General/History

• "Black British" (Wikipedia)
• "A short history of immigration" (BBC's Race UK)
• "General Timeline of Blacks in Britain" (Cultural Studies in the Aftican Diaspora Project, Bunch Center, UCLA)
• 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. 
• 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.
• "Britain: The World in One Country" (London Guardian) starts with a Flash-based map showing the distribution of people of various ethnicies across Britain. Click on a region of the map for access to a series of individual profiles.
• 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) (direct link)
• How many black people are there in Britain? (a summary of statistics taken from the 2001 census--Institute of Race Relations)
• Liverpool's Black Roots:  an annual Summer School Program offered by the University of Liverpool

Arts & Culture

• 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)
• Black Presence in National Gallery Paintings (National Gallery)
• Victoria & Albert Museum:
  • Black Heritage Programme
  • Black British Style
• Sukhdev Sandhu, "The Thin Black Line" (Obsever 16 July 2000:  a review article of two new surveys of Black British writing)
• "Black British Literature" (Prof. Patrick Muana's course page at Texas A & M university): syllabus includes pages with links to articles & interviews on Selvon, Phillips, Emecheta, Adebayo, and Smith
• Site devoted to Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay (created by HSU English students)

Blogs/Education/Current Affairs

• Chronicleworld's Weblog ("Creative Renewal of Black Britain & the African Diaspora") and Chronicleworld's Archives ("The premier independent Internet magazine focusing on the Black African Caribbean experience in Britain and the African diaspora")
• "BLINK": The Black Information Link
• The Black Presence [in Britain] (a blog by Phil Gregory)

Race Relations/Civil Rights

• The London Guardian's slightly dated but still valuable site devoted to Race in Britain
• The BBC's comparable but somewhat more smiley-faced site, "Race UK"
• Institute of Race Relations
  • So you think you know about racism and British black history? (an online quiz)
• 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 landmark 2000 "Parekh Report" of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain
• The Equality & Human Rights Commission (formerly the Commission for Racial Equality, a UK Government Agency)
• Migration Policy Institute page on the United Kingdom
• Ehsan Masood, British Muslims: Media Guide (British Council)

Theory/Criticism/Commentary

• "'The Rise and Fall of Black Britain" (Transtion 74), the published version of a paper I presented at the conference "Poetry and the Public Sphere" at Rutgers University in 1998)
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Black London" (New Yorker April 28, 1997)
• Dianne Abbott, MP, "Multi-racial Britain"
• Tariq Modood, "Multiculturalism, citizenship, and national identity"