The history of black people in Cambridge, UK cannot easily be separated from the history of the University of Cambridge. The university has attracted students from Africa and the African diaspora to the town of Cambridge for more than two centuries. Several notable black people had a Cambridge association in the 18th and 19th centuries, and at the end of the 18th century Cambridge became a centre of abolitionist sentiment. From the end of the 19th 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.
The lives of Cambridge-born black people are less fully documented than those of Cambridge students. In the 2011 census 1.7% of people were Black British, and 1.0% of mixed ethnicity with black ancestry.Office for National Statistics, LC2101EW - Ethnic group by sex by age, Nomis. Accessed 20 June 2020.
Eighteenth century
The poet and scholar Francis Williams, born to a free black Jamaican couple, is the first recorded black writer in the British Empire. According to Edward Long, the Jamaican historian and apologist for slavery, Williams was educated at a grammar school and at the University of Cambridge, as an educational experiment paid for by John 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.John Gilmore, "Williams, Francis", ODNB, 57050.
After the 1781 Zong massacre, the Master of Magdalene College, Peter Peckard began preaching and pamphleteering against slavery. In 1782 Cambridge University Press published the Letters of the ex-slave and composer Ignatius Sancho. In 1785 Peckard set a Latin essay competition on the topic Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare ("is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?"). 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 abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa. Equiano married Susanna Cullen of Soham, Cambridgeshire, and the couple set up home in Soham.James Walvin, "Equiano, Olaudah [Gustavus Vassa]", ODNB, 57028. Their elder daughter Anna died, aged four, in 1797, and a stone plaque in memory of her was set up outside St Andrew's Church, Chesterton: Near this Place lies Interred ANNA MARIA VASSA Daughter of GUSTAVUS VASSA, the African She died July 21, 1797 Aged 4 Years Should simple village rhymes attract thine eye, Stranger, as thoughtfully thou passest by, Know that there lies beside this humble stone A child of colour haply not thine own. Her father born of Afric’s sun-burnt race, Torn from his native field, ah foul disgrace: Through various toils, at length to Britain came Espoused, so Heaven ordain’d, an English dame, And follow’d Christ; their hope two infants dear. But one, a hapless orphan, slumbers here. To bury her the village children came. And dropp’d choice flowers, and lisp’d her early fame; And some that lov’d her most, as if unblest, Bedew’d with tears the white wreath on their breast; But she is gone and dwells in that abode, Where some of every clime shall joy in God.Olaudah Equiano, St Andrew's Church Chesterton. Accessed 19 June 2020.
The abolitionist cause was taken up by a network of evangelical clergy and others with Cambridge connections. They included William Wilberforce, William Pitt the Younger, George Tomline, Isaac Milner, John Mortlock, Robert Robinson and Benjamin Flower. "Cambridge was one of the leading centres of abolitionist sentiment, if not perhaps the leading one." In 1808 Perronet Thompson, governor of Sierra Leone, proposed that John Thorpe and George Caulker, Sierra Leonean children whom Zachary Macaulay had brought to be educated by evangelicals at Clapham, study at Thompson's college, Queens".Fyfe, Christopher (1962) A history of Sierra Leone. Oxford University Press. Quoted in Corcoran, Chris. 1998. The place of Guinea Coast Creole English (GCCE) and Sierra Leone Krio (SLK) in the Afro-genesis debate, 1998.
History of black students at the University of Cambridge Another candidate for the first black student at the University of Cambridge is the Afro-Polish violinist George Bridgetower, who studied music at Trinity Hall and graduated a Bachelor of Music in June 1811.Josephine R. B. Wright, "George Polgreen Bridgetower: An African Prodigy in England 1789–99", The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January 1980), pp.65–82. A composition by Bridgetower was played at Great St Mary's at the 1811 installation of the Duke of Gloucester as University Chancellor.
The first black student for whom full university records exist is Alexander Crummell, who enrolled at Queens' College in 1849 and graduated in 1853.Venn Crummell, son of a freed slave, was an Episcopal preacher and abolitionist pamphleteer from New York City. While studying in Cambridge, Crummell hosted the abolitionist lecturer William Wells Brown, who had escaped slavery in 1834.John Twigg, "Alexander Crummell", The Record, 1986, pp.9–10. A "minor celebrity" in Cambridge,The remarkable story of Alexander Crummell, 20 October 2011. Crummell endured a moment of racist heckling at his graduation until another student, E. W. Benson, successfully counter-heckled in his defence:
From 1875 to 1879 George Gurney Nicol, a Sierra Leone Creole and a grandson of Samuel Adjai Crowther, studied at Corpus Christi College. The first African graduate of the University of Cambridge, Nicol was ordained and returned to West Africa. Francis Henry Fearon (1865-1906) of Sierra Leone studied law at St John's College from 1887 to 1891. Two students from the Gold Coast, the Pan-Africanist J. E. Casely Hayford and the lawyer Arthur Boi Quartey-Papafio, came to study law at Cambridge from 1893 to 1896. Both started as non-collegiate students, though Casely Hayford seems to have transferred to Peterhouse,The Black Cantabs Research Society, "Peterhouse College: Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford (1866-1930)", Black Cantabs, 10 March 2017 and Quartey-Papafio joined Christ's College. Quartey-Papafio's nephew Benjamin, son of the first Ghanaian doctor Benjamin Quartey-Papafio, also started studying medicine at Downing College in 1917, though did not complete his degree.Jenny Ulph, "Downing's Early Black Cantabs", Downing College, 2018.
