Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
Meet the incredible woman who saved Portugal's Jews
With the Inquisition active throughout much of Europe, the first half of the 16th century was a perilous time for Jewish people. Andreé Aelion Brooks explores how the fabulously wealthy Doña Gracia worked tirelessly to protect her community
Still in her 20s, Gracia Mendes Nasi (Nacy), better known as Doña Gracia, was recently widowed and fabulously rich. She should have been able to live in comfort for the rest of her life. Her husband, Francisco Mendes, a spice dealer and banker, had divided his wealth in his will between Gracia and his brother, Diogo. Yet without her husband’s protection, even her money could not shield her from a looming crisis. Indeed, being in possession of such a fortune in patriarchal and Catholic Lisbon in the middle of the 1530s was inherently dangerous for someone of Doña Gracia’s background. She was a converso, a term for a person forced to convert from Judaism. When the papal nuncio, an ecclesiastical diplomat, paid a visit to her palatial home in the old Jewish quarter of Lisbon, he demanded yet another bribe to keep the Inquisition from beginning work in Portugal. The Inquisition, Gracia knew, rounded up conversos, who were then charged with being insincere Catholics and imprisoned. Whether this was true or not, their assets were confiscated. Furthermore, Doña Gracia certainly wasn’t sincere in her public faith. While she had married Francisco, who was also her maternal uncle, at Lisbon Cathedral, the ceremony had been preceded by a secret Jewish wedding. Compounding Doña Gracia’s problems, representatives of the Portuguese king, John III, had also visited her. They told her they wanted to take her young daughter, Ana, to the palace to live as an adopted child of the royal family. According to local laws, the king could thus gain the use of any portion of the Mendes fortune that belonged to Ana. It was clear Doña Gracia needed to make a new start elsewhere in Europe, but there was another problem: converso families were forbidden to leave Portugal. Demonstrating the skill that would make her an outstanding leader, she set two plans running simultaneously, an approach she would follow for the rest of her life. Read more | Your guide to the Spanish Inquisition Firstly, she sent a message to the king explaining that most of the fortune he sought was with her brother-in-law, Diogo, in Antwerp. To retrieve the fortune, she needed the king’s exemption to leave the country. And, of course, she could not leave her baby daughter behind. Nor her two nephews, who were registered to begin studies at university in Louvain. Nor her younger sister, Brianda, who was betrothed to Diogo. She also contacted Diogo to bring one of his spice ships, pick up the family from Lisbon and take them to Antwerp. The greedy king, hoping to maximise the amount of money he could seize, agreed to let her travel. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-173449744-8114cab-e1768985633175.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration of a man in a white and red apron, a tall white coned hat, and holding a stick in one hand. Behind him, there is a large building with many windows" title="A depiction of a man condemned to be burned on the orders of the Inquisition (Image by Getty Images)" /> But Doña Gracia had no intention of giving up her fortune so easily. Before departing for Antwerp, she had also set the second part of her plan in action. She had applied to the Vatican for a ‘Safe Conduct’, a super-passport valid throughout Christian Europe and which overrode any local laws preventing someone from travelling abroad. Throughout her life, Doña Gracia believed in doing what she could to maximise her chances of success. Her skills went beyond protecting her own family. Not only did she take the helm of her late husband’s business, an unusual enough development in itself in the late Renaissance era, but she assumed a leadership role within the converso community. With the threat of the Inquisition looming, Doña Gracia began to expand a nascent escape network that spirited members of the community out of danger and helped them travel to the Ottoman empire, which offered a haven for Europe’s Jewish community. In 1536, with the formal establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, the situation for conversos in the country grew even more perilous. Read more | Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: the history of a city of many names Speaking truth to power In 1553, Doña Gracia too would relocate to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), but in the latter half of the 1530s her focus was on building a new life in Antwerp. Yet here, she encountered many of the same problems she had faced in Portugal. The rulers, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and his sister, Mary of Austria, who acted as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, were quick to pick up where the Portuguese king had left off. The royal duo tried to pledge young Ana to a marriage that would be advantageous to them. Summoned to Mary’s palace to approve the match with Don Francisco D’Aragon – an illegitimate Spanish nobleman and descendant of the royal house of Aragon – Doña Gracia played for time, repeatedly implying she was sick. But she was so opposed to the union that she was reported as saying she would rather see her daughter drown – an audacious and insulting remark. Doña Gracia didn’t back down. She told Mary that she was furious about how Ana’s selected suitor had blamed the continuing persecution of conversos on Doña Gracia’s own obstinacy. Doña Gracia’s confrontational manner shocked Mary, a blue blood who had been queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia before she was widowed and became governor. Once again, Doña Gracia was forced to leave, fleeing to the Republic of Venice in 1544. