Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
by Peter Fryer
(Pluto Press, £16.99)

DESPITE the emergence in 2016 of David Olusoga’s voluminous Black and British: A Forgotten History, Peter Fryer’s newly reprinted classic, first published in 1984 and now with a foreword by Guardian journalist Gary Younge, remains the best and most accessible consideration of black British history.

While the field is hardly a crowded one, Fryer’s offering still has no serious challenger and hangs on to the advantage of being the first mover. Olusoga’s history, in stark contrast to his popular and arresting BBC TV series of the same name, turned out to be a disappointingly dry exercise. By contrast, Fryer’s Staying Power holds the reader’s attention easily.

Beginning with the memorable line, “There were Africans in Britain before the English came here,” he traces the black presence from AD 253 through to the large-scale arrival of West Indian immigrants after the second world war.

Especially strong about the rise of racism associated with British colonial slavery and on revealing the lives of black figures such as Olaudah Equiano, who wielded a degree of influence in the 18th and 19th centuries, the book reflects Fryer’s background as a journalist in its marrying of impressive levels of research with a clear and relaxed style.

While much of the story he tells is now common knowledge, it has to be remembered that this is in large part down to Fryer’s pioneering work and that in some instances it was in this very book that much of the detail was first revealed.

A Marxist who was expelled from the Communist Party in 1956 for rejecting Stalinism, Fryer was a white man — a circumstance that stirred some controversy when the book first came out. But in the time that has passed, a consensus has emerged that he did a good job of what he set out to do.

Fryer died in 2006, so there’s been no question of adding more to the book’s 600-plus pages. Thus it ends with the 1981 inner-city riots and contains only a cursory consideration of the important period in British black history from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, with nothing about what has happened since then.

Fryer argued in his preface that doing proper justice to more recent events requires “a perspective, and an access to documents, that will not be available for a long time.” While there’s much to be said for that assertion, surely enough time has now elapsed for someone to take up from where he left off.