Big up @GoogleUK for paying homage to the great Dr Harold Moody - a Black British hero who's name should be in every kid's history book. But, as you're unlikely to see him there, let me educate on the man many regard as the UK's Martin L. King.

17 years before Windrush arrived, at a YMCA on Tottenham High Street, Dr Harold Moody, a Jamaican-born, Peckham based, a physician established the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP).

The League’s undertaking was to bring together the various British communities of colour to contest the Colour Bar, a series of policies and informal practices used to prevent black people in Britain from working on railways, buses and other industrial roles.

Dr Moody was actually a war hero. During the Second World War, he was once the first doctor on the scene during a major bombing episode in south London.

Pecknarm legend.

After fighting for the lifting of the colour bar in the British Armed Forces, fair wages for Trinidadian oil workers and employment rights for black seamen, Dr Moody was eventually appointed to a government advisory committee on the welfare of non-Europeans in 1943.

After a life of campaigning, Dr Moody died, the year before the Windrush arrived, with the colour bar very much unbroken. Yet the LCP laid the groundwork for the fight against the moral, political & eugenic justifications for the 2nd class citizenship blk were expected to accept.

Yet it wasn’t until 1963, when a young social worker by the name of Paul Stephenson took up Dr Moody’s mission to fight the colour bar by organising the Bristol Bus Boycotts and a sit-in across public houses, that the colour bar was finally ended, in principle.

With the 1965 Race Relations Act, Stephenson’s campaign became enshrined in law - a testament to 61 yrs of campaigning & a fitting tribute to the life of the Jamaican-born doctor.

From their successes emerged an even stronger sense of Black British identity as those from across the Diaspora fought on, united in their mission to gain equity on British shores.

Most won’t have heard of Dr Moody, or Stephenson (Google celebrates them more than our Govt) Their names are lost to a folkloric version of British history that relies on you not questioning why the black activists that pushed us forward have been removed from the credits...

It's important to learn from international civil rights heroes such as Martin and Mandela, but if we can't celebrate our own black heroes right here in London then how do we expect to continue the legacy they built for us in our own city? Today, celebrate Dr Harold Moody