“The history we were taught was very narrow”

For the last three decades, Stephen Bourne has dedicated his career to uncovering the forgotten stories of Black Britain, from the servicemen and women who fought during the World Wars to the pioneers of Black British theatre. We spoke to Bourne about his education and finding his way into history, his fight to get Black British history published and how the market for Black history has started to shift in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Why did you decide to become a historian?

To be honest, I didn’t decide to become a historian. It didn’t work like that. I come from a working-class background. I went to a Secondary Modern School in the early 1970s in South London, and we left at 16 with no qualifications. There was no route to university and an academic career. History at school wasn’t taught, I think we were taught history maybe in the first or second year and it trailed off after that.

History only interested me because I was fascinated by the stories of older women in my family. My mother was a little girl during the Blitz, she grew up in London and my grandmother and my great aunt were always talking about the Blitz and how it impacted them. They were working-class women’s voices and this was missing in history