Category: Europe History

The Code Noir (French pronunciation: ​[kɔd nwaʁ], Black Code) was a decree passed by the French King Louis XIV in 1685 defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial…

Ras Prince Monolulu (26 October 1881 – 14 February 1965), whose real name was Peter Carl Mackay (or McKay), was a horse-racing tipster, and something of an institution on the…

Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761 – July 1804) was a British heiress and a member of the Lindsay family of Evelix. She was born into slavery and illegitimate; her mother, Maria…

Lucius Septimius Severus was Roman emperor from 193 to 211. He was born in Leptis Magna (present day Al-Khums, Libya) in the Roman province of Africa.  

Adrian, also spelled Hadrian (born before 637, died 710), was a North African scholar in Anglo-Saxon England and the abbot of Saint Peter’s and Saint Paul’s in Canterbury. He was…

Sara Forbes Bonetta, (born Omoba Aina; 1843 – 15 August 1880), was a princess of the Egbado clan of the Yoruba people in West Africa who was orphaned during a…

Eric George Irons OBE (1921–2007) was Britain’s first black magistrate and a campaigner for equal rights.  

Betty Campbell MBE (6 November 1934 – 13 October 2017, born Rachel Elizabeth Johnson) was a Welsh community activist, who was Wales’ first black head teacher.  

John Ystumllyn (born c. 1738, died 1786), also colloquially known as Jac Du or Jack Black, was an 18th-century Welsh gardener and the first well-recorded black person of North Wales. 

Louise Marie-Thérèse, also known as The Black Nun of Moret (c. 1658 – 1730), was a French nun and the subject of accounts from the 18th century in which she…