The history ofblack people in Cambridge, UK cannot easily be separated from the history of theUniversity of Cambridge. The university has attracted students fromAfrica and theAfrican diaspora to the town ofCambridge for more than two centuries. Several notable black people had a Cambridge association in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the end of the eighteenth century Cambridge became a centre ofabolitionist sentiment. From the end of the nineteenth century the university started to admit black students in larger numbers. In recent decades, however, the relatively low number of black students admitted to the university has become a topic of media comment and public concern.^{[citation needed]}

The lives of Cambridge-born black people are less fully documented than those of Cambridge students. In the 2011 census 1.7% of people wereBlack British, and 1.0% of mixed ethnicity with black ancestry.^[1]

The poet and scholarFrancis Williams, born to afree black Jamaican couple, is the first recorded black writer in the British Empire. According toEdward Long, the Jamaican historian andapologist for slavery, Williams was educated at a grammar school and at the University of Cambridge,as an educational experiment paid for byJohn Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu. This would make Williams the first black person to study at Cambridge. However, while Williams was certainly sent to England for his education, there is no independent evidence of Montagu's financial involvement, or of Williams actually attending Cambridge.^[2]

After the 1781Zong massacre, the Master ofMagdalene College,Peter Peckard began preaching and pamphleteering against slavery. In 1782Cambridge University Press published theLetters of the ex-slave and composerIgnatius Sancho. In 1785 Peckard set a Latin essay competition on the topicAnne liceat invitos in servitutem dare ("is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?").^[3]Thomas Clarkson, who had recently graduated from the university, won the competition with an anti-slavery essay which he translated and published as a pamphlet the following year.

In 1789, Peckard organised and led the subscription financing of the autobiography of the ex-slave and abolitionistOlaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa. Equiano married Susanna Cullen ofSoham,Cambridgeshire, and the couple set up home in Soham.^[4] Their elder daughter Anna died, aged four, in 1797, and a stone plaque in memory of her was set up outsideSt Andrew's Church,Chesterton:

The abolitionist cause was taken up by a network ofevangelical clergy and others with Cambridge connections. They includedWilliam Wilberforce,William Pitt the Younger,George Tomline,Isaac Milner,John Mortlock,Robert Robinson andBenjamin Flower. "Cambridge was one of the leading centres of abolitionist sentiment, if not perhaps the leading one."^[6] In 1808Perronet Thompson, governor of Sierra Leone, proposed that John Thorpe and George Caulker, Sierra Leonean children whomZachary Macaulay had brought to be educated by evangelicals atClapham, study at Thompson's college,Queens".^[7]

Another candidate for the first black student at the University of Cambridge is the Afro-Polish violinistGeorge Bridgetower, who studied music atTrinity Hall and graduated aBachelor of Music in June 1811.^[8] A composition by Bridgetower was played atGreat St Mary's at the 1811 installation ofthe Duke of Gloucester asUniversity Chancellor.^[9][10]

The first black student for whom full university records exist isAlexander Crummell, who enrolled atQueens' College in 1849 and graduated in 1853.^[11] Crummell, son of a freed slave, was an Episcopal preacher and abolitionist pamphleteer fromNew York City. While studying in Cambridge, Crummell hosted the abolitionist lecturerWilliam Wells Brown, who had escaped slavery in 1834.^[12] A "minor celebrity" in Cambridge,^[13] Crummell endured a moment of racist heckling at his graduation until another student,E. W. Benson, successfully counter-heckled in his defence:

A pale slim undergraduate [...] shouted in a voice which re-echoed through the building, "Shame, shame! Three groans for you, Sir!" and immediately afterwards, "Three cheers for Crummell!" This was taken up in all directions [...] and the original offender had to stoop down to hide himself from the storm of groans and hisses that broke out all around him.^[12]

