How Battersea Gave The UK ‘Its Own Barack Obama’

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United Kingdom on 2018-01-30 04:01Z by Steven

How Battersea Gave The UK ‘Its Own Barack Obama’

Londonist
2017-03-21

Will Noble


John Richard Archer began his mayoralty with a cheeky dig at his detractors

He has been described as Britain’s Barack Obama. Except John Richard Archer was elected to power almost a century before the 44th US president. And his seat wasn’t in Washington DC, but Battersea, London.

Born in Liverpool in 1863, Archer’s rise to political stardom was by way of being a naval man, medical student and photographer. In the early 1900s he set up a photography studio on Battersea Park Road. Ironically, it’s said he didn’t allow photographs taken of himself without consent, leading to some papers purposefully publishing dated images of him.

Voted onto Battersea’s council in 1906, Archer was elected Mayor of Battersea on 10 November 1913. He won by a single vote; the margin may have been slim, but the result was monumental. (Though the first mayor in London to be black, Archer was not the first in the UK. That was Allen Glaser Minns of Thetford, Norfolk, elected in 1904.)

Not everyone was pleased for Archer; during his campaign, and following his victory, he was battered with the kind of racist abuse and cockamamie conspiracy theories that will sound familiar to those who’ve followed politics in recent years…

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Surprises in the Family Tree

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, United States on 2014-01-06 01:55Z by Steven

Surprises in the Family Tree

The New York Times
2004-01-08

Mitchell Owens

John Archer first appears in Northampton County, Va., in the mid-17th century. He started a family that prospered, fought in the Revolutionary War and built a mansion. Generations later, Archer’s blood trickled down to me. It mingled in my veins with DNA from a gravedigger in 17th-century Württemberg, Germany; from an Appalachian clan with a recessive gene that turns their skins indigo blue; and from a rich young widow in Jamestown, Va., whose fickle heart led to America’s first breach-of-promise suit, in 1623.

I have been researching my past for two decades, since I was in high school, so finding a new ancestor is hardly startling. Learning about John Archer three years ago, however, was startling. He was black, a slave or indentured servant freed around 1677. I am white. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. Now I know better, thanks to Paul Heinegg.

A retired oil-refinery engineer in Collegeville, Pa., Mr. Heinegg, who is white, has compiled genealogies of 900 mixed-race families who lived freely in slaveholding states in “Free African Americans of North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia” and “Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware.” (The information is posted on a Web site, http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/.).

Mr. Heinegg’s research offers evidence that most free African-American and biracial families resulted not from a master and his slave, like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but from a white woman and an African man: slave, freed slave or indentured servant.

“Most of the workers in colonial America in the 17th and early 18th centuries were indentured servants, white and black,” said Dr. John B. Boles, a professor of history at Rice University in Houston and the editor of “The Blackwell Companion to the American South” (2001). Since there was not a clear distinction between slavery and servitude at the time, he said, “biracial camaraderie” often resulted in children. The idea that blacks were property did not harden until around 1715 with the rise of the tobacco economy, by which time there was a small but growing population of free families of color. Dr. Boles estimated that by 1860 there were 250,000 free black or mixed-race individuals…

…Tracing those communities has not been easy. ”People of color are often not identified as such in early records,” Mr. Heinegg said. ”For example, an individual might appear in deeds and court records and leave a will without ever mentioning his race.” Sometimes a person’s race can be discerned only by studying the tax assessed on nonwhites. If a man paid the tax on his wife but not himself, Mr. Heinegg said, it meant he was white but she was not.

An added challenge is that racial identity can mutate from free black to white in just a few generations. In my Archer ancestors’ case, it was mixed marriages and a cross-country move: my great-great-grandfather Esquire Collins and his wife, Roxalana Archer, are listed as mulatto in an 1800’s Tennessee census but show up as white on a later Arkansas census. ”You crossed over as early as you were able to,” said Antonia Cottrell Martin, a genealogist in New York. Mixed-race families who had difficulty passing sometimes explained dark complexions as coming from an American Indian or Mediterranean ancestry. ”It’s what people in the South used to call Carolina Portuguese,” said Dr. DeMarce, who comes from a mixed-race background…

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Election of the first black mayor

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United Kingdom on 2012-02-26 22:40Z by Steven

Election of the first black mayor

Daily Mail
1913-11-10

Source: mytimemachine.co.uk

Coloured Mayor—Majority of One at Battersea—Dramatic Speech

For the first time in the history of this country a man of colour has been elected mayor of a borough. The honour has fallen to Mr. John Richard Archer, a photographer, of Battersea Park-Road, who by thirty votes to twenty-nine was last night elected Mayor of Battersea by the Progressive Party. His opponent was Mr W G Moore, a West End tailor.

Mr Archer has hitherto kept secret the place of his birth. Last night, on donning his chain of office, he revealed the secret in a dramatic speech. He said:

“I am a man of colour. Many things have been said about me which are absolutely untrue. I think you ought to show the same respect for me as you would a white man. I am the son of a man who was born in the West Indies. I was born in a little, obscure village in England that you may never have heard of–Liverpool. I am a Lancastrian born and bred.”

“MY MOTHER WAS IRISH”

“My mother [here Mr Archer spoke with great emotion] was just my mother. She was not born in Burma , as some newspapers stated. She was not born at Rangoon . My mother was Irish.”…

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