Black and Asian Studies Association submission to consultation on the proposed History National Curriculum

We are a network of historians, archivists, teachers, parents and others fostering research and disseminating information on the history of people in Britain of African and Asian origin. This has been a long history: we know this from extensive archaeological, documentary and visual evidence, yet much continues to be overlooked.

The African diaspora in Britain we know to have been here for nearly two thousand years. As Peter Fryer writes¹, ‘there were Africans in Britain before the English came’. There were North African soldiers (‘the Aurelian Moors’) garrisoned near Hadrian’s Wall², a Mauritanian in the Roman army is commemorated in South Shields³, the skeleton of a wealthy African woman has been found in York⁴ and an African man lived near modern Stratford-upon-Avon 1,700 years ago⁵. African faces appear as part of the general population in countless illustrations from a medieval manuscript⁶ to contemporary representations of the Gordon Riots⁷, from a painting of the death of Nelson⁸ to photographs of Second World War evacuees⁹. Not only was the Black presence within the English working class considerable¹⁰ but some individuals played key roles in working class struggles and radical protests: for example, Robert Wedderburn (anti-slavery advocate), William Davidson (Cato Street Conspiracy) and William Cuffay an organizer of the 1848 Chartist rally on Kennington Common¹¹. Recent work by archivists looking at parish records¹² has unearthed 17^th and 18^th century baptisms and burials of Black people all over the country from Evesham to Erith, from Pangbourne to Plymouth, from Beverley to Bedford, from Chester to Clwyd. When 350 Black passengers sailed for Sierra Leone from England in 1787 they were accompanied by 59 white women, all wives or widows of Black Londoners¹³.