There is considerable debate public about institutionalised racism and the way that the profits from slavery have funded contemporary institutions and businesses. It also shines a spotlight on the business of history; whose history is recorded, who is commemorated, what assumptions have passed unchallenged and how do we ensure that the field of history reflects all our histories not just that of a privileged few. In this piece, I want to look at one aspect of local history; the lost histories of black Britons in the Midlands before the First World War. It is commonly assumed that black Britons are generally descendants of the Windrush generation. However, their story goes back much further than that. Black Britons appear in the records from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, albeit in small numbers. It is shocking to learn that the last recorded slave sale in the Midlands took place in 1771 in Lichfield. There were others before that, and it is q...