When the war began, Britian was a racially homogeneous country with not more than 8,000 black residents, most of them concentrated in London and several other port cities. The vast majority of towns and villages did not contain a single black resident, and many English people had never encountered a person of color. England was overwhelmingly white by design and the government wanted to keep it that way. It forbade “coloured British subjects” of the empire from settling in—for them—the inaptly named mother country. Nor had the government wanted black American GIs. When America entered the war,
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