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463914533-e7876ff-e1768986146801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large snaked line of people processing through a town square, surrounded by white building with blue and orange roofs. A crowd watches on as hundreds of men in black cloaks walk behind one another" title="An 18th century depiction of the procession of criminals sentenced by the Inquisition of Lisbon. As the persecution intensified, Doña Gracia helped many to flee to Constantinople (Image by Getty Images)" /> Compounding her difficulties, Doña Gracia did not even have the support of her own family. While in Antwerp, Diogo had died and named Doña Gracia as the guardian of his infant daughter rather than the child’s own mother – his wife and Doña Gracia’s sister, Brianda, who was talked of as untrustworthy. This so angered Brianda that, when both were living in Venice, she betrayed Doña Gracia as a secret Jew. In 1549, Doña Gracia again had to flee, this time to Ferrara, a tolerant duchy in northern Italy. Throughout, Doña Gracia continued to be a leader among her people, despite facing many setbacks. At one point, she helped lead a boycott of the Italian port of Ancona in retaliation for the burning of more than 20 conversos by the Italian Inquisition – an outrageous act even by the standards of the era. But the boycott was not a success in the long run because the Jewish merchants in the Ottoman empire who used the port could not agree on a combined strategy. Doña Gracia also failed in efforts to persuade the Venetians to give the conversos one of their lagoon islands as a place to settle. Read more | “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history Life in the open But Doña Gracia’s sheer persistence also paid off. In 1553, she settled in Constantinople with her entourage. Here, she could live publicly as a Jew. Moreover, she persuaded Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman empire, to grant her a long-term lease on Tiberias (in present-day Israel). She helped finance the rebuilding of a city that nestles on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it became a refuge for those conversos wishing to live in their own semi-autonomous area. Doña Gracia thus headed one of the earliest attempts to found a modern Jewish state in the Middle East. Her efforts here likely saved a significant portion of the ethnic Jewish world at a critical juncture in its history. She planned to settle in the region herself and built a mansion in Tiberias, but she died in Constantinople in 1569. In the years since, knowledge of Doña Gracia’s remarkable life has gradually faded, but that may be changing. Four years ago – during a period when the State Archives in Modena, northern Italy were closed because of the pandemic – archivist Alberto Palladini took advantage of the peace and quiet to clean out a box of old letters. It included two from Doña Gracia. These showed she spelled her last name as Nacy, not Nasi as the historical record currently suggests. It’s a small detail, but significant, if only because it hints at the possibility of further revelations should researchers go looking, which seems likely given the current interest in the lives of powerful women whose place in history has been under-appreciated. As for Doña Gracia herself, she certainly never sold herself short. As the seal for her correspondence, she used the Lion of Judah. This suggests she saw herself not just as a rich and successful businesswoman and philanthropist, but as someone descended from the House of David, a Jewish royal. Andrée Aelion Brooks is a journalist and lecturer. Her books include Russian Dance: A True Story of Intrigue and Passion in Stalinist Moscow (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Uncontacted peoples: why do nearly 200 groups choose to live outside 'civilisation'?
"These are the last humans who have stayed outside 'civilisation'", writes Michael Wood
A new report by Survival International, Uncontacted Peoples: At the Edge of Survival, is the latest accounting of the human story – and it is a historical document of unparalleled power. It reveals that at least 196 groups in the world are still uncontacted, most of them gravely threatened by logging, mining and drilling for oil. These are the last human beings who have stayed outside ‘civilisation’ since the violence of the West reached across the globe after 1492. The report cast my mind back 25 years to when we made a series of four films telling the story of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Cortés, Pizarro, Orellana, Cabeza de Vaca: these were men who experienced some of the most incredible adventures in human history. We tracked them on the ground, following in their footsteps over the Andes, up Inca trails to lost cities, and rafting down the Amazon. The third film was especially powerful in its implications for the here and now, as well as the events of the 16th century. It told the story of the expedition led out of Quito in 1541 by Gonzalo Pizarro (younger half-brother of Francisco, who spearheaded the conquest of the Inca empire). Its goal was to find the fabled El Dorado – ‘the Golden Man’ – a mythical city of gold believed to exist somewhere in the jungles beyond the Andes. The city was, in fact, unfindable – because it never existed. In trackless terrain, the expedition ran into disaster: soaked by incessant rains, running out of food, the men were reduced to eating their horses and cooking their boot leather. Francisco Orellana pushed onward in a home-made boat to scout what lay ahead, but such was the speed of the river that he couldn’t make his way back to the rest of the men. Read more | “Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society” After untold sufferings, the survivors of the main army made it back to Quito nearly a year and a half later. Meanwhile, after many adventures, Orellana sailed eastward, navigating the entire length of the Amazon. He was the first European to see the interior of Amazonia at a time when the middle reaches of the river supported huge settlements. Then, from the mouth of the great river, he sailed back north to Trinidad, completing one of the most astounding stories of human endurance. On our journey, a parallel narrative unfolded. Down the main course of the Amazon, everyone told us that the water levels were fast receding. Climate researchers had just announced that, at the rate of climate change then observed, the Amazon forest would start to transform into savannah in 2042 – coincidentally, the 500th anniversary of the Orellana expedition. If that happened, the climate cycle would be broken, the weight of history literally tipping the balance. Along the route, we heard stories of indigenous peoples in the depths of the forest. In the river town of Coca in Ecuador, a man told us how, as a youngster, he had lived with the Waorani tribe before he moved to the town and learned Spanish. He told of the struggles of those who chose to stay out of the modern world. One group steadfastly refused all contact; another had killed US missionaries who had not respected their wishes to be left alone. For them, he said, the price of receiving the white man’s god was degradation, alcoholism, and the loss of their own language, culture and identity. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think The Survival International report features the story of one such people, the Mashco Piro in the Madre de Dios region of Peru – perhaps the single largest remaining uncontacted group. Not long after our journeys for the Conquistadors films, haunted by the beauty and tragedy of Peru, I went back with my family. We stayed in the Manu region with local people who lived off the forests and drew sustenance from the river. Beyond them was a checkpoint and a protected region extending 100 miles to the Madre de Dios river where outsiders may not go – and where the Survival report shows the Mashco Piro still live. So I read the report, with its haunting photos, feeling a sense of profound sadness. The holocaust of indigenous peoples is almost complete. The pattern is the same across the world over the past 500 years: the taking of the land, the extermination of native people and the plundering of the environment, fuelled by white supremacy, evangelical religion, western diseases and sheer greed. And now, five centuries on from the conquest of the Americas, across the entire planet only a few thousand of our ancient brothers and sisters hang on – people who simply do not wish to be contacted. What does that say about us? This column was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From Churchill to Vietnam: protests that changed the world
With the police about to be given broader powers to tackle disruptive events, the right to protest is in the spotlight. Timothy Garton Ash and Katrina Navickas join Danny Bird to discuss the history of popular demonstrations
Danny Bird: What is a protest? What distinguishes it from a riot or a revolution? Katrina Navickas: A protest is often defined by law, making it a fluid and changeable term. In England and Wales, its meaning has evolved over time. The earliest legal definition dates to the 1714 Riot Act, which distinguished a riot from other forms of protest. The modern idea of a demonstration emerged in the 19th century alongside the rise of democratic movements. Protest came to mean people gathering publicly to make collective claims – a reflection of the growing concept of ‘the people’ and their role in politics. However, what counts as a protest still depends on context: the country, the circumstances and the legal boundaries of what is permitted in public spaces. Timothy Garton Ash: Historically, revolution was associated with violence, but modern protest is defined by nonviolent action. Think of Gandhi in India, the Civil Rights movement in the US, or People Power in the Philippines [in 1986, resulting in the overthrow of the Marcos regime]. The revolutionary events of 1989 in eastern Europe were particularly notable because they brought together nonviolence and revolution for the first time. In essence, protest is about people power – collective, peaceful demonstration as a means of change. What makes a protest ultimately successful? Is it timing, tactics, leadership or something peculiar to a moment in history? TGA: In the book I co-edited with Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance and Power Politics (OUP, 2009), we examined 18 cases over a century, from Gandhi to the more recent ‘colour revolutions’ in former Soviet and Yugoslav republics. One point is clear: protest alone is never enough. It requires favourable internal and external conditions to succeed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WHA0173278webready-6200492-e1767782763339.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of people, standing together in white robes" title="Mahātmā Gandhi – shown on a peace march in 1947 during the partition of India – used nonviolent resistance to campaign for Indian independence and the end of British rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> For example, the 1989 revolutions succeeded where many Arab Spring protests did not because their surrounding circumstances were vastly different. Successful movements also have a clear strategy and they’re not merely expressions of anger or moral outrage. Effective protest involves understanding how to influence and divide those in power. Read more | The violent history of student protest KN: I often refer to the idea of critical mass, which is the point a movement gains enough public support to create real momentum. That usually depends on an ideological or belief shift, as well as favourable conditions. Successful protests often arise when the state is weakened – for instance, after wars or during major economic crises – creating opportunities to mobilise support. At such times, the forces of law and order may also be less capable of suppressing dissent. Even the strongest movement needs both structural openings and a sense among people that success is possible. Why does protest continue to make societies uneasy even in countries that pride themselves on free expression? KN: In Britain’s case, particularly in England and Wales, there was no statutory right to assembly or free speech until the Human Rights Act of 1998. Until then, the right to protest was effectively permissive rather than guaranteed. Throughout the 20th century, much of the legislation was designed to manage the far right and other regressive forces, which created tensions around freedom of speech and assembly. A key example came in 1936, with debates over whether Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists should be allowed to march. Questions arose over who could prevent such meetings, particularly those held in private venues, and whether police had the authority to intervene based on what was said. These tensions persist today: the balance between protecting free expression and preventing disorder remains delicate. TGA: Even in the freest societies, freedom is never unlimited. The freedoms of speech and assembly are constrained; if they were not, we would encounter philosopher Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, where unlimited tolerance can ultimately destroy tolerance itself by empowering the enemies of democracy. In authoritarian regimes, the issue is simpler: governments fear protest because it allows people to speak and find their voice. The pivotal moment is breaking that barrier of fear. For instance, in autumn 1989 in Leipzig, two friends attended a demonstration against the East German regime. As they walked, more people joined at each street corner… 10, 12, 200, then 1,000. This ‘cascade effect’ demonstrates how critical mass can overcome fear, a prospect that terrifies authoritarian rulers: consider Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu’s facial expression when he realised that the crowd was openly booing him on 21 December 1989. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2220408825webready-194c494-e1767783458422.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a group of people leaning over a large number of lit candles on the floor" title="A candlelit mass protest in Leipzig in November 1989. The Monday Demonstrations, as these nonviolent gatherings were known, played a crucial role in ending the rule of communism in East Germany (Image by Getty Images)" /> How fair is it to say Britain’s history is one of evolution rather than revolution? KN: I often blame the Victorians for the myth of steady, moderate progress. The story of peaceful reform in Britain ignored harsh realities faced elsewhere. For a long time, for instance, Ireland was treated as a testing ground for extreme policing, public order measures and restrictions on constitutional rights. Even within Britain itself, progress was rarely smooth. TGA: Protest always involves risk – putting your body in situations where you might be attacked or, in extreme cases, killed. Sometimes, violence from the state backfires, galvanising wider support. The Tolpuddle Martyrs and, in Ireland, the Bloody Sunday massacres both illustrate this. How has protest been legislated and policed throughout history? KN: In Britain, general public order legislation arrived relatively late. Historically, most laws targeted specific political or social movements rather than applying broadly. In the 19th century, measures focused on the Chartists, trade unions or suffragettes. Even in the 20th century, legislation was often aimed at particular crises: the 1936 laws addressed fascist and communist unrest in the East End of London, while measures in 1986 targeted striking miners or football hooligans. Recent legislation, including that of 2022–23, is broader in scope, but it still arises in reaction to specific groups dominating public attention – for example environmental and black rights movements. This reactive approach represents a continuity throughout British history. TGA: Authoritarian governments can invent almost any justification to suppress protest. In democracies, the situation depends on whether constitutional protections exist. In the US, the First Amendment protects free speech; in Germany, experience with two dictatorships has led to clear constitutional guarantees of assembly. The UK has no written constitution. Over the past 30 years, piecemeal legislation, often poorly drafted and confusing, has slowly restricted protest. How do the spaces in which protest occurs help to shape it? KN: All protest is, at its core, a claim to public space. Demonstrations are associated with squares, streets and civic areas – town halls, county halls and other symbolic sites. Protesters assert their presence as ‘the public’ within these spaces, often choosing locations of national significance such as Trafalgar Square, built between the 1820s and 1840s and long regarded as Britain’s foremost public space. Throughout history, protesters have deliberately occupied symbolic sites to challenge authority or reshape public narratives. In London, battles over access to Hyde Park were especially significant. Although political gatherings were banned there because it was a royal park, the Reform League’s demonstrations of the 1860s, in which supporters tore down fences to enter, forced change. Speaker’s Corner emerged from this as a legal compromise established by the 1872 Parks Regulation Act, designating a specific area where people could speak freely without permission. Even modern tactics, such as ‘locking on’, have historical roots: suffragettes chained themselves to the gates of Downing Street to demand visibility and access. From the 18th century to the present day, controlling the geography of protest has remained central to how the state manages dissent. Read more | Female activism: 10 remarkable protests from around the world TGA: Protests are also a form of political theatre, and public squares are their grand stages. Consider Tiananmen Square, the focal point of the Chinese protests in 1989. Or Wenceslas Square in Prague during the Velvet Revolution that same year, where 300,000 people gathered under the direction of Václav Havel – an actual dramatist turned leader – shaking their keys in unison to create an unforgettable sound. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2186457134webready-3fb663a-e1767783864589.