Britain's 'Brown Babies'

Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre

Join us for an author talk and the opportunity to meet Lucy Bland, author of Britain's 'brown babies': The stories of children born to black GIs and white women in the Second World War.
Britain’s ‘brown babies’ reveals the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. 
Based on extensive interviews and including over fifty photographs, the book presents the stories of more than fifty of these children. Lucy Bland brings to light the struggles they faced, including racism in a (then) very white Britain, and a lack of family or a clear identity. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
At the heart of the book are oral histories: interviews, about personal memories of growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s as a mixed-race child. The importance of oral history is that it can access information and memories of events and emotions that are not documented elsewhere. People make sense of their past – and their present – through constructing a narrative; the memories recalled through interviews for this book illuminate aspects of the British histories of race and of childhood that have very largely remained undocumented.
The book will be available for purchase at the event.

Manchester Central Library (Performance Space)

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Britain's 'Brown Babies'

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Britain's 'Brown Babies'

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