Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

They were fine words, but black Britons who could recall 1919, or who had experienced the colour bar and the prejudice of the inter-war years, knew that they offered a highly idealized view of Britain and British race relations. Yet the attempts – both official and impromptu – by the Americans to enforce racial segregation, and the unabashed and overt prejudice that the US Army brought with it to Britain, allowed the press and public to adopt a position of moral superiority on the issue of race, as their ancestors had done over the issue of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. Racial prejudice was considered an American vice that the more civilized and culturally sophisticated British rejected.