"The son of escaped slaves, Lewis Howard Latimer (1848-1928) is considered one of the greatest black inventors. John Brown was a notable abolitionist of this period. Hanged in 1859 he advocated the use of armed insurrection to overthrow the institution of slavery in the USA. Jesse Owens triumphed at Hitler’s showpiece 1936 Olympics yet snubbed by American figures of power. The 1948 Nationalities Act led to Windrush Generation in the UK. The writer Sam Selvon wrote The Lonely Londoners (1956). 1949 saw the birth of the first black man to serve as an Anglican archbishop - John Sentamu (97th Archbishop of York). In the US Rosa Parks was hailed as the mother of the civil rights movement after her arrest in 1955 for refusing to adhere to bus segregation rules. This year also saw the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Images of his brutalised body are widely disseminated by US press and met with outcry, leading him to posthumously become an icon of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1961 Frantz Fanon (1925-61) authored The Wretched of the Earth. His writing highlights violence as the only method by which colonial oppression can be overturned. In 1965 Malcolm X, the American minister and human rights activist was assassinated. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael (1941-98) popularised the phrase ‘black power’. Maya Angelou, wrote I know why the caged bird sings (1969), an autobiography charting the difficulties growing up a black woman in St Louis. James Baldwin is another author of note. In 1968 Muhammed Ali was stripped of his title after refusing to serve in Vietnam & convicted of draft evasion. In 1968 Olympics Tommie Smith & John Carlos raised a black-gloved fist as the national anthem played, adding to the list of athletes lauded for their talent but shunned for their race. The New Cross Fire in 1981 kills 13 black teenagers. The police investigation is minimal, leading to the Black People’s Day of Action. Poet Jay Bernard tracks the effects of this event in their poetry collection Surge (2019). Despite Barack Obama being elected in 2009 his presidency is opposed by those who peddle a narrative of his ‘un-American’ heritage. In 2014 tensions between police and the black population intensified. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson led to unrest and triggered the Black Lives Matter Movement, which found wider resonance, particularly in the UK following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In 2016 Colin Kaepernick knelt during the US national anthem to protest police shootings. "