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing very large crowds, holding up orange flags outside a large stone building with many windows and arches" title="Supporters of the opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko rally at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv in November 2004, after the election run-off was thought to be rigged against him (Image by Getty Images)" /> Similarly, Ukraine’s great protests have centred on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square, during the Orange Revolution of 2004–05 and again in the Revolution of Dignity in 2014–15, when it became known as the Euromaidan. In each case, the physical setting of the central square of the capital has been vital to the drama and symbolism of protest. The suffragettes, who used violent tactics, are often lauded for having been on the ‘right side’ of history. What does this say about the way historical protests are perceived by posterity? KN: Groups such as the East London Federation of Suffragettes carried out more spectacular actions when moderate, peaceful wings were failing to make progress. This tactical shift in the early 1900s was also highly media-savvy. The suffragettes understood early mass media, staging stunts designed to capture newspaper front pages. Other actions targeted politicians or property: Winston Churchill, post boxes, shops. Because the suffragettes ultimately succeeded, their militancy is incorporated into the national narrative as justified. Movements using similar tactics that fail rarely achieve such recognition; the losers are often excluded from stories of national progress. History can move backwards as well as forwards, but there is a tendency to view the British story as progressive, where ‘winners’ are celebrated and ‘losers’ forgotten. This explains why suffragette militancy is accepted, while comparable violence – for example, during Irish campaigns for independence – is not seen as necessary. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> TGA: So-called ‘freedom fighters’ who take up arms for independence are often celebrated as heroes if they succeed. History tends to memorialise those who eventually win, often decades after the events. An example is Oxford’s Martyrs’ Memorial, commemorating Protestant bishops who paid the ultimate price during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary and were celebrated only once their cause prevailed. In Czechoslovakia, the brave student Jan Palach set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion. Today, Jan Palach Square commemorates his sacrifice – a recognition that would not have been possible if the country had remained under Soviet control. There is a particular category of hero here: the martyr, someone who literally gives their life for a cause. Such figures occupy a special place in these narratives, because their extraordinary courage and ultimate sacrifice have universal resonance. How important has social class been in the history of protest? KN: When asked about the most successful protests or campaigns, examples often include the abolition of slavery and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 19th century. These movements were largely led by well-connected, relatively wealthy men and women who could exert influence in parliament. Their campaigns were single-issue, respectable, and financially supported, which allowed them to achieve legislative change. By contrast, working-class movements faced a far longer struggle to have their voices heard. Strict class hierarchies and limited resources made it harder to fund campaigns, influence policymakers, or sustain pressure. Yet, despite these constraints, working-class activists often achieved remarkable results with far fewer means than their wealthier counterparts, making their accomplishments all the more significant. TGA: Some protest movements are class-based, with the labour movement being the clearest example. However, protests tend to succeed most when they cross class boundaries and unite different parts of society, because rulers often employ a divide-and-rule strategy. A striking example is the Solidarity movement in Poland during the 1980s. This decade-long mass popular movement succeeded precisely because it united intelligentsia, workers and peasants. KN: This also marks a key difference in 20th century protests. In Britain and Ireland prior to the 1960s, movements were largely class-based, with the labour movement being the strongest. But protests then increasingly took the form of amorphous social movements, not tied to traditional party or trade union structures. These movements sought to connect local struggles with global causes such as environmental campaigns, the anti-Vietnam War movement, peace initiatives and anti-nuclear activism. They were typically more cross-class, framed as part of a wider global struggle rather than a narrow class-based conflict. TGA: One additional factor we haven’t discussed is age. There are striking examples of generational protest movements such as the one that swept across Europe in 1968, including Britain. Climate change activism has emerged as another. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> What can today’s protesters learn from their predecessors? KN: That raises a central question: how do you organise against repressive regimes? One key factor is achieving a critical mass – breaking out of silos of class or generation and creating a large, united group capable of overcoming fear. This remains a core goal of any successful protest movement. TGA: It is vital to learn from history. For example, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was violently suppressed, and the Czechoslovak attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact in 1968 was met with Soviet invasion. By 1980–81, activists in Poland were far more cautious, learning from these experiences. There are several key lessons. First, maintain nonviolence. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik warned: “Those who start by storming the Bastille may end up building their own Bastilles.” Nonviolence achieves more enduring results. Read more | Boston Tea Party: your guide to the protest that ignited a revolution Second, achieve a critical mass. Cascade effects and political theatre are essential, especially in the age of social media. A flash mob may appear impactful but, without sustained engagement, it disappears as quickly as it appeared. Third, develop a strategy. Clearly identify what you aim to change and how protest can effect that change. Non-violent movements succeed by targeting potential defectors within existing power structures – those who may be persuaded to switch allegiance. Protest has a promising future, but its lessons are best understood by studying the past. Timothy Garton Ash is Isaiah Berlin professorial fellow and professor of European studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Bodley Head, 2023) Katrina Navickas is professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire. Her books include Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France
The wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army captain in France in the late 19th century exposed antisemitism and virulent nationalism – but also, as Mike Rapport reveals, sparked a flood of ‘fake news’ that presaged the worst of the modern media landscape
In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bottle of rum, and killed himself. This desperate act was a pivotal moment in one of the best-known causes celebres in modern history: the Dreyfus Affair. The story of Henry’s suicide, following his arrest for forging a document in the controversial case, was co-opted by the nationalist rightwing media as part of a tidal wave of coverage that threatened to destabilise French democracy and public trust in the Republic. The background is well known today. In September 1894, Henry, a counter-espionage officer, had uncovered evidence of a mole within French military intelligence. A cleaner working in the German embassy (and in Henry’s pay) had found a memorandum, since dubbed the ‘bordereau’, written by an officer in the French General Staff revealing military secrets. The handwriting was identified as that of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain then working in the War Ministry, who was arrested, court-martialled, publicly degraded and hauled off to solitary confinement on the notoriously harsh penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. But the army had the wrong man. Contradictions and irregularities in the case soon began to appear. In August 1896, the new head of military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, was examining more papers stolen from the German embassy. The handwriting on one was identical to that in the bordereau used to convict Dreyfus – but the signature was that of Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissipated, debt-ridden, disreputable officer who had been selling secrets to the Germans for two years. Dreyfus, Picquart realised, was innocent. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL1756949-CMYKWeb-Ready-2c9d689.jpg" width="3683" height="2456" alt="An engraving shows a man lying dead on the floor, while a police officer kneels over him. Another police officer stands by his head, and two more officers are entering the room in the background" title="An engraving depicts the discovery of the suicide of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry following his arrest for forging a letter incriminating Dreyfus. Some thought his crime justifiable (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Ignoring the errors Even after this discovery, Dreyfus remained incarcerated for years longer because government officials, the army and large segments of public opinion refused to accept that a terrible error had been made. In part this was a result of the desire to maintain national security by authorities who were keen to avoid demoralising the army just as France secured a military alliance with the Russian empire, and amid heightened tensions with Germany following its annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region from France in 1871. But it was also due to the fact that Dreyfus was from Alsace, and Jewish – at a time when a virulent strain of antisemitism based on ‘scientific’ racism had emerged, and as antisemites of different political persuasions associated Jews with either socialism or capitalism. Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies These motives also played on a deeper division that had riven French society since 1789. There were those who, like Dreyfus himself, embraced the principles of the Revolution and its legacy as embodied in the Third Republic, founded in 1870. These included secularism, parliamentary democracy, civil equality and a world view exulting in science and human reason. Adherents of this strong current within French political culture generally became ‘Dreyfusards’ who supported the officer’s innocence. Their opponents saw 1789 as a fatal breach with France’s true historical destiny: Catholic, hierarchical and monarchical. More recently, this traditional conservatism had been joined by a new form of rightwing ideology promising social reform but which was also nationalist, authoritarian, antisemitic. Many of those with such views became ‘anti-Dreyfusard’, opposed to revisiting the case. These flames were stoked by a virulently partisan newspaper press that played a pivotal role in the battle for public opinion. Print media had experienced a boom stimulated by more rapid communications, the introduction of photographs into newspapers, an expansion in advertising, and new forms of printing technology that made periodicals quicker and cheaper to produce and more widely available. At that time, France had a particularly vibrant press. Free, compulsory and universal primary education for boys and girls from the early 1880s encouraged literacy, and a press law enacted in 1881 lifted almost all restrictions on what could be published, although this was rolled back in 1893 and 1894 after a spate of anarchist bombings. Journalists and publishers could be sued for slander, but cases were rarely successful. Between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the number of periodical titles mushroomed by 250 per cent. These publications included broadsheets and tabloid newspapers representing the whole range of political opinions from the radical left to the extreme right. Yet within this vibrant ecosystem of print lurked a danger that remains familiar in our age of social media, online news and artificial intelligence. It was all too easy to spread what we now call ‘fake news’ – misinformation (falsehoods spread unintentionally), disinformation (fabrications aimed at manipulating readers politically and socially) and malinformation (deception based on some truth, but twisted in such a way as to deceive). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1404448124cmykWeb-Ready-a0c4306.jpg" width="2374" height="1582" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing military uniform, including a hat with "74" written on the front. He has a large, heavy moustache" title="Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the officer who really wrote the treasonous memorandum attributed to Dreyfus. He was acquitted by a tribunal in 1898 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fake news During the Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper press was infused with ‘fake news’. Not for the last time, the episode exposed the friction between free speech on the one hand and, on the other hand, the challenges that arise when people of bad faith abuse that freedom, spreading falsehoods to manipulate public opinion, demonise certain groups of people, or undermine faith in the rule of law and democratic government. The Dreyfus case sparked a truly explosive public controversy after Walsin Esterhazy was finally tried – and acquitted with unseemly haste – by a military court in January 1898. On 13 January, novelist Émile Zola published J’Accuse…!, an open letter to the president of the Republic, in L’Aurore newspaper. He accused the government and army of committing a gross injustice and of conspiring to cover up the truth. He specifically highlighted and decried the antisemitism, militarism and authoritarianism behind the falsehoods: “It is a crime to lead public opinion astray,” Zola wrote, “to manipulate it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the humble, ordinary people, to whip reactionary and intolerant passions into a frenzy while sheltering behind the odious bastion of antisemitism… It is a crime to play on patriotism to further the aims of hatred.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-90758187cmykWeb-Ready-51ffbc8.jpg" width="2642" height="1761" alt="A yellow newspaper page with the headline "J'accuse!" written across the top" title="Émile Zola’s open letter to the president of the Republic, accusing the army and government of a cover-up in the Dreyfus Affair, exposed deep rifts in French society (Image by Getty Images)" /> Following Zola’s outburst, the Dreyfus Affair erupted into a full-scale public storm. Except on rare occasions, newspapers tended to reinforce the beliefs of their readership rather than challenge them with facts. Giving readers what they wanted to hear was partly driven by economics: the conservative Le Figaro, for example, had stopped publishing Zola’s articles towards the end of 1897 after he openly embraced the Dreyfusard cause, which hurt sales of the newspaper. Yet much of the fake news had an even more insidious purpose. Anti-Dreyfusard papers fuelled nationalist prejudices by targeting Jews; claimed to be defending the ‘honour’ of the army; and railed against the ‘unpatriotic’ manoeuvres of the Dreyfusards – all as a means of galvanising support for the assorted authoritarians, monarchists, nationalists and antisemites who loathed the Republic. It was not that the Dreyfusards were innocent of spreading fake news. Although much of what Zola wrote in J’Accuse…! turned out to be accurate, he did not get everything right, as he himself appeared to admit when he finished by saying that he would willingly submit to prosecution for defamation under the 1881 Press Law. Zola did, in fact, face prosecution in 1898, avoiding imprisonment only by slipping away in June to England and living there in exile for a year. Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history Even some leftwing Dreyfusard newspapers tended to casually use the antisemitic trope of the Jew as capitalist to explain popular hostility against Jews. Anti-Dreyfusard publications saw Jews, socialists and leftwing republicans as a ‘Syndicate of Treason’ (as the vitriolic journalist Henri Rochefort put it). However, the Dreyfusard press was prone to sharing conspiracy theories of its own, seeing its opponents as part of an interwoven plot involving the Catholic church and the nationalists, aiming to destroy the Republic and the inheritance of 1789. Yet the anti-Dreyfusard press had most of the running: of the 55 dailies published at the time, only eight came out as Dreyfusard from February 1898, almost all of them with relatively low circulation numbers. The media was dominated by anti-Dreyfusard titles, which had an almost open field in which to bombard readers with a swirl of half-truths and outright lies, stoking prejudices and stirring up fears. Forgiveable forgery One of the most egregious moments came in the wake of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry’s death. After his colleague, Picquart, had exposed Esterhazy as the real traitor in 1896, Henry had tried to bolster the case against Dreyfus by forging a letter that ‘proved’ his guilt, introducing it into the dossier of evidence. The ruse was successful until, as the pressure mounted over the course of 1898, the government investigated and discovered that forgery, leading to Henry’s arrest and suicide. For anti-Dreyfusard journalists, Henry’s crime was forgiveable: it was ‘patriotic’ because it served a higher cause – the security of the nation. Dreyfus was guilty anyway, they claimed; and even if he were innocent, those who sought to clear his name were traitors working for Germany. The virulently nationalist La Patrie accused Zola of doing untold harm to the army: “And since that day, the damage has surged in like a torrent, roared like a tempest. Who has not recognised in this tactic the workings of Bismarckian [ie German] politics?” The idea that Henry was a martyr to the cause of patriotism gained traction when the explicitly and graphically antisemitic La Libre Parole opened a subscription for the Lieutenant-Colonel’s widow, Berthe, which received no fewer than 25,000 donations. The newspaper published the many antisemitic and anti-republican messages sent along with the money. La Libre Parole means ‘Free Speech’, making it a case study for how prejudice and anti-democratic forces cloak themselves in the very freedoms that they seek to destroy or to deny to others. The Dreyfus case was – rightly or wrongly – seen as connected with both national security and the country’s future, so both sides entrenched themselves deeply within their positions. The more that the problems with Dreyfus’s conviction trickled out, the more the anti-Dreyfusards reinvigorated strategies that rested less on facts than on what is today called ‘gaslighting’ and on deflection, both of which involved stoking prejudices and demeaning opponents. Gaslighting, by which the perpetrator seeks to cast doubt on the truth, was deployed by Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, who in June 1898 assured his readers that Dreyfusards were merely “a clutch of cosmopolitans who always talk of pieces of paper and documents but never prove anything” – the term ‘cosmopolitan’ being a dog-whistle term denoting unpatriotic or Jewish people. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/RV185-14cmykWeb-Ready-bfe91fd.jpg" width="2464" height="1643" alt="The top image shows a man in a suit with a moustache sitting at a desk and looking to the right. The bottom image shows a bearded man wearing glasses attached to a string, looking directly into the camera" title="Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès (top) entreated readers to consider national security above the facts of the miscarriage of justice, in contrast with the moral arguments of Dreyfusard Émile Zola (Images by TopFoto and Getty Images)" /> Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès made a more sophisticated use of gaslighting. Nothing in the Dreyfus Affair was demonstrably true, he argued in Le Journal in February 1898, so “how do you intend… to undertake to solve the problem when you do not have all the data?” he demanded of the Dreyfusards. Barrès’ purpose was to cast doubt on the significance of the few facts that were, at that point, already public knowledge. He took this further by suggesting that there are some truths that are “foreign to individual reason”, and that national circumstances and interests were the true barometer of what was just and true. “It is necessary to judge things in the relative,” Barrès argued, opening the way for his readership to be secure in their prejudices – because for them the army’s honour and national security were more important than the facts of any miscarriage of justice. Anti-Dreyfusard newspapers tried in various ways to deflect their readers’ attention away from the question of the convicted man’s innocence and onto other targets. This was a strategy behind the argument that Henry’s forgery was ‘patriotic’: his crime was minor compared to the real danger, which would be the victory of the Dreyfusards, who were no better than traitors. La Patrie proclaimed in September 1898: “Let us leave those cosmopolitans from Frankfurt to howl with joy over the tomb of that modest child of French soil [Henry]… Let us turn away with disgust from the spectacle of the odious triumph of the worst enemies of the army and of the country.” In that one sentence, the newspaper connected the Dreyfusards with treason, with Germany and Jews (‘cosmopolitans’), and with the ignominy of defeat – ‘Frankfurt’ being a reference to the humiliating peace treaty with Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Demeaning caricatures At the same time, the anti-Dreyfusard press demeaned their opponents, caricaturing them as effeminate wimps, sexually sterile and highly strung, and contrasted them with the muscular, virile masculinity of the army officers whom they were accused of attacking. Zola was frequently depicted with simian characteristics: hairy, fat, thick-lipped. Dreyfus and other Jewish figures were ascribed the whole range of antisemitic tropes. La Libre Parole compared the ‘French’ femininity of Henry’s widow, Berthe, with the Jewish Dreyfusard Joseph Reinach, who was “puffy, swarthy, sweaty, stomach bulging”. For some, it did not even matter that Dreyfus was innocent: he was Jewish, so for the nationalists the greater ‘truth’ was that he could never be French. The process of gaslighting and deflection combined to stoke prejudices and popular fears, fogging out the original question of Dreyfus’s innocence. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution Yet a denouement was eventually reached. In February 1899, President Félix Faure – who opposed reopening Dreyfus’s case – died of a brain haemorrhage. He was succeeded by a Dreyfusard, Émile Loubet, whose election by parliament prompted an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue antisémitique, who provided the street muscle of the anti-Dreyfusard movement. In June, the appeals court quashed Dreyfus’s conviction and ordered a retrial, which took place in August and September 1899 in Rennes – Paris being deemed too dangerous. Shockingly, the military tribunal again found the captain guilty. President Loubet issued a formal pardon, but Dreyfus was not officially cleared until 1906. He returned to the army, serving with merit in the First World War. The Dreyfus Affair showed how, when the stakes were high and when divisions ran deep, a torrent of half-truths, lies, deflection, the stoking of fear and prejudices, and appeals to ‘patriotism’ made it difficult for citizens to make informed decisions. It also demonstrated that many citizens were content to have their prejudices reaffirmed rather than critically examined. This is why Barrès’ argument that the nation had needs that were above reason and truth was so corrosive to democratic politics. The principle that truth, justice and legality could be judged only according to national interests allowed readers to indulge in a kind of relativism that justified falsehoods and injustice in pursuit of a conception of France that excluded groups who were the bogeymen of the nationalist right: Jews, foreigners, Protestants, Freemasons, socialists and others. It also exposed the spiky question that every democracy faces when freedom of expression becomes a means of undermining confidence and trust in its institutions: how to defend itself without infringing the very liberties that are its essence. Ultimately, the lesson of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in an age of mass media, citizens not only need to be equipped to make the honest effort to assess critically their sources of information and to examine their positions with verifiable evidence: they have to be willing to do so. In December 1898, L’Aurore understood that this was essential to the survival of democracy: “It is for citizens to inform themselves, to think, to use their will; it is for them to reform their morals, to no longer let themselves be taken for fools or as things to be juggled with and to emancipate themselves, not by force, but by ideas.” We need, the newspaper concluded, to “enlighten [our] brains, not slice them open!” Mike Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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