They have all earned Britain’s thanks: 20 Black heroes who should be on a postage stamp | Bernardine Evaristo, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Doc Brown and others

Beryl Gilroy

by Bernardine Evaristo

Beryl Gilroy, born in 1924, is the unsung heroine of the Windrush generation of writers. She arrived in Britain from Guyana in 1951 and worked as a schoolteacher in London for many years, eventually becoming a headteacher.

Her wonderful, groundbreaking memoir, Black Teacher (1976), is an account of her early years as a teacher in the 1950s and the racism she encountered and overcame, always with great humour and dignity in the face of extreme ignorance.

Unlike the book’s male counterpart, To Sir, With Love, by fellow Guyanese writer ER Braithwaite, which was turned into a Hollywood film starring Sidney Poitier, Black Teacher was shamefully overlooked. In 2021 Faber & Faber republished it and I was honoured to write an introduction.

Gilroy went on to write many fiction books for children and adults. She died in 2001, leaving behind two children, one of whom is the renowned scholar Paul Gilroy.

Bernardine Evaristo OBE is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker prize in 2019

Olaudah Equiano

by Ben Bailey Smith, AKA Doc Brown

When I picked up a gig a few years back alongside David Olusoga to voice the audiobook for The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, I had next to no knowledge of who the man was or why his life had such an interesting narrative. Now there’s rarely a day that goes by when I don’t think about him.

A slave who through his own ingenuity eventually bought his freedom and became British, Equiano was part swashbuckling adventurer, part historian and a quiet, unsung hero. After settling in London it was his incredible memoirs that helped kickstart the abolitionist movement. A phenomenal human with an even more phenomenal life story.

Ben Bailey Smith, AKA Doc Brown, is an actor, comedian and rapper