ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the early black British thinkers who featured in the abolitionist struggle and in the popular radical movements of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, it focuses on the development of black activism across the first half of the twentieth century, including the anti-colonial movements, but also thinkers who promoted a determinedly black British identity among the small settled communities of the 1930s and 40s, thereby prefiguring the black activism of the post-war period. The first black British public intellectuals rose out of one of the early crises of the British Empire: the campaign against slavery. Cambridge-educated Joseph Batista was, prior to Gandhi's emergence, one of the central figures in the Indian Home Rule movement. The African diaspora was the driver of early pan-Africanism, not its appendage. In the pre-war period the other major driver of pan-Africanism was Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), whose fierce wrangling with Du Bois is well recorded.
