100 Great Black Britons is a poll that was first undertaken in 2003 to vote for and celebrate the greatest Black Britons of all time. It was created in a campaign initiated by Patrick Vernon in response to a BBC search for 100 Greatest Britons, together with a television series (2002), which featured no Black Britons in the published listing. The result of Vernon's campaign was that in February 2004 Mary Seacole was announced as having been voted the greatest Black Briton. Following the original poll, 100 Great Black Britons was re-launched in 2020 in an updated version based on public voting, together with a book of the same title.
Background In 2002, the BBC launched a campaign and television series called 100 Greatest Britons, with the definition of a great Briton as "anyone who was born in the British Isles, or who has lived in the British Isles, and has played a significant part in the life of the British Isles". The series was the idea of Jane Root, then Controller of BBC Two, and in the final results of the BBC poll, Winston Churchill was voted "the greatest Briton ever". At the time, the poll was criticised for lacking in diversity, as out of 100 nominees only 13 were women while none were Black (of African descent).
In response to the absence of any Black people in the "100 Greatest Britons poll", Every Generation and Patrick Vernon launched a website and the alternative campaign, 100 Great Black Britons, in October 2003 during Black History Month, to "raise the profile of the Black contribution to Britain". Vernon said: "Black history hasn't been recognised. We didn't come here at Windrush in – we've been here for a thousand years. We've influenced and shaped Britain." Believing that people were not aware of the long history of Black people in the UK, he later added that the poll was part of a campaign to provide role models of Black Britons of all ages. The website that hosted the survey www.100greatestblackbritons.com received more than a million hits during the online campaign, and more than 100,000 people voted in the poll over three months, choosing from a selection of present-day and historic Black figures. The poll has been described as a landmark moment and one of the most successful movements to focus on the role of people of African and Caribbean descent in British history.
Top of the subsequent list of 100 Greatest Black Britons was Mary Seacole, a nurse who helped soldiers during the Crimean War and who is often overshadowed by the work of her contemporary, Florence Nightingale, and whose contribution was often ignored by the history books. Other figures in the first poll of 100 Greatest Black Britons of all time included musicians, politicians, media figures, and religious leaders. Response to the list saw Black historical figures being added to the school curriculum, blue plaques were put up in memory of some of the individuals on the list and a statue of Mary Seacole was unveiled in the garden of St Thomas' Hospital in London. In March 2020, a petition was started to campaign for the temporary field hospital in Birmingham to be named after Mary Seacole after it was established that Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre would be used to treat COVID-19 patients: this was in response to the temporary hospital at London's ExCel centre being named the Nightingale Hospital after Florence Nightingale.
Criticism Paul Phoenix, of Black Parents in Education, criticised the poll for being inspired by the 100 Greatest Britons poll and copying the idea. Phoenix said, "Why do we always have to keep reacting to what other people do? We should celebrate our heroes every single day the year and not wait until Black History Month to bring these issues to public attention". Sam Walker, of the Black Cultural Archives, responded in support of the 100 Great Black Britons poll, stating that "it doesn't matter whether the poll is a copycat idea; so is Black History Month, which came from America in the late 1980s and has served us well to date".
The inclusion of Queen Philippa of Hainault on the list was criticised, as historians dispute that she was "black" in any modern sense. She was of predominantly European ancestry, with remote Armenian ancestry on her father's side, and Cuman (Turkic/Asian) ancestry on her mother's side. A report written by Bishop Walter de Stapledon in 1319 describes either Philippa (then a child) or one of her sisters as "brown of skin all over", with hair "betwixt blue-black and brown"; but, aside from the confusion over which sister is being described, it is unclear precisely what these terms imply. All known portraits appear to show Philippa as white. Historian Kathryn Warner concludes that she was "a European woman and emphatically not of African ancestry".
Similarly, the inclusion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning was challenged, The New York Times singling her out as one of those on the list who "would no doubt have been surprised to hear that they were black". Barrett Browning was descended from slave-owning families in Jamaica on both the paternal and maternal sides of her family. She once wrote of yearning "to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave!", a comment that has led some to suggest that she "believed that she had African blood"; but Marjorie Stone concludes that the "evidence does not support the speculation", and that Barrett Browning was in fact alluding to "the 'curse' of profiting from the blood of slaves".
