Pioneering scholars, the Cowley Road and the carnival that grew out of one summer in 1986.
Scholars First
Christian Cole, from the Sierra Leone Colony, became a member of University College in 1873 and graduated in 1876, the first Black graduate of the University of Oxford. He went on to be the first Black African barrister to practise in the English courts, and since 14 October 2017 a plaque to him has hung on University College's wall in Logic Lane.
From the start of the 20th century, small numbers of Jamaican scholars followed. In 1951 Stuart Hall, born in Kingston, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College. He became the founding editor of the New Left Review in 1960 and later led the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, and his portrait now hangs in Merton's hall.
Cowley Road And The Car Works
The biggest arrivals of people of African heritage came in the 1950s and 1960s, as Oxford looked for workers to fill jobs left by local people moving to better pay in the motor industry. After the Race Relations Act of 1965, West Indians were taken on in the car works too.
The community first gathered around the Cowley Road in east Oxford. In the 1960s Blackbird Leys was built on farmland south of the city, and it remains a main focus of Oxford's African-Caribbean community. The West Indian Day Centre and the Christian Life Centre are still part of community life.
Carnival
Junie James was born in Jamaica and moved to Oxford in January 1964. In the summer of 1986 she and her colleagues organised Oxford's first Caribbean carnival, the event that led to today's Cowley Road Carnival. She is a founder member and director of the heritage organisation ACKHI.
Black Oxford Today
An ever-growing number of African scholars now study and work at the university, and the families who built lives on the Cowley Road and in Blackbird Leys are part of the city's story. Black-owned food spots, barbers, salons and brands are part of everyday Oxford, well beyond the colleges.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Oxford on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
Cowley Road, Oxford. Photo: Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons Crowds gathering for the Cowley Road Carnival. Photo: Chris Denny, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons