Tag: BBC News Magazine

  • About 100,000 black GIs were stationed in the UK during the war. Inevitably there were love affairs, but US laws usually prevented black servicemen from marrying. So what happened to the children they fathered?

  • When Trudy Menard and Barclay Patoir told friends and family they were going to get married, no-one thought it was a good idea – because Trudy was white and Barclay was black.

  • The black people ‘erased from history’ BBC News Magazine 2016-04-10 Arlene Gregorius, BBC Mexico More than a million people in Mexico are descended from African slaves and identify as “black”, “dark” or “Afro-Mexican” even if they don’t look black. But beyond the southern state of Oaxaca they are little-known and the community’s leaders are now…

  • Our story about the forced repatriation of Chinese sailors who had been recruited for the Merchant Navy during World War Two told of the devastation for those families left behind. Barbara Janecek shared her own tale in response.

  • After World War Two ended, the British government forcibly repatriated hundreds of Chinese sailors who had been recruited for the Merchant Navy. Their sudden departure had a devastating effect on families left behind, like that of Yvonne Foley.

  • The Japanese women who married the enemy BBC News Magazine 2015-08-16 Vanessa Barford Seventy years ago many Japanese people in occupied Tokyo after World War Two saw US troops as the enemy. But tens of thousands of young Japanese women married GIs nonetheless – and then faced a big struggle to find their place in…

  • Today it’s taken for granted that people of all ethnic groups should be treated equally in the armed forces and elsewhere. But as Leslie Gordon Goffe writes, during World War One black officers in the British armed forces faced a system with prejudice at its core.

  • Mo Asumang: Confronting racism face-to-face BBC News Magazine 2014-05-13 Mo Asumang is the daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother. As a well-known TV presenter in Germany she became the target of racist extreme right-wingers and neo-Nazis, who based their attacks on Asumang’s “non-Aryan” background. So she decided to look into…

  • Return to the rainforest: A son’s search for his Amazonian mother BBC News Magazine 2013-08-28 William Kremer BBC World Service David Good’s parents come from different countries – hardly unusual in the US where he was raised. But the 25-year-old’s family is far from ordinary – while his father is American, his mother is a…

  • Anglo-Indians: Is their culture dying out? BBC News Magazine 2013-01-03 Kris Griffiths A product of the British Empire, with a mixture of Western and Indian names, customs and complexions, 2,000 Anglo-Indians are to attend a reunion in Calcutta. But their communities in both the UK and the subcontinent are disappearing, writes Anglo-Indian Kris Griffiths. Southall…