General/History

• "Black British" (Wikipedia)
• "A short history of immigration" (BBC's Race UK)
• Black Presence: Asian and Black History in Britain, 1500-1850 (British National Archives) is cryptically designed, but highly informative. The galleries entitled "Early Times," "Work and Community," and "Culture" are especially useful. (Use the sidebars to navigate among the subsections within galleries, or simply go to the site index to choose a particular subsection.)
• Sadly (and unforgiveably), the BBC took its "Windrush" site devoted to Black British history and culture off-line. (The site was named after the S.S. Empire Windrush, the ship whose arrival in England from the Caribbean in July 1948 inaugurated the first wave of postwar Black and Asian immigration to the UK).  A handful of pages from that site have migrated to other BBC locations:
  • Mike Phillips, "Windrush: The Passengers" (a historical overview of blacks in Britain since 1948)
  • Onyekachi Wambu, "Black British Literature Since Windrush" (Wambu is editor of Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black Britain)
  • Windrush--Arrivals (transcriptions of oral histories of Windrush passengers)
• Channel 4's "Untold" was a similarly superb site supporting its 1999 "Black History Season."  It had pages devoted to Britain's Slave Trade, a mutiny by British West Indian soldiers after World War I, the 1981 racial uprisings across England, and "Brown Babies"--the children of white English mothers and black American GI's during World War II.  Each unit included a lengthy program summary and a page of related links and recommended further reading. It, too, has vanished.
• Migration Histories (MovingHere.org.uk) assembles archival documents, photos, film and sound clips on Caribbean, Irish, Jewish, and South Asian immigration into Britain--a splendid site.
• "Britain: The World in One Country" (London Guardian) starts with a Flash-based map showing the distribution of people of various ethnicies across Britain. Click on a region of the map for access to a series of individual profiles.
• NPR's Morning Edition for June 22, 1998 aired a story on the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in England (RealAudio--highly recommended) (direct link)
• How many black people are there in Britain? (statistics collated from a variety of sources--Institute of Race Relations)
• Liverpool's Black Roots:  an annual Summer School Program offered by the University of Liverpool
• Making Britain: How South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950 (Open University)

Arts & Culture

• Black Cultural Archives (London)
• Transforming the Crown: African, Asian & Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996 (a 1998 exhibition organized by the Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diaspora Institute, New York)
  • Curator's Essay (by Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd), "Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996"
• Holland Cotter, "Roots of Empire: Britain's Black Artists" (New York Times 4 December 1998)
• Marjorie Morgan, Caribbean Britain: The Cultural and Biographical Directory, 1960-2000
• British Film Institute (BFI): Black British Film | 10 Great Black British Films
• Victoria & Albert Museum:
  • Black Heritage Programme
• Sukhdev Sandhu, "The Thin Black Line" (Obsever 16 July 2000):  a review article of two new surveys of Black British writing

Blogs/Education/News/Current Affairs

• The Voice (the UK's premiere black newspaper)
• The Black Presence [in Britain] (a blog by Phil Gregory)
• 14000 British Professors--But Only 50 Are Black (RepeatingIslands.com)
• Britons Perturbed by a Troubling Shortage of Curry Chefs (New York Times)

Race Relations/Civil Rights

• The London Guardian's now dated but still valuable site devoted to Race in Britain
• The BBC's comparable but somewhat more smiley-faced (and more current) site, "Race UK"
• Institute of Race Relations
• Campaign Against Racism & Fascism
• The Runnymede Trust, a liberal thinktank on race and ethnicity, sponsor of the landmark 2000 "Parekh Report" of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain
• The Equality & Human Rights Commission (formerly the Commission for Racial Equality, a UK Government Agency)
• Migration Policy Institute page on the United Kingdom
• Ehsan Masood, British Muslims: Media Guide (British Council, 2006)

Theory/Criticism/Commentary

• "'The Rise and Fall of Black Britain" (Transtion 74)
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Black London" (New Yorker April 28, 1997)
• Dianne Abbott, MP, "Multi-racial Britain"
• Tariq Modood, "Multiculturalism, citizenship, and national identity"
• Tariq Ali, "Stuart Hall, 1932-2014" (Jacobin)
  • Stuart Hall and C.L.R. James in Conversation