My Aunt Esther.

History Today, February, 2000 by Bourne, Stephen

Stephen Bourne tells how a Blitz adoption led to his passion for rediscovering Black history in Britain.

As a child in the 1960s I grew up in a racially-mixed community on a council estate in Peckham. On the other side of London lived Aunt Esther, a black woman born here before the First World War. When I was a kid, young black and white children played together on the estate and in the school playground.

At the age of five my best friend at school was Eric whose parents had come here from Jamaica. Though children like Eric were subjected to name-calling from some white children, I didn't join in. A few years later the full impact of racism hit me when Enoch Powell and his fictional disciple Ali Garnett (from BBC television's Till Death Us Do...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.