is why this is such a misunderstood history. SB: When the conflict broke out in May, there were ugly scenes outside the Indian High Commission and the Pakistan High Commission. It’s something we absolutely do not need. The South Asian community here should be united rather than divided, when it becomes a law and order problem. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war What areas of historical research would you highlight as important today? SM: I’m working on the history of South Asian children and their migration to Britain. This is part of a growing field looking at children in history not just as distant people in the background but as historical actors themselves. I’m exploring the role that young people played, changing society, changing politics. Colleagues are also working on the informal labour of women in housework and homeworking – sewing, childminding, the things that women often do at home that isn’t recorded within formal economic histories – to understand the contribution that South Asian women have made to the economy in Britain, especially women of Pakistani origin in northern England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2155867340-6eda065.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A row of South Asian women sit at tables in a factory, using sewing machines. Some of them are looking at their work, while others are looking at the camera" title="Women of South Asian heritage work at a clothing factory in Newcastle, 1968. The contribution of South Asian women to the British economy, particularly those involved in homeworking such as sewing, is now being researched for the first time, reveals Sumita Mukherjee (Image by Getty Images)" /> SB: I would love to see oral histories from earlier generations being recorded. Not enough of this has been done. There was a little documentary recording people who migrated to Britain in the sixties. It was so interesting seeing their lifestyles, how they were so formally dressed at all times; compare it with today, when everyone is so casual, even the new immigrants. These stories tell us so much about how these people came here. I feel more and more that, as we lose that generation, we need to save their stories. I wish they would be recorded on film and audio as much as possible. SP: Oral histories, real personal stories, are so important. I always encourage young people and others to record their family histories – to talk to their grandparents, if they still have them, to record those migration stories. I did that with my granddad: there are so many things I didn’t know about his migration story. A friend of mine, jeweller Anisha Parmar, invites South Asian women to come together and use family jewellery as a way to explore their heritage and their history. It’s been incredible to see young South Asian people delve into their identity and heritage through the medium of gold jewellery in particular. When we think about South Asian items in museums, often we are thinking about beautiful, ornate pieces of jewellery worn by maharajas and royalty. But she’s made more personal connections. We’ve all got such items – I’m wearing my grandma’s bangles right now. SB: The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ordered a report looking at the names of soldiers from India and Africa who, despite a pledge that every soldier who died in the world wars would be commemorated with a headstone, were not recorded in that way. To address that, fantastic work has been done by Greenwich University and the UK Punjab Heritage Association to find the names of soldiers from the Punjab in the First World War, as well as details of regiments, when they joined, if they died. I find that quite exciting: a way of making right something that was wrong – to commemorate some 50,000 Indians whose names were lost. Shalina Patel is a historian, teacher and author. Her first book is The History Lessons (Icon, 2024) Sumita Mukherjee is professor of modern history at the University of Bristol. Her books include Indian Suffragettes (Oxford University Press India, 2018) Shrabani Basu is a historian, journalist and author. Her latest book is The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer (Bloomsbury, 2021) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation
The year before the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, another black American woman started a legal fight against segregation on public transport. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies highlight her role in the civil rights battle
On 2 November 2005, thousands of mourners crowded into the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit to attend the funeral of black American civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Former US president Bill Clinton led the tributes before a congregation that held hands and sang the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’. The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama is familiar yet sometimes misunderstood. Her arrest for refusing to surrender a bus seat in December 1955 followed not the spontaneous action of an apolitical seamstress but a calculated decision by a lifelong activist who, along with other members of the black community, had put increasing pressure on white city leaders to end the daily indignities of segregated bus journeys. Her detention may have been the catalyst for the desegregation of public transport in the South, but other black women before her had also braved similar hurt, humiliation and intimidation. Among them was a woman called Sarah Mae Flemming. In June 1954, Flemming was involved in an incident that is far less celebrated than the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet it was an incident that truly laid the foundation for the eventual overturning of Jim Crow laws as applied to public transport. Flemming was a child of the Great Depression, one of seven children raised by a farming couple whose own parents had been enslaved. Born on 28 June 1933, she grew up alongside her siblings in a busy household near Eastover, South Carolina, a small community some 20 miles south-east of the state capital, Columbia. After graduating from high school, Flemming worked briefly for a relative in Ohio before returning to South Carolina to help support her family, taking a position as a maid for white residents in one of Columbia’s affluent suburbs. Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement The day that changed her life, 22 June 1954, started much as any other: she boarded a bus to work. At first there was standing room only, until a seat was vacated by a departing white passenger. When Flemming took the seat, however, the driver shouted at her to move. According to contentious evidence he gave later in court, she had breached the ‘colour line’ – the long-standing system of racial segregation enforced by so-called Jim Crow laws – by sitting in front of two white women. Embarrassed, Flemming decided that she would walk the remaining 2 miles to work, and pulled the cord for the next stop. At that time, black Americans were required to enter and leave buses by the rear door – but the aisle was too crowded, so she tried to follow white passengers through the front exit. The driver stood in her way, then struck her in the stomach. Flemming was forced to shuffle through the rear door, and from there to a hospital. Worse than the pain from the punch was the wound to her dignity. From insult, opportunity The hurt and humiliation of one young woman did, though, present an opportunity to the broader black community. Just a month earlier, the United States Supreme Court had reached a landmark decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, outlawing school segregation. To Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the secretary of the South Carolina branch of the NAACP – the national organisation founded in 1909 to fight for civil rights for people of colour – Flemming’s mistreatment presented a chance to test whether that ruling also applied to public transport. Flemming agreed to help, resolving to challenge Jim Crow laws despite the risks to which she would be exposed. Simkins hired white lawyer Philip Wittenberg, who filed a suit accusing the bus company of having violated Flemming’s right to the full protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. He sought $25,000 in damages. The legal process in Flemming v South Carolina Electric and Gas Company (who operated the bus) was convoluted and slow. District Court Judge George Bell Timmerman, a staunch segregationist, dismissed the case on the grounds that the Brown decision applied only to schools and not to public transport. The NAACP assisted with an appeal to the US Fourth Circuit Court, which deemed that the Brown decision applied to all aspects of public life – and that the Flemming case must proceed to trial. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-838649138-ac65a26.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Four men stand in a line, holding up a poster that reads "Stamp out Mississippi-ism! Join NAACP"" title="NAACP leaders hold a poster against racial bias in Mississippi at the peak of the civil rights struggle in the mid-1950s – a battle involving countless ordinary black people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Civil rights activists sensed that they were on the verge of a breakthrough – a perception sharpened when, in April 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the bus company. NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins saw the decision as the end of bus segregation, telling reporters: “Now that the Supreme Court has spoken with clarity, we are hopeful that the majority of communities throughout the South will fall in line.” There seemed good reason for such optimism. Within a day, transit companies in 13 cities across the region had announced the desegregation of their buses. That included Montgomery City Lines, which instructed its drivers not to enforce segregated seating, an action blocked when city officials secured a court injunction. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? Yet the Flemming case did not win the fight against the colour line in Montgomery – where the boycott was ongoing, and would continue for over a year – or elsewhere. Both sides in the civil rights struggle soon realised that the Supreme Court had not actually determined whether segregated busing was unconstitutional, only that it would not consider an appeal until the lower court had actually heard the case. Battle lines in Montgomery remained drawn: white city leaders secured an injunction that stopped the bus company desegregating, while black activists persevered with their boycott. “Jim Crow Dies Hard,” affirmed a headline in the Washington Post. Proving the point, when the Flemming case returned to the district court in June 1956, Judge Timmerman dismissed it a second time. Not until June 1957, following a successful appeal by Flemming’s lawyers, did the case finally convene. It was not worth the wait. An entirely white male jury took only 30 minutes to decide against the plaintiff. Serving a greater good Flemming had lost the will to fight. Rather than remain involved in the escalating civil rights struggle, she retreated into the privacy of family life, raising three children with her husband, whom she married while the case was ongoing. “As for myself,” she informed the press, “I never rode a city bus since they put me off and I never will again.” Her own battle had ended in defeat, but Flemming had contributed to the broader triumph of civil rights activists. In February 1956, lawyers filed suit on behalf of four black female plaintiffs who had been mistreated on Montgomery buses. Four months later, a district court ruled in their favour, striking down bus segregation. In November, the US Supreme Court affirmed the decision in the case of Browder v Gayle. A year after it had begun, the organisers of the Montgomery bus boycott had won a decisive victory. It is not known whether Flemming was even aware of the fact, but the judges who ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional cited as precedent the appeal court ruling in her case that ‘separate but equal’ no longer had any basis in law. Flemming did not receive justice, but her fight through the courts had served an even greater good. Sarah Mae Flemming lived the rest of her life, away from the spotlight, in Eastover with her husband and their three children until her untimely death on 16 June 1993, aged just 59. By then, Rosa Parks had long overshadowed her – a situation compounded by the fact that Flemming never spoke publicly about her contribution to the civil rights cause. Barely a footnote in histories of the movement written during her lifetime, her story has belatedly been rediscovered. Today, locals and visitors to downtown Columbia can stroll along Sarah Mae Flemming Way to see the impressive mural that honours her memory. It is a reminder that, though charismatic civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X became the focus of most attention, the fight for racial equality was as much – if not more – about ordinary people such as Flemming performing extraordinary acts of courage. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies are, respectively, professor and associate professor of American history at the University of Sussex This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
Kavita Puri on the important role of carnivals in remembering neglected histories
I was recently in Rio de Janeiro, in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, admiring some of the brightly coloured floats that had featured in this year’s world-famous carnival. Each spring, just before the start of Lent, hundreds of thousands of people attend the parades in the city’s Sambadrome stadium and enjoy watching the floats. Like pieces of art many metres high, they are designed and intricately handmade in Rio’s numerous escolas de samba (samba schools), each strongly identified with a local neighbourhood. The schools are organised into leagues for the carnival, during which they compete for the prestigious design award. Pre-Lenten festivities in Brazil began in the early 18th century, during the Portuguese colonial era. The Catholic influence is evident in the name of the event, which is believed to derive from the Latin carnem vale (farewell to meat) or carnem levare (remove meat), referring to the 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. It’s said that the earliest form of the festivities in Brazil evolved from the pre-Lenten Entrudo, celebrated by immigrants from other Portuguese colonies on the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. During that festival, people soaked each other with buckets of water and hurled mud and food, wreaking cheery mayhem that often degenerated into street brawls. Read more | Brazil: a society shaped by slavery In the 19th century, more organised parades attracted elite participants: even the Portuguese emperor joined in the celebrations, together with aristocrats wearing masks and extravagant costumes. Carnival balls were arranged, with music from Europe such as polkas and waltzes becoming popular. By the middle of that century, street parades with horse-drawn floats and military bands had become the focal points. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that samba – the music and dance style most strongly associated with carnival today – was developed by Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been transported to South America, many of them enslaved, over the preceding centuries. Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822, but slavery was not abolished there until 1888 – more than 65 years later. One of the first escolas de samba was established in 1928 in the barrio (district) of Mangueira, a little west of the city’s historic centre. More soon sprang up, enjoying strong community links – particularly in the poorer favelas (shanty towns), where they offered people a way to come together and organise themselves while avoiding police oppression. The schools’ theme songs and floats became outlets for political expression, voicing concerns about dictatorship, hunger, the environment, education – and, perhaps most tellingly, the Afro-Brazilian experience, social inequalities and indigenous rights. The schools have also used appearances in the competition – now held in the Sambadrome stadium built for the purpose in 1984 – to foreground overlooked histories. Last year, the Portela school highlighted the extraordinary story of Luíz Gama. Born in 1830 to a trafficked African woman, he escaped enslavement and went on to become a lawyer (in fact, he is considered by many to be Brazil’s first black lawyer) and a leading abolitionist. His story was retold through four incarnations of his figure on a float. Watched live by tens of thousands of spectators in the Sambadrome and broadcast around the country, it introduced him to a vast new audience. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" The music, dance, costumes and extraordinary floats of carnival represent a huge source of local pride. The schools spend much of each year raising money, working in the communities, and planning and preparing for the next competition. Though a joyous and hugely fun event for all, Rio’s carnival plays an important role in highlighting long-neglected stories, histories and issues. This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
What is Juneteenth, and why is it celebrated? A historian explains the significance of the holiday today
Each year on 19 June, millions across the US gather to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved African Americans finally learned of their freedom. Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith explores how the celebrations have evolved over the past 160 years – and the long campaign to have Juneteenth formally recognised as a federal holiday
