The lives of each person in the book are covered in around 3 pages each - so the telling is pithy and sticks to the highlights.

She received her PhD in History from the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull in 2014. He was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union from 1992 to 2003, and the first black leader of a major British trade union. Patrick Vernon's landmark 100 Great Black Britons campaign of 2004 was one of the most successful movements to focus on the role of people of African and Caribbean descent in British history. For too long the contribution of Britons of African and Caribbean heritage have been underestimated, undervalued and overlooked”. Great Black Britons is a poll that was first undertaken in 2003 to vote for and celebrate the greatest Black Britons of all time.In 2019, 16 years after the initial launch of the 100 Great Black Britons, Patrick Vernon OBE and Angelina Osborne launched a new campaign to celebrate Black British History and Black Britons who contributed to shape Great Britain by their work and actions. Dr Oliver Lyseight (11 December 1919 – 28 February 2006), [17] who migrated to England from Jamaica in 1951, was the founder of one of Britain's largest black majority churches, and was a spiritual leader to the " Windrush generation", the first Caribbeans to emigrate in significant numbers to postwar Britain, notably in 1948 on the HMT Empire Windrush. With the publication of their 100 Great Black Britons, Mr Vernon and his co-author, Dr Angelina Osborne, have relaunched the campaign with an updated list of names and accompanying portraits - including new role models and previously little-known historical figures.

Patrick Vernon's landmark '100 Great Black Britons' campaign of 2003 was one of the most successful movements to focus on the role of people of African and Caribbean descent in British history. Since 2010 he has been leading the campaign for national Windrush Day and in 2018 kick-started the campaign for an amnesty for the Windrush Generation as part of the Windrush Scandal. It’s a great read which is suitable for all ages as an opinion, which acts as a great reference for some history making individuals past and present, more well known and amazingly newly discovered hidden figures identified for their great contributions made within Britain’s society over time. In 2018 he received an honorary PhD from Wolverhampton University and was selected as one of the 1000 Progressive Londoner by the Evening Standard. We are happy to welcome you to The London History Festival again this year - this time we are inviting you to join us both in person, in our lovely lecture hall in Kensington Central Library, and virtually, from the comfort of your own home.

This year we are putting on a series of evening talks in a programme of events we hope will both entertain and enlighten you.

PATRICK VERNON OBE is a Clore and Winston Churchill Fellow, a fellow at the Imperial War Museum, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a former associate fellow for the Department of the History of Medicine at Warwick University. The arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in Britain from the Caribbean has been mythologised as the defining moment that changed Britain from an exclusively white country into a racially diverse one. Instead, we are told about the likes of Munroe Bergdorf, who has simply changed gender, worked as a model and famously made derogatory comments about people of a particular race.In the wake of the 2018 Windrush scandal, and against the backdrop of Brexit, the rise of right-wing populism and the continuing inequality faced by Black communities across the UK, the need for this campaign is greater than ever. The poll has been described as a landmark moment and one of the most successful movements to focus on the role of people of African and Caribbean descent in British history. In September 2007, in Tottenham, London, Haringey Council opened the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in his name. A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to pay for a copy of the book to be sent to every secondary school. Frustrated by the widespread and continuing exclusion of the Black British community from the mainstream popular conception of ‘Britishness’, despite Black people having lived in Britain for over a thousand years, Vernon set up a public poll in which anyone could vote for the Black Briton they most admired.