Tracing the black presence in Liverpool, the oldest black community in Europe, is the subject of this chapter by Ray Costello. He begins by recounting and dispelling the ‘Windrush myth’—a misconception that the arrival of nearly 500 Jamaican workers on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 was the beginning of the history of black settlers in Britain. Instead, black communities had existed in Britain for at least five centuries with Liverpool having the most continuous presence including enslaved black servants, freed slaves, sailors, children of African royalty attending school, and free Black Loyalists from the Americas. Costello describes the diverse backgrounds, cultures and languages of black settlers in Liverpool following each of Britain’s wars which obscured the true age of the community and perpetuated a view of local blacks as exotic foreigners. The failure to recognize the age and Britishness of an established black Liverpudlian population, Costello fears, preserves a belief in the recency of black immigration promotes the idea that assimilation and acculturation are the keys to integration and racial equity.
Racial Context, Black Immigration and the U.S. Black/White Health Disparity
