The modern origins of Black radicalism in London began with the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780 when at least 285 anti-government protestors were killed by the militia. 326 rioters were charged, including three Black participants, Benjamin Bowfrey, John Glover and Charlotte Gardiner. All three were found guilty of capital crimes, yet only Gardiner was hung (along with 20 others one of whom, McDonald, may also have been a person of colour).

Little is known about them. Were they former American slaves?; from the Caribbean?; West Africans, like fellow residents Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cuguano? (Recent studies have suggested Equiano may have originated from South Carolina).

The last quarter of the 18th century was a period of change threatening emancipation: the American Revolution began in 1776, the French in 1789, the Haitian, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, in the 1790s. Many of the ideas galvanising these revolutionary surges came from Norfolk man Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

Paine’s ideas, and those of the enlightenment generally, contributed to the tide of fury against the industrial trade in slaves. A leading activist in the Abolitionist Movement in the UK was ex-slave Olaudah Equiano. He came to prominence highlighting the 1783 massacre of 130 sick slaves. The captain of Liverpool slave ship Zong threw them overboard so that their loss as commodities could be claimed from the underwriters.

Equiano was a member of the London Corresponding Society. It campaigned for the vote, arguing liberty for working-class whites could not be separated from the struggle of dispossessed, displaced, enslaved Blacks. Those forces that made their fortune from the slave trade were the same that passed laws against trade union and other forms of working-class political activity. Other Black members were William Davidson and Robert Wedderburn, both revolutionary socialists.

Davidson, secretary of the shoemaker’s union, was hung in 1820 for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the Cabinet and instigate a popular revolution.

Robert Wedderburn, a printer, like Davidson was born in Jamaica. He wrote an autobiography The Horrors of Slavery – he watched his mother and grandmother being flogged on the plantation – and many essays on the subject, for which he was imprisoned in solitary confinement for 2 years.

With the decline of Black population of London during the first half of the 19th century came a parallel decline in their inherent qualities as defined by Victorian pseudo-scientific anthropologists. Yet, despite this symbolic degradation of The Black, Britons would have seen real Black people rise to prominence, defying their allotted shape and place.

People such as tailor, William Cuffay, sacked in 1834 for going on strike, an injustice that inspired him to join the National Charter Association. In 1842 he was elected to the Chartists’ five man national executive.

In 1845 The Times described the London-based physical force Chartists as “the black man and his party”. Through the use of spies and agent provocateurs they ensnared Cuffay and other leading militants, convicting them of attempting an armed uprising. The London tailor demanded to be tried by his peers, as designated in the Magna Carta.

I say you have no right to sentence me…It has not been a fair trial, and my request to have a fair trial - to be tried by my equals - has not been complied with. Everything has been done to raise a prejudice against me, and the press of this country - and I believe of other countries too - has done all in its power to smother me with ridicule. I ask no pity. I ask no mercy. I expected to be convicted, and I did not think anything else…After what I have endured this week, I feel that I could bear any punishment proudly, even to the scaffold.

Cuffay was transported to Tasmania where he died in poverty in the workhouse in July, 1870 after continuing his struggle for working-class rights.

Two other notable Black Chartists were David Anthony Duffy and Benjamin Prophitt, also arrested in 1848 – the year of European revolutions - and transported.

In parliamentary politics there has been representation by people of colour since 1892 when Dadabhai Naoroji was elected to the House of Commons for Finsbury. Another Bombay-born man, Shapurji Saklatvala, was elected in 1922 for north Battersea, the first communist MP. His election agent was Black Briton, John Archer, mayor of Battersea in 1913.

Possibly the most influential Black radical of the 20 century who never entered parliament — and who probably had no intention of doing so - was Trotskyist CLR James who chaired the Finchley branch of the Independent Labour Party and authored the seminal Beyond a Boundary, on cricket, the Caribbean and Empire. He was a close friend of West Indies cricketer Learie Constantine, who did enter the Palace of Westminster as Lord Constantine in the 1960s.

We cannot conclude without mentioning the Pan-African Conference of 1900 in London, the first collective gathering of Africans dedicated to ending colonial rule A radical member of this conference was Dusé Mohamed, who launched and edited African Times and Orient Review in 1912, the first UK newspaper dedicated to a Black UK readership.

Let us end with a quote from Malcolm X, who visited Britain in 1965, echoing the sentiment and belief expressed 175 years earlier by the London Corresponding Society,

You have whites who are fed up, you have blacks who are fed up. The whites who are fed up can’t come uptown [ to Harlem] too easily because the people uptown are more fed up than anybody else…when the day comes when whites are really fed up with what’s going on.. .when they learn how to establish the proper type of communication with those uptown who are fed up, and they get some co-ordinated action going. You will get some changes. And it will take both, it will take everything that you’ve got, it will take that.