The Nigerian-born Augustus Molade Akiwumi studied law at Fitzwilliam College from 1912.Black Cantabs between 1900-1930, 20 June 2016. Accessed 30 June 2020. The Barbadian Ormond Adolphus Forte, later called the "dean of Cleveland Negro newspapermen", studied classics at Cambridge before World War I.Forte, Ormond Adolphus, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Accessed 19 June 2020. The Jamaican David Clemetson started studying law at Cambridge, but enlisted in the Sportsmen's Battalions at the outbreak of World War I. In 1915 he became a British Army officer, but was killed in action in 1918.Violet Sphinx, David Louis Clemetson, Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 9 July 2014. The Barbadian surgeon and pan-Africanist Cecil Belfield Clarke studied medicine at Cambridge, graduating in 1918.David Killingray, Clarke, Cecil Belfield, Oxford African American Studies Center. The Nigerian Victor Adedapo Kayode studied law at Selwyn College from 1917 to 1921. His son, the politician Remi Fani-Kayode, studied law at Downing College in the 1940s,Emmanuel Ajibulu, Chief Remi Fani-Kayode: The Facts and Not the Fiction, Modern Ghana, 30 November 2009. Accessed 30 June 2020. and his grandsons, Akinola Femi-Kayode and the politician Femi Fani-Kayode, also later studied at Downing. Edmund Léon Auguste (1900–1970) from St 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 in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, studied law and history at Downing from 1920 to 1923. Adetokunbo Ademola, Nigeria's first local Chief Justice, studied law at Selwyn from 1928 to 1931.Xavier Bisits, "Missionaries, presidents and royalty: The first black men to attend Cambridge University", The Tab, 22 February 2016. The white British anthropologist Kenneth Little "had never met a person of African descent" before studying at Cambridge in the late 1930s. Proceeding to do Cardiff fieldwork for a London School of Economics PhD, he moved away from biological anthropology to focus on the sociology of race 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".
In 1945 Gloria Carpenter (later Cumper) became the first black woman to matriculate at the university, studying law at Girton College and gaining her LL.B. in 1946. In the late 1940s the dramatist Efua Sutherland studied teaching at Homerton College. Mutesa II of Buganda studied at Magdalene College from 1945 to 1947. Ezekiel Norukior Igho from Nigeria studied natural sciences at Downing College from 1945 to 1948 before returning to be Vice Principal of Urhobo College in Effurun.
The Sierra Leonean physician Davidson 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.Christopher Fyfe, Nicol, Davidson Sylvester Hector Willoughby, ODNB, 55166 The Trinidadian politician and banker William Demas won an Island Scholarship to Emmanuel College in 1947, and stayed in Cambridge until 1955, gaining a MA in economics and a master of letters.Compton Bourne, Demas, William Gilbert, Oxford African American Studies Center. Accessed 19 June 2020. The Guyanese-born writer and educationist E. R. Braithwaite did graduate study at Caius College, gaining a master's in physics in 1949.Susie Thomas, Braithwaite, Eustace Edward Adolph Ricardo [known as E. R. Braithwaite], Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2020. The Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord studied English at Emmanuel College from 1950 to 1953.The Black Cantabs Research Society, Emmanuel College: Barry Reckord, Black Cantabs, 9 March 2017. The Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best studied at Cambridge in the 1950s.Who was Lloyd Best?, Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean. Accessed 19 June 2020. The African-American anthropologist James Lowell Gibbs did graduate study in Cambridge in 1953-4.Frank A. Salamone, Gibbs, James Lowell, Oxford African American Studies Center. Accessed 19 June 2020.
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. From 1952 to 1954 the Nigerian historian Bolanle Awe attended Perse School for Girls.Adeyemi Bukola Oyeniyi, Awe, Bolanle, Oxford African American Studies Center. Accessed 19 June 2020. The Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite studied history at Pembroke College, graduating in 1953 and gaining a diploma in education the following year.Lynn Innes, Edward "Kamau Brathwaite obituary", The Guardian, 5 February 2020. The Kenyan scientist Thomas Odhiambo entered Queens' College in 1959 to study natural science, continuing to graduate study and gaining a PhD in insect physiology.The Black Cantabs Research Society, Queens' College - Dr Thomas Risley Odhiambo. Accessed 29 June 2020.