Every summer, the Juneteenth holiday offers Americans an opportunity to celebrate visions of black freedom in the United States. ‘Juneteenth’ refers to 19 June 1865 – the day that victorious federal troops read out a General Order to the inhabitants of Texas’s Galveston Island declaring that “all slaves are free” – but enslaved people knew the date was a bit arbitrary. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the Confederate states more than two years prior, and the ratification of the 13th amendment six months later would end it throughout the US. Emancipation came to the South not as a dramatic, singular event but, instead, agonisingly slowly over space and time. Yet, for all the news that black Texans had passed to each other about slavery and the Confederacy being on the ropes in the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slaveholders in the Confederacy’s western frontier held fast to their regime until the Union Army’s arrival made emancipation enforceable. Within weeks, the more than 250,000 black people enslaved across Texas began seizing their freedom. Within a year, they had begun commemorating it. And by 1900, historian Quintard Taylor notes, Juneteenth had become more widely celebrated among black Texans than the Fourth of July. Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president? Resistance through celebration The holiday served as part of freedpeople’s self-fashioning. Juneteenth is now a national American holiday, but it began as a Texas Emancipation Day, conceived and institutionalised by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Black women’s clubs, churches and civic organisations marshalled resources to secure spaces for public celebration. In Houston in 1872, for example, they purchased 10 acres that they named ‘Emancipation Park’ and began holding annual celebrations. Black residents in Austin did the same in the early 1900s. In these cities and elsewhere, African Americans celebrated with picnics, parades, balls, rodeos and reunions. They honoured their elders who had lived through slavery and recorded their memories so that the experience would not be forgotten – or, more likely, erased. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/PA0MJN-b2f1b9e-e1750347645459.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph depicting a band of African American musicians standing in a wooded area. They are holding various musical instruments, including guitars, a violin and a double bass. There is a Stars and Stripes flag behind them." title="617 Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900" /> In celebrating, they were also resisting. The establishment of Juneteenth as a holiday coincided with white southern elites’ violent resistance to the democratic experiment of postwar Reconstruction and their revanchist rollback of Reconstruction-era democracy. Colloquially known as Jim Crow, the system of economic and political exploitation was secured in part by sadistic violence and in part by narrative claim. To make Jim Crow palatable, even desirable, to white Americans across the regional divides, its defenders argued that US slavery was largely benign, enslaved people mostly content, and the antebellum South a white man’s romantic tragedy. Thus, every time black communities gathered in triumph and jubilation, they gave the lie to the claims of Jim Crow defenders. And in preserving freedpeople’s memories and knitting together family histories out of lives oft-defined by family separation, they built archives that preserved harder, but fuller, histories. A national phenomenon Through the 20th century, Juneteenth travelled with black mobility. Neighbouring states had already taken up the holiday, but the world wars and accompanying Great Migration of African Americans out of the US South and into the north and west meant that Juneteenth celebrations spread to cities like Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles. Civil rights work in the 1960s kept the holiday expanding at the grassroots; the organisers of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign made 19 June a day of national solidarity for their march, spurring participants to carry the holiday from Washington DC back to their hometowns. It took hold because of what it offered. Joy – invaluable in social movements as well as in daily life – but also a way to remember, to honour, and to gird themselves for future struggles. WATCH | Inside a Jim Crow asylum View Green Video on the source website Juneteenth’s journey from a local holiday to a national phenomenon tracks the black freedom struggle in the post-civil rights era and underscores its connection to earlier times. By 1980, Juneteenth had become a legislative issue as well as a local celebration. In Texas, a veteran of the civil rights movement, Al Edwards, had successfully shepherded a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. No small feat, as prizewinning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, for a state seemingly more interested in its cowboy mythos than its actual history of fighting two wars (the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) to stay a slave regime. The pressure intensifies Amid a growing call over the course of the 1990s and 2000s to have it declared a federal holiday, other states began recognising Juneteenth. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as a response to police violence in the 2010s intensified pressure on both state and the federal governments, but the pressure did not come from younger activists alone. In 2016, educator-activist and local historian Opal Lee launched a walking campaign in cities from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for the federal holiday she and other civic leaders had been pursuing for decades. As the 89-year-old Lee told a reporter for National Public Radio, the holiday was an offering to her “ancestors” as well as to her “great -great-grandchildren”, her “grandchildren” and her “children”. When President Joe Biden signed the bill finally making Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021, Opal Lee was at his side. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? George Floyd’s death made the Juneteenth federal holiday possible. Floyd, a Texas-raised athlete who moved to Minnesota and was suffocated by a Minneapolis policeman, died so public and needless a death that it made the American epidemic of anti-black police violence hard to deny. In the short-lived racial reckoning that followed, activists laid out what they believed the nation needed: a return to robust voting rights; reform of militarised policing; a retreat from mass incarceration; and a vision for economic justice. Instead, Congress offered up Juneteenth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2150767015-7035ced-e1750347673444.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="President Joe Biden embraces Opal Lee after presenting the civil rights activist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. Biden is wearing a black suit and white tie; Lee is wearing a a white suit and black suit. In the background, we can see attendees of the ceremony and two US flags." title="President Biden Hosts Presidential Medal Of Freedom Ceremony At The White House" /> “A heap of Juneteenths” There was to be no structural change, but perhaps we can look to Juneteenth’s founders as a reminder that countering white supremacist narratives is part of challenging state violence. Many everyday Americans have a hard time contending with slavery, and they shy away even more from thinking through the systems of racialised power and exploitation that developed in slavery’s wake. Juneteenth celebrations offer an opportunity to engage slavery’s histories and legacies, to sit with other people’s memories, to learn, and to find pleasure even in knowing hard things. This will be true and necessary whether the federal government continues to acknowledge the holiday or whether it returns to its vibrant home in the grassroots. Like most celebrations of liberation, Juneteenth marks something powerful and partial. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths,” one of Ralph Ellison’s characters notes in his follow-up to Invisible Man, an unfinished novel named Juneteenth. “[And] I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.” When freedpeople rejoiced at slavery’s end, they did not celebrate America’s triumph so much as they did their own survival. America was a promise yet fulfilled whereas black life was fact. The way they took the fact and beauty of their living and used it to seed a better future, therein lies the story and its inspiration.
"These women transformed his understanding of the world": making Malcolm X
Malcolm X became one of the most influential leaders in the US civil rights movement – thanks largely, explains Ashley D Farmer, to the women who shaped his life and ideas
On a balmy spring evening in Omaha, Nebraska, Louise Little answered a knock at the door. She must have been terrified when she opened it and saw several knights of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback, demanding that she produce her husband at once. Louise knew she was in trouble. She was all alone save her three children – Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert – and pregnant with her fourth child, Malcolm. But as the Klansmen brandished their guns, Louise stood her ground. She refused to let them see fear in her eyes or tell them her husband’s whereabouts. In the end, the men left with a threat on their lips as they rode off into the night. Such moments were par for the course for Louise Little, the first of many black women who taught, mentored and shaped the man now known as Malcolm X. Malcolm was born 100 years ago – on 19 May 1925, in Omaha. He was Grenadian-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl Little’s fourth child together. It is easy to see why Earl was smitten with Malcolm’s mother: Louise had travelled extensively, she spoke multiple languages and she was politically engaged. Malcolm’s parents met in Montreal, Canada at a gathering of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). A black nationalist from Jamaica, Garvey captured the black masses with his calls for race pride, and the right for black people all over the world to control their communities and determine their futures. The pair married in 1919, relocated briefly to Philadelphia and then moved to Omaha. By the time Malcolm was born, the Littles were well-known nationalist organisers in the area. Earl was the president of the local chapter of the UNIA, while Louise served as its secretary, managing memberships and writing for the UNIA’s newspaper, The Negro World. Childhood tragedies The couple worked hard to survive during Jim Crow – the state-sponsored racial caste system that deployed disenfranchisement, racial violence and segregation laws to make black people second-class citizens in almost every walk of life. Louise and Earl raised their children as Garveyites, eventually