Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire

Jeffrey Hill is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies at De Montfort University, UK. He is the author of Sport: A Historical Introduction (2010), Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain (2002) Nelson: Politics, Economy, Community (1997).

Widely respected as a sports historian, Jeffrey Hill demonstrates his importance as a writer of political and cultural biography with this scrupulously researched and finely argued profile of an unjustly forgotten figure. The Lancashire mill town of Nelson provides the geographical and conceptual pivot for this enthralling narrative of sport-inflected border-crossing, both as Learie Constantine’s adopted (and adoptive) home and as a dependable point of reference in his complex mobility between the colonial Trinidad of his youth, the independent nation that he helped bring into being – alongside his direct contemporary and lifelong friend C.L.R. James – and the racially conflicted Britain that he sought to influence first as a sportsman, then as social commentator, politician and diplomat. Jeffrey Hill’s monograph makes a compelling case for the contemporary reassessment of a multiply pioneering sportsman whose record of public service in the sphere of race relations, on both sides of an increasingly ‘Black’ Atlantic, is all the more worthy of attention, and appreciation, in our own challenging times

• 1. Constantine2. Trinidad 3. Cricket4. Nelson5. Writer6. Race Relations7. Colour Bar8. Race Politics9. The BBC10. Black EnglishmanBibliographyIndex