Black British Studies

Were you ever taught about Black Briton Dr Harold Moody? If not why not?

Clip Repost from

Dr Harold Moody (Medicine, 1910) was a prominent humanitarian, anti-racist campaigner and civil rights activist. The son of a pharmacist, Harold Arundel Moody (1882–1947) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and travelled to England in 1904 to study.
Despite his academic achievements, Harold was unable to gain work as a physician because of the colour of his skin. He was denied a hospital job because the matron refused to ‘have a coloured doctor working at the hospital’ and was rejected for the post of medical officer for the Camberwell Board of Guardians, being told that people did not want to be treated by a black man. After three years of unsuccessful job-hunting, Harold set up his own practice in Peckham.

In 1931, Harold became one of the founders of the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), a pressure group whose aims were to highlight the problems and successes of black people, to challenge racial discrimination and to fight for equality. Harold worked tirelessly lobbying politicians, the civil service and trade unions, seeking to build and strengthen race relations and challenge injustices, and he served as the LCP’s president right up until his death. His work included fighting for the lifting of the colour bar in the British armed forces, fair wages for Trinidadian oil workers and employment rights for black seamen. In 1943, Harold was appointed to a government advisory committee that looked at issues on the welfare of non-Europeans.

The League he founded survived him by four years, but Harold’s campaign for civil rights has been credited as being the key to influencing the Race Relations Act 1965 – the first legislation in the UK to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of colour, race, ethnicity or national origins. The Act saw the introduction of the offence of ‘incitement to racial hatred’ and led to the creation of the Race Relations Board in 1966. (KCL summary)

Which other Black Britons do you think we should know more about?

Repost
In 2026, I cannot believe we are being asked to respond to the suggestion that the descendants of the enslaved should pay for the machinery that oppressed them.

The Caribbean does not owe Britain for slavery, for colonial extraction, or for laws that treated African people as chattel. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for justice, and history itself has already told the truth.

Those who wish to speak on this matter should first take the time to read enough history to understand it. The Caribbean will not be used as a prop for anyone’s politics. We know who we are, we know what was done, and we will continue to speak for repair with clarity and dignity.