Black and British: A Forgotten History

by David Olusoga

Harriet Jacobs wrote that being in Britain felt like ‘a great millstone had been lifted from my breast’, as ‘for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion’.36 This might be because British racism was mild in comparison to the strains they had known in the United States, and was therefore deemed to be not worth reporting. But as a key strategy of the abolitionists was to lionize Britain and repudiate America, they also had a clear motivation for under-reporting the racism that was a feature of British culture. In The Heroic Slave, his novella of 1853, Douglass had his central character explain that to be an American slave in Britain was to nestle ‘in the mane of the British lion, protected by his mighty paw from the talons and the beak of the American eagle’.37 The character into whose mouth Douglass placed those words was a slave on board the Creole, the American ship seized by the slaves on board and diverted to the Bahamas in 1841, in order to find their own safety.