From 1875 to 1879George Gurney Nicol, aSierra Leone Creole and a grandson ofSamuel Adjai Crowther, studied atCorpus Christi College. The first African graduate of the University of Cambridge,^[14] Nicol was ordained and returned to West Africa.^[15] Francis Henry Fearon (1865-1906) of Sierra Leone studied law at St John's College from 1887 to 1891.^[16] Two students from theGold Coast, thePan-AfricanistJ. E. Casely Hayford and the lawyerArthur Boi Quartey-Papafio, came to study law at Cambridge from 1893 to 1896.^[17][18] Both started as non-collegiate students, though Casely Hayford seems to have transferred toPeterhouse,^[19] and Quartey-Papafio joinedChrist's College. Quartey-Papafio's nephew Benjamin, son of the first Ghanaian doctorBenjamin Quartey-Papafio, also started studying medicine atDowning College in 1917, though did not complete his degree.^[20]

The Nigerian-bornAugustus Molade Akiwumi studied law atFitzwilliam College from 1912.^[21] The BarbadianOrmond Adolphus Forte, later called the "dean of Cleveland Negro newspapermen", studied classics at Cambridge beforeWorld War I.^[22] The JamaicanDavid Clemetson started studying law atCambridge, but enlisted in theSportsmen's Battalions at the outbreak of World War I. In 1915 he became aBritish Army officer, but was killed in action in 1918.^[23] The Barbadian surgeon and pan-AfricanistCecil Belfield Clarke studied medicine at Cambridge, graduating in 1918.^[24] The NigerianVictor Adedapo Kayode studied law atSelwyn College from 1917 to 1921.^[21] His son, the politicianRemi Fani-Kayode, studied law at Downing College in the 1940s,^[25] and his grandsons, Akinola Femi-Kayode and the politicianFemi Fani-Kayode, also later studied at Downing. Edmund Léon Auguste (1900–1970) fromSt Lucia studied medicine at Downing College from 1919 to 1922, going on to work as a doctor and medical officer in St Lucia and the Gold Coast.James Vivian Clinton from the Gold Coast, who later became a journalist inSierra Leone andNigeria, studied law and history at Downing from 1920 to 1923.^[20]Adetokunbo Ademola, Nigeria's first local Chief Justice, studied law atSelwyn from 1928 to 1931.^[26]The white British anthropologistKenneth Little "had never met a person of African descent" before studying at Cambridge in the late 1930s. Proceeding to do Cardiff fieldwork for aLondon School of Economics PhD, he moved away from biological anthropology to focus on the sociology ofrace relations. What prompted the shift was his experience of the "colour bar" in Cardiff, "a slice of the reality about which my African friends in Cambridge had told me".^[27]

In 1945Gloria Carpenter (later Cumper) became the first black woman to matriculate at the university, studying law atGirton College and gaining her LL.B. in 1946.^[28] In the late 1940s the dramatistEfua Sutherland studied teaching atHomerton College.Mutesa II of Buganda studied atMagdalene College from 1945 to 1947.^[26] Ezekiel Norukior Igho fromNigeria studied natural sciences at Downing College from 1945 to 1948 before returning to be Vice Principal of Urhobo College inEffurun.^[20]

The Sierra Leonean physicianDavidson Nicol was the first black African to gain a first-class degree at Cambridge, and in 1957 became the first black African to hold a Cambridge college fellowship.^[29] The Trinidadian politician and bankerWilliam Demas won an Island Scholarship toEmmanuel College in 1947, and stayed in Cambridge until 1955, gaining a MA in economics and a master of letters.^[30] TheGuyanese-born writer and educationistE. R. Braithwaite did graduate study atCaius College, gaining a master's in physics in 1949.^[31] The Jamaican playwrightBarry Reckord studied English atEmmanuel College from 1950 to 1953.^[32] TheTrinidadian economistLloyd Best studied at Cambridge in the 1950s.^[33] The African-American anthropologistJames Lowell Gibbs did graduate study in Cambridge in 1953-4.^[34]

By the 1950s and 1960s, some African schools had established recurring links with Cambridge colleges:King's College, Lagos, for example, sent several students to Downing College.^[20] From 1952 to 1954 the Nigerian historianBolanle Awe attendedPerse School for Girls.^[35] The Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite studied history atPembroke College, graduating in 1953 and gaining a diploma in education the following year.^[36] The Kenyan scientist Thomas Odhiambo entered Queens' College in 1959 to study natural science, continuing to graduate study and gaining a PhD ininsect physiology.^[37]

