{"id":49358,"date":"2016-10-08T02:11:55","date_gmt":"2016-10-08T02:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=49358"},"modified":"2016-10-08T02:11:55","modified_gmt":"2016-10-08T02:11:55","slug":"britains-black-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=49358","title":{"rendered":"Britain’s Black Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain’s Black Past<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

BBC Radio 4
\n2016-10-03<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Invisible Presence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Professor Gretchen Gerzina<\/a> explores a largely unknown past – the lives of black people who settled in Britain<\/a> in the 18th and early 19th centuries.<\/p>\n

She reveals a startling paradox – although Britain was at the heart of a thriving slave trade, it was still possible for many black people to live here in freedom and prosperity. A few even made it to the very top of fashionable society.<\/p>\n

But there were others who were brought over by slave-owners from the West Indies<\/a> and who were never free, despite living for the rest of their lives in Glasgow<\/a> or Bristol<\/a> or London<\/a>. Some took the law into their own hands, and managed to free themselves, others went further and advocated violent revolution. Free or unfree, they all saw Britain as a place of opportunity that could become a home.<\/p>\n

Over two weeks, Professor Gerzina travels across Britain and talks to historians, unearthing new evidence about Britain’s black past. From a country estate in Chepstow<\/a>, via the docks of Liverpool<\/a>, to grand houses in London and Bristol, she evokes the daily texture of black people’s lives.<\/p>\n

In the first programme in the series, Professor Gerzina travels to Sunderland Point<\/a> to discover a remote grave in the corner of a windswept field – a memorial to a young black cabin boy, abandoned on the coast by his slave-owning master. This poignant story sparks questions about how we remember black figures from the past.<\/p>\n

Listen to the episode (00:13:15) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Britain’s Black Past BBC Radio 4 2016-10-03 The Invisible Presence Professor Gretchen Gerzina explores a largely unknown past – the lives of black people who settled in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries. She reveals a startling paradox – although Britain was at the heart of a thriving slave trade, it was still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2850,459,8,6940,10],"tags":[25163,25164],"class_list":["post-49358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-uk","tag-gretchen-gerzina","tag-gretchen-holbrook-gerzina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49359,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49358\/revisions\/49359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}