moving to Lansing, Michigan in search of a better life and a bigger black nationalist community. Life came to a screeching halt for six-year-old Malcolm when his father, Earl, announced he was going into town on 29 September 1931. It wasn’t uncommon for Earl to go out like this, but this time Louise had a gnawing feeling that white supremacists were gunning for her husband more than usual. She begged him not to go. But Earl wouldn’t listen. Later that night, Lansing police confirmed her fears. Earl was dead. The officers claimed that Earl had slipped and fallen on the tracks and a streetcar had run him over. But Malcolm claimed the KKK was at fault. They had long wanted his nationalist father dead. Whatever the cause of Earl’s death, Louise was now left to raise their seven children alone. She got by, at first, by following Garvey’s ideals. Grieving as she was, Malcolm’s mother read to him from The Negro World, modelled black economic independence by shopping at black-owned businesses, and fostered his interest in the global black diaspora. Louise Little was Malcolm’s earliest teacher and laid the foundation for him to become one of the greatest black nationalist leaders of the 20th century. But Louise’s life lessons were cut short. Years into the Great Depression, and with too many children to feed, Malcolm’s mother started to fall apart. In December 1939, doctors declared Louise insane and sent her to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo. The state placed the Little children in foster care and sent Malcolm to a juvenile home in the mostly white town of Mason, Michigan. By his own account, Malcolm thrived there, earning good grades and integrating into his school community. But a chance encounter with his half-sister, Ella Collins, changed the trajectory of his life. Inspirational sister Ella, who was one of Earl’s children from his first marriage, visited Malcolm and her other half-siblings when he was a young teen. Malcolm was impressed. “[Ella was] the first really proud black woman I had ever seen,” he recalled in his autobiography. “Ella wasn’t just black, but like our father she was jet black. The way she sat, moved, talked, did everything, bespoke of somebody who did and got exactly what she wanted.” Ella and her husband, Kenneth Collins, adopted Malcolm when he was 15 years old, and welcomed him into their home in Roxbury, the black part of Boston. “No physical move in my life,” Malcolm noted of his relocation in 1941, was “more pivotal or profound in its repercussions. All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did.” For better or worse, the move opened up a whole new world for Malcolm. Ella did her best to keep Malcolm on the straight and narrow, but the city life was too much of a draw. It didn’t take long for him to join up with the wrong crowd. Malcolm, or ‘Detroit Red’ as he was known on Roxbury’s streets, became part of a five-person larceny ring that plundered its way through jewellery stores and pawn shops across the city. After several close calls, the police finally nabbed the quartet. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? His sisters were Malcolm’s steadying force while he was behind bars. Ella was one of Malcolm’s first and only visitors at the Charlestown State Prison in 1946, where the 20-year-old started his 10-year sentence for burglary. But it was his older sister, Hilda, who prompted the despondent Malcolm to change course. Frustrated, if not embarrassed, by his turn toward crime, Hilda suggested that Malcolm clean up his act while behind bars. He could start by improving his grammar and reading comprehension, she suggested, since letter writing was his only real connection with the outside world. “I did begin a correspondence course in English,” Malcolm recalled after Hilda admonished him. This became the gateway to the world of books. Soon Malcolm started devouring any publication he could get his hands on behind bars, everything from Shakespeare to Asian history. Because of his sister’s prompting, Malcolm Little was on his way to becoming one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-517350846-CMYK-26622e8.jpg" width="4271" height="2845" alt="A mugshot of Malcolm X as a young man. He wears a trilby hat and looks directly into the camera with a serious expression on his face" title="Mugshots of Malcolm, 1944. On this occasion, he was sentenced to four months in jail following a charge of larceny" /> Perusing books on all sorts of subjects helped open Malcolm’s mind to the Nation of Islam (NOI). While Malcolm was in prison, Ella, along with his older brothers, Wilfred and Philbert, joined the religious organisation that Wallace Fard Muhammad had started in 1930 in Detroit. By the time they joined the Nation, it had a new leader: Elijah Muhammad. Nevertheless, its goals were the same: to “teach the downtrodden and defenceless black people a thorough knowledge of God and of themselves”, worship Allah, and support black nationalist principles such as black political and economic independence. The NOI made sense to Malcolm – who recognised the echoes of Garveyism in the group’s message. By the time he got out of prison in August 1952, he had joined the NOI and changed his name to Malcolm X. Marriage and family Four years later, Malcolm found a life companion in another Nation follower. Betty Dean Sanders grew up in Detroit and attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before relocating to New York to study nursing at Brooklyn State College. At the urging of other nursing students, Betty began attending NOI meetings. She was hesitant at first. Betty had grown up in a loving household that valued women’s independence and the Christian faith. How could she convert to Islam and live by its mandates – everything from its strict dietary restrictions to its conservative gender roles? Yet Nation leaders’ analysis of race relations resonated with the 22-year-old girl who had been to the Deep South and witnessed Jim Crow first-hand. Betty converted in 1956 and married Malcolm X on 14 January 1958, the same day that she received her nursing licence. Betty X, as she was now known, had more formal education than most in her NOI circles. She wanted to work, but Malcolm, who at the time mostly thought of women as helpmates to men, forbade it. So Betty asserted her know-how in other ways. To be sure, she worked hard to raise their six daughters, but she also helped to facilitate Malcolm’s career. When she wasn’t answering phones and managing his schedule, Betty hosted movement luminaries at the couple’s home and offered her opinion on everything from US race relations to world events. After their guests left and Malcolm laid his head down at night, he discussed the movement and his role in it with her. She offered insights and softly steered him as he navigated the turbulent waters of the early 1960s. With Betty by his side, Malcolm became one of the most influential people in the country. He kept up a gruelling schedule, speaking on college campuses and at mosques across the country, sparring with white leaders and journalists, and mobilising Nation members whenever police or politicians attacked one of their own. No matter their political affiliation, activists across the black freedom movement had to concede that Malcolm was one of their biggest and brightest stars. But many wanted to see him stretch politically, to move beyond the Nation of Islam. Movement leaders such as Audley Moore said as much. Moore met Malcolm at an open-air meeting in Harlem in the 1950s. He immediately captivated her with his ability to rouse crowds to black nationalist action, something she hadn’t seen since she had come face-to-face with Garvey in the 1920s. Captivated by Garvey’s message, a 25-year-old Moore had joined the UNIA then and there, and spent the next seven decades building the black nationalist movement in America. So influential was she in shaping modern black nationalism that Moore became known as the “Queen Mother” of the movement and activists came to her house to learn at her feet. Malcolm was one of them. In the early 1960s, Moore’s West Philadelphia home served as a nationalist training ground of sorts – a place where young and old organisers alike came to seek her counsel. Malcolm stopped in when he was in town and Moore jumped at the chance to shape his thinking. She wanted him to embrace the movement for reparations for black Americans that she began in the 1950s and to adopt a more global approach to black liberation – one that included the struggles that African countries were waging against their colonial oppressors. It didn’t take long for Moore to see her influence in his public remarks. “If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing,” Malcolm told an audience at Michigan State University in 1963. “But collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I’d be rich beyond dreams.” Magnify that by the millions of black people whose wealth and wages had been stolen for centuries, and “You’ll see how this country got so rich so fast,” he continued, laying the groundwork for his audience to understand the argument for reparations. Still, Malcolm tried to remain a dutiful follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation. But he couldn’t ignore the rumours. Word on the street was that the NOI leader had fathered several children out of wedlock – a sin in the eyes of the Nation. Malcolm felt betrayed by his mentor. If this were not enough, after Malcolm brazenly remarked that John F Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination was a case of “the chickens coming home to roost”, Muhammad silenced him. By early 1964, it was time for Malcolm to