The Nigerian novelistChinua Achebe was recommended by his professor atUniversity College Ibadan, James Welch, for an exhibition toTrinity College. However, Trinity did not accept him.^[38] The Nigerian mathematicianJames Ezeilo, however, was accepted as a PhD student at Queens' College, and gained his PhD in 1959.^[39] The Belizean jurist and diplomatEdward A. Laing studied law at Queens' College from 1961 to 1966.^[37]

In February 1965James Baldwin visited theCambridge Union, to debate the motion "Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro" against the right-wingWilliam F. Buckley Jr. The debate, which Baldwin won by an overwhelming majority,^[40] was televised forNational Educational Television.^[41] In 1967Duke Ellington performed a Sacred Concert at the University church,Great St Mary's.Queen Esther Marrow sang at the concert.^[42]

In the mid-1970s Cambridge University became a little nucleus of black literary activity. In 1973–4 the Nigerian playwrightWole Soyinka spent a year as visiting fellow atChurchill College. Soyinka recalls having to overcome a recurring "overwhelming desire" to smash a statue ofWinston Churchill which he passed daily on the college staircase. While at Cambridge, Soyinka wrote and delivered the first reading of his playDeath and the King's Horseman.^[43] The Cambridge English department did not grant Soyinka a permanent position, but permitted him to deliver classes on "Myth, Literature and the African World". His only student wasHenry Louis Gates Jr., the first African American to gain aMellon Fellowship, who had arrived in 1973 to study English literature atClare College.^[44] Gates had befriended the British-Ghanaian cultural theoristKwame Appiah, who had started as a philosophy undergraduate atClare College in 1972,^[45] and Appiah had introduced Gates to Soyinka. Soyinka gave Gates a passion forAfrican studies, and a determination to trace the lineage ofAfrican American literature to the literary traditions ofAfrica and theCaribbean. Pursuing this research at Cambridge meant some argument with the university faculty:

I was told in no uncertain terms that I could write aboutMilton orShakespeare, maybe evenPound orEliot, who had just recently been introduced to the canon, but certainly not anything African or African-American. And after months of arguing, they allowed me to choose as a topic theEnlightenment, the 18th century, and to look at how Europeans wrote about the first African – and what we would now call African-American – writers who were published in English and French and German and Dutch.^[46]

Other writers from theBlack diaspora who studied English literature around this time were the South African writer and academicNjabulo Ndebele, who gained a MA from Churchill College in 1975,^[47] and the Guyanese writerDavid Dabydeen.^[48] In 1977 the ZimbabweanTsitsi Dangarembga started studying medicine at Cambridge, but experienced racism and isolation, and did not complete her course.^[49]

In the last few decades of the twentieth century greater numbers ofBlack British students have studied at the University of Cambridge. The Labour politicianDiane Abbott, for example, studied history atNewnham College in the early 1970s.^[50] The Conservative politicianKwasi Kwarteng studied classics and history atTrinity College in the 1990s.^[51] The novelistHelen Oyeyemi studied at Corpus Christi College from 2001 to 2004.^[52] The writerLola Adesioye studied at Robinson College from 2001 to 2004. The Scottish rugby playerJoe Ansbro studied at Robinson College from 2003 to 2006.^[53]

In 2004Ato Quayson, who had been a graduate student atPembroke College in the 1990s, became the first black person to achieve full tenure at Cambridge when he was appointed Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures.^[54]

Several societies exist for black students within the university. There is the African Society of Cambridge University (ASCU).^[55] Cambridge University Ghanaian Society (CUGhS) was founded in 1990.^[56] The Cambridge University African and Caribbean Society (CUACS) was founded in 2005.^[57] In 2015Njoki Wamai and other University of Cambridge students founded Black Cantabs Research Society as a "counter-history project".^[58][59] In October 2019 aBlack History Month photographic exhibition,Black Cantabs: History Makers, featured portraits of black pioneers at the University of Cambridge: Francis Williams; George Bridgetower; Alexander Crummell; David Clemetson;Elizabeth Bagaaya, Batebe of theKingdom of Toro; British civil servantSharon White; Diane Abbott; South African anthropologistArchie Mafeje; composerErrollyn Wallen; novelistZadie Smith; actressesThandie Newton andNaomie Harris; writer and performerJustina Kehinde; and studentBez Adeosun.^[58]

