Black British history

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is media, culture and creative industries lecturer Sarah Jilani. We start in 1954 with the Japanese film Seven Samurai which is widely considered to be one of world ci ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear how a speech by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, in 1972, caused a break down in relations with the USA. Our guest is an expert in the historic relations between Swede ...  Show more

There remains a tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush. Yet, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isl ...

During World War Two, tens of thousands of African-American US servicemen passed through the UK as part of the war effort. The black GIs stationed in Britain were forced by the American military to abide by the racial segregation laws that applied in the deep south of the US. But ...  Show more

Sixties Britain didn’t swing for all its citizens – with racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and the spectre of unemployment affecting many black and Asian Britons. But those affected were determined to fight for their rights. Speaking to Rhiannon Davies, Preeti Dhillon revisits th ...  Show more

A 109 year old Black woman fights for reparations for her neighborhood that was burned to the ground when she was a child. The first woman on to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List was a Black Panther. The richest person of all time, an African king, gave away so much gold that ...  Show more