part ways both with his beloved leader and the organisation that shaped him. Black women stepped in to fill the void. In April 1964, Malcolm left for a five-week trip that his sister Ella funded, during which he visited Africa and the Middle East, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It transformed Malcolm’s life. He gained a new understanding of Islam outside of the Nation and a new sense of self. He changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement Globetrotting exchanges While abroad, Malcolm stopped in Ghana. The west African country had gained its independence from Britain in 1957 and its president, Kwame Nkrumah, welcomed black Americans to the country. Several black women – including writer Maya Angelou, long-time labour organiser Vicki Garvin, and WEB Du Bois’ wife, Shirley Graham – who were temporarily residing there formed the ‘Malcolm X Committee’ to welcome the activist. Committee members planned dinners to discuss foreign policy, introduced Malcolm to Nkrumah, and facilitated conversations between Malcolm and diplomats from around the world. These women transformed his understanding of the world and their place in it. When he proclaimed that “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman” that same year, he based these claims not only on his time with Betty but also on his conversations with these women. These black female activists also helped Malcolm conclude that the “single worst mistake of the American black organisations and their leaders” was that they “failed to establish direct brotherhood lines of communication” with independent black nations. Malcolm vowed to right this wrong when he returned to the US by creating the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2AW1FX0-b098ca4.jpg" width="2556" height="1703" alt="The jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, pictured here in concert in 1966, was a key figure in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" title="The jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, pictured here in concert in 1966, was a key figure in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" /> Malcolm, as most still knew him, modelled the OAAU after the Organisation of African Unity, a conglomeration of African nations founded in 1963 to develop a unified voice and agenda for the continent. His version would align the millions of black Americans with African nations to foster global black liberation. However, he had trouble getting the OAAU off the ground. Days before he was set to debut the organisation, Malcolm wrote to Sara Mitchell, a young woman he had met amid his Harlem organising. He asked her to come to the meeting and offer her “objective analysis of [her] impressions of what we are trying to do, including [her] suggestions as to how we can do better”. Mitchell obliged, offering such trenchant analysis that Malcolm invited her to help write the aims and objectives of the organisation and develop its inner workings. Read more | From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream Mitchell shaped the scope and substance of the group, calling on Malcolm to abandon the tagline “By any means necessary” and instead to adopt a broader one, “Independence, Justice, and Prosperity”, in order to bring more people into the group. Other capable women, such as longtime organiser Lynne Shifflett, served as the OAAU’s executive secretary. Jazz singer Abbey Lincoln joined as the provisional director of the organisation. Public assassination After some organisational retooling, Malcolm planned to address these women and other members of the OAAU on 21 February 1965 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Yet no sooner had he stepped onto the stage than NOI members gunned him down in front of a pregnant Betty and three of his four daughters. Betty and Ella tried to carry on the organisation in the aftermath, with an office filled with women running its daily operations. But it floundered without its leader. Though short-lived, the OAAU exemplified Malcolm’s political values on all fronts. His undying pursuit of black freedom; his ability to evolve in his thinking about how to achieve this; and his understanding that black women were vital to the cause. Yet this is not the Malcolm most remember. Most conjure up soundbites of him throwing the second punch as it were: his labelling of the white man as “the devil” and his support of “violence in self-defence”. Further juxtaposed to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, these and other quips helped the press and popular culture frame Malcolm as a radical and hateful man. Malcolm also said: “Dr King wants the same thing I want. Freedom.” Despite this, even today, many see him as King’s and the civil rights movement’s ‘evil twin’. Lost in this legacy is the fact that white supremacists threw the first punch. Throughout his short life, Malcolm witnessed the black folks around him endure extreme vigilante violence, irrepressible racism and seemingly endless sexism. His goal was to try to offer them another viable path to freedom beyond integration. On the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death, it is just as important to remember that this is the true legacy of Malcolm X – as well as the many female teachers, mentors, lovers and friends who helped make it possible. Timeline: Becoming X 10 key milestones in the life of the influential US black nationalist 19 May 1925 Malcolm Little is born in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth child of Grenada-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl 29 September 1931 Malcolm‘s father, Earl, dies after being hit by a streetcar in Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm comes to believe that white supremacists were responsible December 1939 After years of hardship raising seven children alone, Malcolm‘s mother, Louise, is sent to a psychiatric hospital. The children are placed in foster care 1941 Malcolm is adopted by his half-sister Ella Collins, and moves to Roxbury, a black neighbourhood in Boston, to live with her family 1946 Malcolm begins a 10-year sentence for burglary at Charlestown State Prison in Boston. There, he resumes his education and devours a range of books, opening his mind to ideas of black nationalism August 1952 Malcolm is released from prison. Having joined the Nation of Islam, the 27-year-old changes his name to Malcolm X 14 January 1958 Malcolm marries 22-year-old nurse Betty Dean Sanders. Alongside raising their six daughters, she nurtures and shapes her husband‘s career: speaking, writing and advocating for black nationalism April 1964 After becoming disillusioned with the Nation of Islam‘s leader, Malcolm travels to Africa and the Middle East, completing his Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and taking the name El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz 28 June 1964 Having met Ghana‘s first postcolonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm founds the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He aims to attract more members, including women, by adopting a broader approach 21 February 1965 Preparing to address OAAU members at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York City, Malcolm X is shot dead by an assassin angry at his criticism of the Nation of Islam and its leader Ashley D Farmer is an associate professor in the Departments of History & African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”
Many people of African and Caribbean heritage in Britain have suffered racist attacks over the centuries. But, as Hakim Adi explains, they have also been active and effective in organising their own defence
Racist attacks targeting people of African and Caribbean heritage in the UK have a long history, and have taken many varying forms. They are among the main reasons why, for many centuries, it has been necessary for these people to establish organisations for self-defence, often in concert with supporters and allies among the wider population. African self-organisation became well established in the 18th century. In 1768, Sir John Fielding, a London magistrate, complained that enslaved Africans in Britain not only liberated themselves but then would “enter into Societies and make their business to corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England”. In other words, they encouraged others to liberate themselves. Indeed, Africans were among the initiators of abolitionism – one of the biggest political movements in British history. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? The 1780s saw even more overt efforts at political organising by well-known African abolitionists Ottobah Cugoana and Olaudah Equiano. They acted jointly with several other Africans based in London, writing to prominent parliamentarians, abolitionists and the press from 1785 on. In December 1787, Cugoana and Equiano styled themselves Sons of Africa, thereby creating one of the first named African political organisations in Britain’s history – and one of the first Pan-African organisations anywhere in the world. Their letters were signed by as many as 12 different Africans, sometimes specifically “for ourselves and brethren”, suggesting that the signatories represented a much wider community. Through Equiano, the Sons of Africa were connected to other radical political organisations in Britain, including the United Irishmen and the London Corresponding Society. The rise of community activism This tradition continued into the first half of the 19th century, when leading figures included the radical British-Jamaicans Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson, and the Chartist William Cuffay, son of a formerly enslaved Kittitian. Towards the end of that century, the Dominican Celestine Edwards emerged as a prominent anti-racist and anti-imperialist propagandist, writer and speaker, working closely with the African-American journalist and civil rights activist Ida B Wells during her influential tour of Britain. It seems likely that informal organisations existed in places with large black communities in the 19th century. We know that ‘coloured’ seamen in Liverpool united in 1879 to complain against racist employment practices. But it was not until the 1890s that an organisation emerged to coordinate the activities of African and Caribbean activists. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/2WWE9GP-CMYK-f782f11-e1730722296265.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The leading anti-racist and anti-imperialist writer and speaker Celestine Edwards (Photo by piemags/AN24/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="The leading anti-racist and anti-imperialist writer and speaker Celestine Edwards (Photo by piemags/AN24/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The African Association was founded in London in 1897 by a black South African, Alice Kinloch, and a Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester Williams. The Association aimed to enable those of African descent to speak with one voice on all issues that concerned them – principally the impact of colonial rule and various forms of racism. It is now best remembered for convening the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 which, Williams stated, “would be the first occasion upon which black men would assemble in England to speak for themselves and endeavour to influence public opinion in their favour”. Heralding the start of modern Pan-Africanism, this moment highlights the fact that the Association was in contact with people in Africa, the Caribbean, the US and Europe. Key figures at the conference included John Archer – who later became the first black mayor of a London borough – composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Haitian journalist and lawyer Benito Sylvain, and American sociologist and activist WEB Du Bois. Many members of the African Association were students and, in the period from the turn of the century to the First World War, several other black student organisations were formed. In 1902, African students at the University of Edinburgh united to urge university authorities to protest against the racist employment policies of the colonial West African Medical Service. Less localised examples include the Ethiopian Progressive Association, formed in 1904; the African Students’ Union, set up in 1916; and the Union of Students of African Descent, established during the First World War. These were generally concerned with Britain’s ‘colour bar’ – informal racial segregation in public facilities and services – as well as the most oppressive aspects of colonial rule overseas. Read more | Black British history: key questions answered Racism soon grew more overt, including large-scale attacks in nine towns and cities in 1919, in some cases resulting in deaths. One victim was Charles Wotten, a young seaman from Bermuda who was drowned in Liverpool docks in 1919. In response, many African, Caribbean and Yemeni seafarers united to defend themselves. In Glasgow, for example, black seafarers fired shots, and armed self-defence was a feature of resistance in South Shields and Cardiff. Indeed, in all the towns and cities affected, black residents united and fought back using any means at their disposal. Confronting institutional racism These attacks exposed wider racism in various institutions. Government and trade unions had allowed discriminatory practices to persist in the shipping industry, and sections of the press had published articles on the “black peril” even during the First World War when men such as Wotten had served. And in 1919, police arrested many of those defending themselves from racist attacks. Such actions were met with community protests from organisations such as the Liverpool Ethiopian Association and Cardiff Coloured Association, while seamen in South Shields threatened to strike. The African Progress Union, founded in 1918, demanded reparation for the “Negro race”. It also protested against the 1919 attacks, sending a delegation to the deputy lord mayor of Liverpool and arranging legal defence so those arrested could defend themselves. Pan-African organisations and their publications flourished between the world wars. Black workers’ organisations also formed to combat racism in various industries, such as the Coloured Film Artists Association. Wider collective action included mass protests in London against Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Many major British organisations also united in the Pan-African Federation to participate in two Subject Peoples Conferences in 1945, and to convene the more famous Pan-African Congress in Manchester that October. Activism within the Windrush generation In the postwar years, the need for collective action continued as the struggle to end colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean intensified and racist attacks in Britain persisted. People who arrived from the Caribbean turned to existing organisations, including the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress and the West Indian Students’ Union, but more direct self-defence was often required. In July and August 1948, Liverpool’s black community was forced to defend itself from large-scale racist attacks fuelled in part by continued opposition from the government and the National Union of Seamen to the employment of African and Caribbean seamen. The need for this resistance prompted the formation of such organisations as the Colonial Defence Committee and the Colonial People’s Defence Association. As in earlier episodes, the police arrested many of those trying to defend themselves. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation Residents of Causeway Green, Birmingham faced racist attacks in 1949; in the wake of this violence, the influential Afro-Caribbean Organisation was formed in 1952. And in 1958, major racist onslaughts in Nottingham and Notting Hill faced united black resistance on the streets, including from well-organised coalitions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1212210475-91bbdf9-e1730722492442.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Police question men outside a restaurant during the Notting Hill riots of 1958, which were sparked by violent racist attacks on black residents (Photo by Daily Express/Pictorial Parade/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Police question men outside a restaurant during the Notting Hill riots of 1958, which were sparked by violent racist attacks on black residents (Photo by Daily Express/Pictorial Parade/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> By that time, a hostile environment had been created by the press and by some politicians who expressed the view that “coloured” immigration was a problem that needed to be controlled. The ‘colour bar’ was still widespread, and successive governments failed to introduce legislation to make racism illegal until the Race Relations Act 1965. Conditions were ripe for racist attacks that black people and anti-racists were left to deal with. Edward Scobie, a BBC reporter of Caribbean origin, later wrote: “It would be no exaggeration to say that the attitude of the British police in the Notting Hill area during those days of riots and violence [in 1958] was unsympathetic and anti-black.” And Frances Ezzreco, an activist of the Coloured People’s Progressive Association, recalled thinking: “If someone comes to hit me, I’m going to hit back. If I can’t hit back with my fists because they are bigger than me, I’ll hit them with anything I can lay my hands on – and that’s exactly what happened. We weren’t prepared for that kind of fighting, but when it came to it, we did it.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-613490752-45a70a0-e1730722440284.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A crowd gathers in London to watch the funeral procession of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan expatriate murdered in 1959 (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="A crowd gathers in London to watch the funeral procession of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan expatriate murdered in 1959 (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> Many of the key protests in this period were coordinated by the Committee of African Organisations (CAO). This coalition was the main signatory to a letter condemning racism sent to the prime minister, and it established the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. When the government introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, including stringent restrictions on immigration from Commonwealth nations – in other words, mostly non-white people – the CAO played a leading role in protests organised by another coalition, the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference. Anti-racism in the 20th century and beyond Through the mid-1960s, black protesters continued to act, launching the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 and the Campaign Against Racist Discrimination, inspired by the 1964 visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr. Radical politics, particularly the Black Power movement, prompted the birth of a range of activist coalitions. These were among the bodies campaigning against oppression overseas: in 1969, for example, a protest against apartheid in South Africa was held in Manchester Cathedral. It was also in this period that the word ‘black’ was first used in a political context to describe those of African and Caribbean heritage, although for a time it was sometimes also used to describe those of south Asian origin. Racism in Britain has a long history, closely connected with colonial conquest and enslavement – but so, too, does anti-racism, which has generally been the attitude of the majority. And the collective organising of those of African and Caribbean heritage has played a key role in that tradition – as it still does today. This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many are turning against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent"
Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she explores how the far-right violence seen across the UK in the summer of 2024 fits in with the history of race riots, and the fight against racism troubling history of racist attacks in Britain
Far-right violence erupted across Britain following the horrific mass stabbing of children in Southport on 29 July. Attacks in towns and cities were driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, racism and Islamophobia, and fuelled by misinformation on social media about the Southport murderer. As I watched news reports, I heard words being said out loud that many of us had not heard for years. I saw shops vandalised, mosques attacked. And I thought of the people I have interviewed, and the memories that these scenes would have brought back. The generation who came from the colonies (or who were once colonial subjects) invited to Britain after the Second World War to do the hard jobs – the worst shifts in the factories, or in the newly established National Health Service (NHS) – went through so much to be accepted. They began the long and ongoing struggle for equality. Then their children, who were confronted by overt racism and violence, even murder – like that of teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar, stabbed to death in Southall in 1976 – took to the streets, alongside black Britons and white anti-racists, to defy the National Front. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation I’m reminded of something one of my interviewees told me after riots that flared in 2001 in Oldham, where the British National Party and National Front were agitating among British south Asian communities. Abdul was a youth worker in Oldham whose family had come from Bangladesh in the 1970s. Back then, his dad had stood up to the National Front, and he himself had faced bitter racism at school in the 1980s. “There’ve been times when we thought: should we up and go?” he told me. “But the question is: where do you go? This is your home. We fought for this country – my forefathers were in the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War. So we’ve got a stake in this country. We don’t just take – we give.” When things flare up he experiences a familiar feeling. “Once again, you think about whether you’re welcome here, and about the anxiety and the stress that you have to go through,” he says. “And then you think: when is it going to end?” Race riots have a long history. Some of the earliest and most significant occurred after the First World War, and were reported on in the national papers. In 1919, a series of violent riots in Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, London, Hull, Newport, Barry, Liverpool and Cardiff saw street fights and properties vandalised. Five people were reported dead. Huge crowds of white working-class people in these towns and cities directed anger at postwar employment shortages towards black and minority ethnic communities, blaming colonial workers invited to Britain to meet wartime shipping needs. Later, in 1958, race riots broke out in Notting Hill after 10 white youths committed serious assaults on six West Indian men in four incidents. They were part of wider unrest fuelled by resentment at the growth in the West Indian community in London. This came after the 1948 British Nationality Act created the status of Citizen of the UK and Colonies, smoothing the recruitment of workers from places such as the Caribbean. These riots, which lasted around a week, resulted in more than 100 arrests. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-2659500cmyk-02ae4a8-e1731923050539.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Protesters march in Whitehall after the 1959 murder of a young Antiguan, Kelso Cochrane, by a gang of white youths in Notting Hill (Photo by John Franks/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Protesters march in Whitehall after the 1959 murder of a young Antiguan, Kelso Cochrane, by a gang of white youths in Notting Hill (Photo by John Franks/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Yet though the recent events feel disheartening and regressive, seeing the thousands who took to the streets peacefully in anti-racist protests was both moving and hopeful. Many reports show a dramatic shift as people, across generations, turn against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent. Perhaps if the longer history of empire and immigration was better understood, the people attacked – some of whom were born here, some from families who have lived here for three generations – would be recognised as being as British as the far-right attackers, even though their skin colour might not be the same. I hope there will be a time when the descendants of empire do not have to ask themselves: “When is it going to end?” This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Charlotta Bass: the first woman of colour to run for US vice president
Before Kamala Harris, there was Charlotta Bass. Historian Sonia Grant explores the overlooked life of a journalist and civil rights activist who became a target of both the FBI and Ku Klux Klan – and who, in 1952, became the first woman of colour to be nominated to the US vice presidency
The FBI agent had been sitting in his hot, stuffy car all day, once again tasked with surveilling the nursing home across the street. It was another uneventful day. He noted the comings and goings: deliveries of crates of milk and groceries; the postman making his rounds; nursing staff in their starched uniforms either arriving or leaving; and, towards early evening, a steady stream of relatives visiting elderly residents. When the agent finished his shift, he drove back to the office and typed up what he determined would be his final entry: “July 3, 1967, Charlotta A Bass – Case Closed”. What possible security threat could a bedridden black woman in her nineties pose? Yet despite being incapacitated by a stroke, Charlotta Bass remained a target of FBI surveillance until 1967, two years before her death, and could be arrested on sight if deemed in breach of national security. Her 500-plus page dossier bulged with reports that spanned five decades. It chronicled her denunciations of the Ku Klux Klan; her elevation as the first black American woman to edit and own a newspaper; her championing of civil rights; her political agitation; and, most importantly, her 1952 bid to become vice president of the United States. Who was Charlotta Bass? Charlotta Bass was a journalist and civil rights activist who became a target of both the FBI and Ku Klux Klan – and who, in 1952, became the first woman of colour to be nominated to the US vice presidency. Born Charlotta Amanda Spears in 1874 (or 1880, records differ), she was one of 11 children. Growing up in South Carolina, her family, like all black families, endured discrimination, segregation, prejudicial and, at times, violent treatment, which was sanctioned in law by the Black Codes or so-called Jim Crow laws. In later life, Charlotta would be horrified that it was her home state – long steeped in bigotry and proud of its Confederate past – that had no compunction in sending a 14-year-old black boy named George Stinney to the electric chair. Every facet of black life was dominated by the pernicious reach of segregation: where black people could live and marry, what school or university they could attend, what type of employment or profession was either open or barred to them, and where they could worship or even be buried. After leaving school, Charlotta moved to Rhode Island to escape the South’s overt repression and live with her brother, Ellis. She enrolled at Pembroke College (now part of Brown University) and got a job selling subscriptions for a local black newspaper. There for several years, it was the beginning of an illustrious career in journalism. Charlotta Bass as a journalist In 1912, a few years after moving to California, the now thirty-something Charlotta’s journalistic skills and dogged determination saw her galvanise another black newspaper, The California Eagle. She worked for and ran the paper for a little under 40 years, during which she became Charlotta Bass after her marriage to Joseph Bass, the man she had originally brought in as editor. One of Charlotta’s first campaigns called for a ban of DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a revisionist film that romanticised the Confederate South’s ‘lost cause’ in the American Civil War – the film depicted black people (white actors in blackface) as savage, and reignited interest and mass membership of the KKK. For her trouble, while Charlotta worked late at the office one evening, eight hooded Klansmen tried to break in. She reached for a gun kept in a drawer and, not knowing how to shoot, brandished it and caused the would-be assailants to scatter. Nonetheless, much of Charlotta’s energy throughout the 1920s was consumed by confronting the KKK and thwarting their attempts to subvert the political apparatus in Los Angeles, in part through infiltrating law enforcement agencies and the judiciary. By the 1930s, she had burnished her credentials as a formidable campaigner and gained a reputation for single-mindedness, even if it resulted in humiliation – such as when she was pelted with rotten apples while addressing an anti-draft rally in 1932. The next two decades saw Charlotta hone her pragmatic character: she was both a member of the ‘conservative’ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the more ‘radical’ Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) under the leadership of Marcus Garvey. Charlotta forged coalitions across racial lines and championed miscarriage of justice cases – such as the arrest of hundreds of Mexican-American youths following the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder in 1942 – and civil liberty violations, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Other regular features of The California Eagle’s front pages included segregated schools, job discrimination, police brutality against black people, and housing. Racism on the west coast may have manifested differently to the South – for one lynchings were not as prevalent – but there were still clear demarcations as to where black people could live. Restrictive covenants in housing prohibited black people, including celebrities such as Gone with the Wind Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel and jazz legend Nat King Cole, from living in neighbourhoods that had been exclusively white. Why was Charlotta Bass watched by the FBI? Charlotta’s unwavering outspokenness in her newspaper came at both professional and personal risk. During the 1940s, the Office of the Secretary of War had the black press under scrutiny, and Charlotta drew attention with a petition against segregation in the US Army, and her promotion of the Double V Campaign (aimed at securing victory for black people both in the armed forces abroad and at home). Her coverage resulted in The Eagle being deemed “seditious” and Charlotta herself “subversive” and a “Communist supporter”. It was a dangerous time to face such an accusation. McCarthyism and the fear of communist infiltration meant people could be convicted and imprisoned on the flimsiest of evidence, and if suspects refused to implicate others, their associations were seen as incrimination enough. In Charlotta’s case, activists WEB DuBois and Paul Robeson – both suspected communists. Regardless, Charlotta was especially busy in 1950. She travelled to Europe, with FBI agents ordered to tail her, “a short, elderly negro, female, grey hair, fat, wearing glasses [and] waddling walk”. Charlotta attended the Defenders of the Peace Committee of the World Congress in Paris and Prague, and spent ten days in Moscow, reporting that she encountered no racial discrimination and comparing the Soviet Union favourably to the US. This was much to the chagrin of the authorities back home. Upon her return, Charlotta was summoned to appear before California’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. In terms of her political allegiance, Charlotta had been a life-long Republican, but had grown disillusioned at what she saw as ‘the party of Lincoln’ taking black people’s loyalty for granted with little, in the way of legislation or repeal of Jim Crow laws, to show for it. Similarly unimpressed with the Democrats, Charlotta threw her support behind the left-wing Progressive Party. After selling The Eagle in 1951, Charlotta turned her focus to politics. Although she had run unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 1950, she made inroads with her new party. Renowned for her activism and campaigning, it was hoped that Charlotta’s profile within the black community could be capitalised, as courting the black electorate was a key part of the party’s election strategy. Charlotta Bass becomes the first black woman to be nominated to the US vice presidency On 30 March 1952, Charlotta was nominated as the Progressive Party candidate for vice president of the United States, the first black woman ever to be selected – and over a decade before the Voting Rights Act, which would formally prohibit racial discrimination in voting. Charlotta’s running mate, a radical San Francisco lawyer named Vincent Hallinan, had just begun a six-month prison sentence for contempt of court. He would brag that he was a descendant of Irish revolutionaries and had dozens of fistfights with other lawyers in courthouse corridors. It was while defending union leader Harry Bridges in a high-profile fraud and perjury trial that Hallinan was imprisoned. His client was convicted of perjury — a verdict overturned by the Supreme Court – while Hallinan’s petition to have his sentence commuted (to enable him to join Charlotta and the campaign) was rejected. Even with its presidential candidate behind bars, the Progressive Party proceeded with its convention in Chicago. Hallinan’s multi-millionaire property developer wife, Vivian, accepted the nomination on his behalf. The party’s manifesto was considered radical; some of its pledges included universal healthcare, an end to racial discrimination, reduction of armaments, recognition of the People’s Republic of China and its admittance to the United Nations, and cessation of the Korean War. What did Charlotta Bass say in her acceptance speech? In her acceptance speech, with the party’s co-chair Paul Robeson by her side, Charlotta proudly declared: “For the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second highest office in the land. “[For] 40 years, I stood on a watch tower, watching the tide of racial hatred and bigotry rising against my people and against all people who believe the Constitution is something more than a piece of yellowed paper to be shut off in a glass case in the archives, but a living document, a working instrument for freedom.” In August, Hallinan finally joined the campaign after being released. They did not think they would win – their slogan was “Win or Lose, We Win by Raising the Issues” – but Hallinan and Charlotta secured just 0.2 per cent in the election (135,007 votes, compared to the more than 33 million votes gained by election winner Republican Dwight Eisenhower). Charlotta, now in her late 70s, decided she had finished with party politics, but found other avenues, principally community activism, in order to pursue her life-long commitment to civil rights. Towards the end of her life, as FBI agents still kept her under watch, Charlotta remained unapologetic, defiant even, despite enduring the dark days of McCarthyism, decades of government surveillance and a lifetime of relentless prejudice, saying: “I am willing to face it again… I shall continue to tell the truth as I know it and believe it, as a good progressive citizen, and a good American.” This content first appeared in the November 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
The 1963 March on Washington made history as one of the largest protest marches ever staged, and the setting for Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Rhiannon Davies shares an explainer on the events of the day…
When was the March on Washington? On 28 August 1963, a multi-racial crowd of more than 250,000 protesters flocked to the United States of America's capital, Washington DC, to take part in one of the biggest protest marches ever staged. They were campaigning in the name of jobs and freedom, trying to pressure the president at the time, John F Kennedy, to pass the civil rights legislation that he had long been promising. On the day, protesters gathered at the Washington Monument, before marching about a mile down the National Mall to gather in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Despite the authorities’ fears that violence might break out, the atmosphere of the day was peaceful. In fact, it has even been described by some as “like a picnic”. What happened at the March on Washington? The day's programme was packed with a full roster of entertainers and inspiring activists. Marchers sung along to musicians like Bob Dylan, prayed with pastors, and at the end of the night listened in awe to the final speaker: Martin Luther King Jr. King was an icon by this time, having first risen to fame during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, sparked by Rosa Parks' decision not to give up her bus seat. He was one of the boycott's leaders, and his inspiring speeches had captivated the press and roused the nation. But it was during the March on Washington that he delivered his most iconic speech: the “I have a dream” speech. The first half of his speech was as he'd practised. In it, he powerfully explained how he felt black Americans were still not free, a century on from emancipation, and had “come to our nation's capital to cash a check”. He told the eager crowd: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” But then, after delivering his prepared remarks, he went off script. He decided to share with the crowd in front of him his dream for the future of America, he said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.” This speech is now remembered as one of the most iconic of the 20th century and a defining moment of the US civil rights movement. It captivated the world and made waves in the White House. After that march, civil rights leaders, including King, went to speak with the president. The following year, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law as Martin Luther King Jr looked on. Find out more about the US civil rights movement in our six part podcast series US Civil Rights: Fighting for Freedom