2003 poll results
Top 10 +RankimageNameDescriptionNotability1Mary Seacole (1805–1881)British-Jamaican businesswoman and nurseMary Jane Seacole (née Grant; 23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican businesswoman and nurse who set up the "British Hotel" – a "comfortable quarters" for sick and injured soldiers – behind the lines during the Crimean War. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African "doctresses", Seacole used herbal remedies to treat soldiers. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1990. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman. 2 =Bishop Wilfred Wood (born 1936)Wilfred Denniston Wood KA (born 15 June 1936) was a Bishop of Croydon from 1985 to 2003 (and the first area bishop there from 1991). He was the first Black bishop in the Church of England. On 30 November 2000 – Barbados Independence Day – the Queen appointed Wood a Knight of St Andrew, the highest class within the Order of Barbados, "for his contribution to race relations in the United Kingdom and general contribution to the welfare of Barbadians living there".2 =Dr Oliver Lyseight (1919–2006)Founding Father of the New Testament Church of God England & WalesDr Oliver Lyseight (11 December 1919 – 28 February 2006), who migrated to England from Jamaica in 1951, was a Bishop and the co-founder, alongside Bishop Herman Brown, of one of Britain's largest black majority churches. As of 2024, the church, which is denominationally Pentecostal, claims more than 130 distinct branches and 11,000 members. Lyseight was a spiritual leader to the "Windrush generation", the first Caribbeans to emigrate in significant numbers to Britain, notably in 1948 aboard the .3Mary Prince (1788–1833)Writer and enslaved womanMary Prince (c. 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was a British abolitionist and autobiographer, born in Bermuda to an enslaved family of African descent. Subsequent to her escape, when she was living in London, England, she wrote her slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), which was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It was reprinted twice in its first year.
Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle, a founder of the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone from Antigua to London with her master and his family in 1828.4Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797)African abolitionist and authorOlaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797), known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa (/ˈvæsə/), was a writer and abolitionist from, according to his memoir, the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin (today southern Nigeria). Enslaved as a child, he was taken to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but purchased his freedom in 1766.
As a freedman in London, Equiano supported the British abolitionist movement. He was part of the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group composed of Africans living in Britain, and he was active among leaders of the anti-slave trade movement in the 1780s. He published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which depicted the horrors of slavery. It went through nine editions in his lifetime and helped gain passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade. Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen in 1792 and they had two daughters. He died in 1797 in Westminster.
Since the late 20th century, when his autobiography was published in a new edition, Equiano has been increasingly studied by a range of scholars, including from his homeland.5Philippa of Hainault (1310/15 – 1369)14th-century noblewoman and queen of EnglandPhilippa of Hainault (Middle French: Philippe de Hainaut; 24 June c.1310/15 – 15 August 1369) was Queen of England as the wife of King Edward III. Edward promised in 1326 to marry her within the following two years. She was married to Edward, first by proxy, when Edward dispatched the Bishop of Coventry "to marry her in his name" in Valenciennes, the second city of the County of Hainaut, in October 1327. The marriage was celebrated formally in York Minster on 24 January 1328, some months after Edward's accession to the throne of England. In August 1328, he also fixed his wife's dower.
Philippa acted as regent in 1346, when her husband was away from his kingdom, and she often accompanied him on his expeditions to Scotland, France, and Flanders. Philippa won much popularity with the English people for her kindness and compassion, which were demonstrated in 1347 when she successfully persuaded King Edward to spare the lives of the Burghers of Calais. This popularity helped maintain peace in England throughout Edward's long reign. The eldest of her thirteen children was Edward the Black Prince, who became a renowned military leader. Philippa died at the age of 56 from an illness closely related to edema. The Queen's College, Oxford, was founded in her honour.
Philippa's inclusion on the Black Britons list proved controversial, as historians dispute that she was "black" in any modern sense: see Criticism section above.6Courtney Pine (born 1964)British musicianCourtney Pine, CBE (born 18 March 1964 in London) is a British jazz musician, who was the principal founder in the 1980s of the black British band the Jazz Warriors. Although known primarily for his saxophone playing, Pine is a multi-instrumentalist, also playing the flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and keyboards. On his 2011 album, Europa, he plays almost exclusively bass clarinet.