Cunard Yanks Bristol premiere of a Cunard Yanks already shown in Liverpool and New York to popular aclaim. In the early 1950s young, white, Liverpool seamen who worked the Cunard Line, were sailing to New York. Although they did not know it at the time, they were to collide with the explosion of a new cultural scene in the U.S.A. This was the great migration of Afro-Americans to the northern states and the cities of Chicago, Detroit and New York which had brought new music, dance and fashion to […]
Berlin, 1939. A young, brilliant trumpet player, Hieronymus, is arrested in a Paris café. The star musician was never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sidney Griffiths, the only witness that day, still refuses to speak of what he saw. When Chip Jones, his friend and fellow band member, comes to visit, recounting the discovery of a strange letter, Sid begins a slow journey towards redemption. From the smokey bars of pre-war […]
This classic text is the most comprehensive and extensively researched history of black people in Britain. The sections on the black radicals of the 18th and 19th century are a must as is Fryer's demolition of British establishment attempts to rewrite themselves as the moral and legal vanguard in the abolition of slavery. Fryer's social history not only enlightens us about individual black political figures in this process but also covers such disparate groups as boxers, musicians and soldiers […]
America's entry into World War II immediately served to highlight the issue of race relations and the contradictions between America's declared position as a defender of "freedom" and "democracy," and what was actually practiced. Prior to the D-Day landings of June 1944, there were just under 1.6 million American forces personnel located in various parts of the U.K, with the largest numbers gathered in the southwest. The pubs in Bristol were segregated with some serving whites only, others, […]
