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

by David Olusoga

Of the seven hundred black people who were forced to take shelter from white mobs in the Liverpool bridewells in the summer of 1919, around eighty were soldiers or sailors recently discharged from their war service.63 Many of these black men were viewed by the mobs as foreigners with no legitimate claims to Britishness or British residency, but were nothing of the sort: they were men who had volunteered for service and put themselves at risk of injury or death only to find themselves assaulted on the streets and in their homes by other Britons who regarded their skin colour as incontrovertible evidence that they were not and could never be British. Those who were British-born were also notionally stripped of their nationality and identity by the racial thinking that informed and fuelled the indiscriminate racial violence of 1919.