Black People who changed the world
Historians & Journalists
‘Lucy’ (c. 3.2 MYA)
Discovered in 1974, the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of an adult female hominid in Ethiopia, christened ‘Lucy’, remains the earliest example of a member of the humans genus to be found, and is the cornerstone of modern palaeoanthropology. Several similar discoveries, including a 2.3 million-year-old jawbone in the Hadar region of Ethiopia offer empirical proof that the human species evolved in East Africa.
Ibn Battuta (1304-1368)
Born in Tangier, Morocco, Battuta was an extensive traveller. His journals, written in a variety of locations in the world- spanning from the Mandé empire in present-day Mali and Guinea to Yuan dynasty China- greatly expanded geographical knowledge of the world, and his records of the cultures he encountered, particularly in the Sahara, mark him as one of the most major ethnographers in modern history.
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)
Born in Benin, Equiano was kidnapped and sold into slavery at age 11. Being sold to several successive masters, Equiano experienced horrific abuse as a slave, but at the age of 21 bought his freedom with the little money he had been able to save; one year later he became the first Black member of the London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1789 he published his account of his life as a slave, The Life Of Olaudah Equiano the African, which became an international bestseller and the most important book of the abolitionist movement, and became de facto spokesperson for the Black British community. He died on an expedition to resettle freed slaves in Sierra Leone.
Claudia Jones (1915-60)
Born in Trinidad, Jones immigrated with her family to New York at the age of 8. From 1933 onwards, she began to play a role of increasing importance in the American Communist Party, becoming in 1948 the editor for Negro Affairs for the party’s paper the Daily Worker, a role in which Jones also garnered interest as one of the first prominent Black feminists in the Western world. Deported by McCarthy in 1955, Jones spent the remainder of her life in Britain, where in 19595 she founded the West Indian Gazette, the UK’s first Black community newspaper, and more indelibly in 1959 the Notting Hill Carnival, the largest annual festival celebrating the Black immigrant community in the world.
Stephen Lawrence (1974-1993), Doreen and Neville Lawrence
Murdered in a racially motivated knife attack when aged only 18, Lawrence’s death highlighted not only how much work needed still to be done to promote harmony between the different ethnic groups in Britain but also the still widespread racism in certain sections of the police force. Despite being given the names of five suspects within 24 hours of Lawrence’s murder, the police did not make any arrests for two weeks, allowing witnesses and evidence crucial to any trial attempts to be intimidated and destroyed. Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville, carried out their own investigations, including finding a video made in 1994 of the five suspects holding knives and pretending to kill Black people, eventually forcing the suspects to be called to trial in 1996. During the trial, the police intentionally denigrated the testimony of Duwayne Williams, a surviving victim of the attack; the suspects were acquitted. The Lawrences pressed for an inquiry to be held into police action during the trial, and in 1999 the result, the MacPherson Report, concluded that the police had continually acted against the legal process in both the murder investigation and trial, and caused a mass change in police training methods. Doreen and Neville Lawrence were both awarded OBEs for their work and continue to campaign against racism; Stephen Lawrence was buried in Jamaica.
