Mixed Race Studies

Revealed: MP’s alleged killer ‘bought manual on how to make a handgun and bombs from a US far-right group and has links to neo-Nazi organisations going back decades’

The Daily Mail
London, England
2016-06-17

James Tozer, Chris Greenwood, Andy Dolan, and Claire Duffin For The Daily Mail
Richard Spillett, Stephanie Linning, and Lucy Crossley for MailOnline

• Detectives were last night questioning Thomas Mair over Jo Cox’s murder
• US civil rights group say their records show he bought far-Right books
• Claims the quiet loner had been recently released from psychiatric care
• Mair was brought up by his grandmother and lived in his childhood home
• Half-brother says Mair never expressed any ‘racist tendencies’, adding: ‘I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother. We got on well’

The man suspected of killing Labour MP Jo Cox previously bought a book on how to make a handgun, it was claimed this morning.

Thomas Mair has been described as a loner who was ‘socially isolated and disconnected from society’ as a result of long-term mental illness.

Detectives were last night questioning 52-year-old Thomas Mair, amid fears he was motivated by Mrs Cox’s political campaigning.

Documents obtained from a US far-right group show a 1999 receipt for a manual on how to build a homemade gun with Mr Mair’s name and address on the top…

…Duane St Louis, age 41, the suspect’s half-brother and Mary’s son with second husband Reginald St Louis, said Mair had obsessive compulsive disorder and cleaned himself with Brillo pads because he was ‘obsessed with his personal hygiene’.

Reginald, who is believed to be from Grenada, and Mary had married when Mair was around 16. The couple lived with Duane and Mair’s younger full brother Scott, while Mair stayed with his grandmother. Reginald died in the 1980s. It is not known if Mair’s father, named locally as James, is still alive.

Speaking from his home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, he added: ‘He’s never expressed any views about Britain, or politics or racist tendencies. I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother, we got on well. He never married. The only time I remember him having a girlfriend was as a young man, but a mate stole her off him. He said that put him off [women] for life.’…

Read the entire article here.

Roots Entwined by Audrey Dewjee

Tangled Roots: Literature and events to celebrate mixed-race people in Yorkshire
2013

Audrey Dewjee

Yorkshire-born Audrey Dewjee has been married for over 40 years to a Zanzibari of Indian ancestry. She has been researching British Black and Asian History since the mid-1970s, and is currently a member of Leeds Diasporian Stories Research Group. In the 1980s she worked with Ziggi Alexander, co-researching the exhibition Roots in Britain: Black and Asian Citizens from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and co-editing Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, which brought Mary Seacole back into the public consciousness

London abounds with an incredible number of…black men who have clubs to support those who are out of place [i.e. out of work] and in every country town, nay in almost every village, are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys, and infinitely more dangerous.

So wrote Phillip Thicknesse in 1788. Thicknesse may have been exaggerating the numbers for effect; nevertheless, surviving records show that inter-racial families existed all around the country. There may be a greater number today, but mixed-marriages have taken place in Britain for hundreds of years.
 
Small numbers of Africans and Asians started arriving in Britain as a result of the trading links which followed upon early voyages of exploration. Africans were the first to arrive in the 1500s as a by-product of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They were followed by Indians and Chinese, after the setting up of the East India Company in 1601. London and the southern counties provide the earliest evidence of marriages – for example, that of Samuel Mansur or Munsur “a Blackamoure” to Jane Johnson at St. Nicholas, Deptford in 1613. Samuel may have been African, Arab or Asian.

Yorkshire eventually caught up with the trend. One of the earliest marriages here took place on 12 November, 1732, at Thornton by Pocklington in the East Riding, when John Quashee wed Rebecca Crosby. Others followed. Henry Osman, who had been brought to England from India by a member of the Lowther family, married Anne Cook at Swillington in 1753. At the time of his marriage, he was employed as a footman by Sir William Lowther, and he remained at Swillington until his death in 1781. Henry and Anne had a number of children, many of whom married and stayed in the local area.

Respectable English women appear to have had no hesitation in marrying men of colour: for instance, Elizabeth daughter of Rev. George Lawson, vicar of Weaverthorpe, who married Peter Horsfield at Boynton in 1780. The fact that many of the men had skills or were in secure employment and therefore able to support a family, would have added to their attraction. Yorkshire men also married African and Asian women. James Doe and Parcira Derosa, described as “a widow and Chinese”, were united in Ripon Cathedral in 1755, while possibly the earliest portrait of an inter-racial family in Britain was that of Harlequin, her Yorkshire husband and their two children…

Read the entire article here.

Tangled Roots: Stories and events to celebrate multi-racial families and mixed-race people in Yorkshire

Tangled Roots Exhibition: Portraits of Writers from Yorkshire taken by Anthony Farrimond
Seven Arts, Harrogate Road
Leeds, England
2013-09-18 through 2013-10-13

Tangled Roots is an Arts Council funded project which records and celebrates the experiences of multi-racial families in Yorkshire.

Tangled Roots first event is an Exhibition of portraits of multi-racial writers from Yorkshire. Photographed by Anthony Farrimond. On display at Seven Arts, Harrogate Road, Chapel Allerton, Leeds. 18 September – 13 October.

For more information, click here.

Study provides first genetic evidence of long-lived African presence within Britain

University of Leicester
Press Release
2007-01-24

Research reveals African origins in the UK and US

New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst “indigenous” British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry.

The University of Leicester study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and published today in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics, found that one third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin.

The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, of the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester, first spotted the rare Y chromosome type, known as hgA1, in one individual, Mr. X. This happened whilst PhD student Ms. Turi King was sampling a larger group in a study to explore the association between surnames and the Y chromosome, both inherited from father to son. Mr. X, a white Caucasian living in Leicester, was unaware of having any African ancestors.

“As you can imagine, we were pretty amazed to find this result in someone unaware of having any African roots,” explains Professor Jobling, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. “The Y chromosome is passed down from father to son, so this suggested that Mr. X must have had African ancestry somewhere down the line. Our study suggests that this must have happened some time ago.”

Although most of Britain’s one million people who define themselves as “Black or Black British” owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in reality, there has been a long history of contact with Africa. Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s Wall…

…“This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been,” says Professor Jobling. “Human migration history is clearly very complex, particularly for an island nation such as ours, and this study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations or ‘races’.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Africans in Yorkshire? The deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny within an English genealogy

European Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 15 (2007)
pages 288–293
DOI: 10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201771

Turi E. King
University of Leicester

Emma J. Parkin
University of Leicester

Geoff Swinfield
Geoff Swinfield Genealogical Services, Mottingham, London

Fulvio Cruciani
Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Rosaria Scozzari
Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Alexandra Rosa
Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Si-Keun Lim
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Yali Xue
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Chris Tyler-Smith
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Mark A. Jobling
University of Leicester

The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants. Y chromosomes belonging to the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, haplogroup (hg) A, are regarded as African-specific, and no examples have been reported from Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe. We describe the presence of an hgA1 chromosome in an indigenous British male; comparison with African examples suggests a Western African origin. Seven out of 18 men carrying the same rare east-Yorkshire surname as the original male also carry hgA1 chromosomes, and documentary research resolves them into two genealogies with most-recent-common-ancestors living in Yorkshire in the late 18th century. Analysis using 77 Y-short tandem repeats (STRs) is consistent with coalescence a few generations earlier. Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among ‘indigenous’ British, and emphasize the complexity of human migration history as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.

Introduction

The population of the UK today is culturally diverse, with 8% of its 54 million inhabitants belonging to ethnic minorities, and over one million classifying themselves as ‘Black or Black British’ in the 2001 census. These people owe their origins to immigration from the Caribbean and Africa beginning in the mid-20th century; before this time, the population has been seen as typically Western European, and its history has been interpreted in terms of more local immigration, including that of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans. However, in reality, Britain has a long history of contact with Africa (reviewed by Fryer). Africans were first recorded in the north 1800 years ago, as Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s wall –‘a division of Moors’. Some historians suggest that Vikings brought captured North Africans to Britain in the 9th century. After a hiatus of several hundred years, the influence of the Atlantic slave trade began to be felt, with the first group of West Africans being brought to Britain in 1555. African domestic servants, musicians, entertainers and slaves then became common in the Tudor period, prompting an unsuccessful attempt by Elizabeth I to expel them in 1601. By the last third of the 18th century, there were an estimated 10,000 black people in Britain, mostly concentrated in cities such as London.

Has this presence left a genetic trace among people regarded as ‘indigenous’ British? In principle, Y-chromosomal haplotyping offers a means to detect long-established African lineages. Haplotypes of the non-recombining region of the Y, defined by slowly mutating binary markers such as SNPs, can be arranged into a unique phylogeny.  These binary haplotypes, known as haplogroups (hg), show a high degree of geographical differentiation, reflecting the powerful influence of genetic drift on this chromosome. Some clades of the phylogeny are so specific to particular continents or regions that they have been used to assign population-of-origin to individual DNA samples, and in quantifying the origins of the components of admixed populations using simple allele-counting methods.

Studies of British genetic diversity, generally sampling on the criterion of two generations of residence, have found no evidence of African Y-chromosomal lineages, suggesting that they either never became assimilated into the general population or have been lost by drift. However, here, we describe a globally rare and archetypically African sublineage in Britain and show that it has been resident there for at least 250 years, representing the first genetic trace of an appreciable African presence that has existed for several centuries…

Read the entire article here.