The low number of black students at the University of Cambridge has been the focus of media attention and public concern. A CUACS photographic campaign, "Black Men of Cambridge University", went viral in 2017, highlighting that the university had only accepted fifteen black male students in 2015.Freedom of Information inquiries by MPDavid Lammy established that only one in four Cambridge college made offers to Black British students every year in the period 2010-15.^[60] In 2018 the grime artistStormzy established the "Stormzy Scholarship for Black UK Students" at Cambridge. The scheme currently provides tuition costs for two students and maintenance grants for four students.^[61][62]

In April 2019 the university announced it was launching a two-year academic study of the ways in which the university contributed to and benefited fromcolonial slavery.^[63][64] Sixteen colleges announced their cooperation with the inquiry, and four of them announced plans to undertake their own independent inquiries.^[65]

Albert Gordon, who had come to Britain fromJamaica in 1960, became Cambridge's first black pub landlord in 1971, running the Midland Tavern in Devonshire Street with his wife Lorna. He secured a dancing license for the pub, and was "a driving force of West Indian culture for the city" throughout the 1970s.^[66][67] In 1980 the Cambridge Black Women's Support Group (CBWSG) was established as a house group, providing social and educational opportunities for black women and holiday playschemes for children. In 1990 the CBWSG established the Mary Seacole day nursery.^[68] Women from the group read the work of African American women writers likeAlice Walker,Ntozake Shange andAudrey Lorde, and went together to seeToni Morrison when she visited Cambridge.^[69]

Theanti-apartheid movement was visible in Cambridge from the 1960s onwards. On the fifth anniversary of theSharpeville Massacre, Cambridge City Council voted to ban South African produce from its civic restaurant.^[70] In February 1969 two hundred campaigners from the Cambridge University South Africa Committee (CUSAC) marched on Trinity College in objection to the planned tour of the country by the college's drama society, the Dryden Society. Campaigners proposed renaming Kimberley road afterNelson Mandela, though residents resisted, arguing that Mandela was a communist and terrorist. However, theCity Council offices inRegent Street were successfully named Mandela House.^[71] In 1985 the City Council and the Cambridge Branch of the Anti-Apartheid Movement dedicated the playground inGwydir Street to the memory of murderedSoweto schoolboyHector Pieterson.^[72]

Cambridge African Film Festival (CAFF) was founded in 2002. Today CAFF, held annually in October, is the longest running festival forAfrican film in the UK.^[73]Black History Month, first held in the UK in 1987, began to be celebrated in Cambridge in 2005. The Cambridge African Network (CAN) was founded in 2008.^[74] CAN organizes events to bring together the African community in Cambridge.^[75]

In the 2011 census 1.7% (2,097 out of 123,867) of people in Cambridge reported themselves as African, Caribbean or other Black British, and 1.0% (1,198) people reported themselves as of mixed ethnicity with black ancestry.^[1] In 2011Castle,Petersfield andKing's Hedges were the Cambridgewards with the highest black population.^[76]

On 5 June 2020 several thousand people attended aBlack Lives Matter demonstration onParker's Piece in Cambridge.^[77] Black Lives Matter activists called for the removal ofa 1989 stained-glass window inGonville and Caius College commemorating the eugenicist and statisticianRonald Fisher^[78] and in June 2020, the college announced that the window would be removed because of his connection with eugenics.^[79]

• Black people in Oxford
• Tobias Rustat

• Cambridge Black Heritage,Cambridge Museum
• Memories of The Midland Tavern, Cambridge, by Albert Gordon: Cambridge's First Black Landlord
• Black Cantabs Research Society
• Cambridge African Film Festival

• African diaspora in the United Kingdom
• Black British culture in England
• Black British history
• People from Cambridge
• History of Cambridge
• History of the University of Cambridge

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from September 2020