"There Were Africans in Britain Before the English Came Here"

"With Fryer as our guide, we know that whatever multicultural bonhomie we enjoy now is a product not of Britain's innate genius and sense of fair play, but of bitterly fought struggles in which the political and media class have often resisted progress. We know that in those struggles black people have had allies, as well as enemies, among white Britons and trade unions. And that these struggles were not fought in a vacuum, but were always part of the broader economic, political and social landscape. Fryer shows us that black British history is not a subgenre of British history but an integral part of it, so tightly woven into the fabric that any attempt to unpick would make the whole thing unravel. With sufficient imagination and solidarity all sorts of Britons can see themselves in this book and spark their own transformative reckoning with who we are and how we got here."

Gary Younge at The Guardian discusses Peter Fryer's 1984 book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain.