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

by David Olusoga

The cultural penetration of minstrel music, and later of genuine African American spiritual music, from which the minstrels had borrowed, was remarkable. Minstrel tunes were ubiquitous. Karl Marx, then resident in London, was said to have sung minstrel songs and taught them to his children. In addition to the flow of minstrel music into Victorian family life, terms and slang that were used in minstrel songs and in blackface stage acts infiltrated everyday speech, and not just that of the poor. Among the words that surface in the letters of even the highly respectable are ‘Mammy’ and the N-word. Charles Darwin, writing to his wife Emma in a letter of May 1848, signed off, ‘Your old nigger—C.D’.