General/History

• "Blacks in Great Britain," a short but comprehensive historical essay by Leyla Keough (Africana.com)
• "A short history of immigration" (BBC's Race UK)
• Black Presence: Asian and Black History in Britain, 1500-1850 (British National Archives) is cryptically designed, but highly informative. The galleries entitled "Early Times," "Work and Community," and "Culture" are especially useful. (Use the sidebars to navigate among the subsections within galleries, or simply go to the site index to choose a particular subsection.)
• Sadly (and unforgiveably), the BBC has taken its "Windrush" site devoted to Black British history and culture off-line. (The site was named after the S.S. Empire Windrush, the ship whose arrival in England from the Caribbean in July 1948 inaugurated the first wave of postwar Black and Asian immigration to the UK).  A handful of pages from that site have migrated to other BBC locations:
  • Mike Phillips, "Windrush: The Passengers" (a historical overview of blacks in Britain since 1948)
  • Onyekachi Wambu, "Black British Literature Since Windrush" (Wambu is editor of Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black Britain)
  • Windrush--Arrivals (transcriptions of oral histories of Windrush passengers)
• Channel 4's "Untold" is a superb (and continually developing) site supporting its 1999 "Black History Season."  It has pages devoted to Britain's Slave Trade, a mutiny by British West Indian soldiers after World War I, the 1981 racial uprisings across England, and "Brown Babies"--the children of white English mothers and black American GI's during World War II.  Each unit includes a lengthy program summary and a page of related links and recommended further reading.  Another really superb site from Channel 4 is its interactive "Black and Asian History Map," which it describes as "a gateway to websites about black and Asian history across the British Isles."
• Migration Histories (MovingHere.org.uk) assembles archival documents, photos, film and sound clips on Caribbean, Irish, Jewish, and South Asian immigration into Britain--a splendid site.
• NPR's Morning Edition for June 22, 1998 aired a story on the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in England (RealAudio--highly recommended)
• How many black people are there in Britain? (a summary of statistics taken from the 1991 census)
• The Black Presence in Britain (a private site constructed by Phil Gregory)
• Generations Journey: an interactive archive of Afro-Caribbean oral history in Kirklees, West Yorkshire
• Liverpool's Black Roots:  an annual Summer School Program offered by the University of Liverpool

Arts & Culture/Business/Current Affairs

• Transforming the Crown: African, Asian & Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996 (a traveling exhibition organized by the Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diaspora Institute, New York)
  • Curator's Essay (by Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd), "Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996"
• Holland Cotter, "Roots of Empire: Britain's Black Artists" (New York Times 4 December 1998)
• Sukhdev Sandhu, "The Thin Black Line" (Obsever 16 July 2000:  a review article of two new surveys of Black British writing)
• The Chronicle ("Britain's first Internet magazine monitoring Britain's Black urban communities")
• Black Britain Online ("the leading Black oriented Web Site in the UK, focusing on Black professionals and business leaders")
• "BLINK": The Black Information Link
• Site devoted to Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay (created by HSU English students)

Race Relations/Civil Rights

• The London Guardian's comprehensive site devoted to Race in Britain
• The BBC's comparable but somewhat more smiley-faced site, "Race UK"
• Institute of Race Relations
  • Online Resources
  • So you think you know about racism and British black history? (an online quiz)
  • How many black people are there in Britain? (a summary of statistics taken from the 1991 census)
• Campaign Against Racism & Fascism
  • "Law, Order and the Politics of Convergence" (1997 article on police harassment of racial and ethnic minorities in contemporary Britain)
• The Runnymede Trust, a liberal thinktank on race and ethnicity, sponsor of the October 2000 "Parekh Report" of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain
• The website of the Commission for Racial Equality (UK Government Agency) includes a useful page on "Ethnic Diversity" in the UK
• "Immigration, Labor, and Race in the United Kingdom" (Migration Policy Institute)

Theory/Criticism

• "'Tings and Times': Poetry, Performance and the Vogue for Black Britain," a paper I presented at a conference on "Poetry and the Public Sphere" at Rutgers University in 1998. (It also appears, slightly revised, in the journal Transition #74 [HSU users only].)
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Blacks in  London" (Africana.com; originally appeared in The New Yorker)
• Dianne Abbott, MP, "Multi-racial Britain"