Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events in modern Black history: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Barack Obama’s presidential election victory, entering New Orleans days after Hurricane Katrina, covering the rise of Black Lives Matter and interviewing prominent figures including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy. Now as the UK faces new waves of racial tension and division, Younge came to the Intelligence Squared stage to draw from his book Dispatches From The Diaspora and to discuss what can we learn from the past to make sense of the present. Recently awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism, one of the nation’s most powerful political voices joined us to discuss reporting on the diaspora from its frontlines. Joining Younge in conversation for this three-part episode is the writer and journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom.

Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events in modern Black history: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Barack Obama’s presidential election victory, entering New Orleans days after Hurricane Katrina, covering the rise of Black Lives Matter and interviewing prominent figures including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy. Now as the UK faces new waves of racial tension and division, Younge came to the Intelligence Squared stage to draw from his book Dispatches From The Diaspora and to discuss what can we learn from the past to make sense of the present. Recently awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism, one of the nation’s most powerful political voices joined us to discuss reporting on the diaspora from its frontlines. Joining Younge in conversation for this three-part episode is the writer and journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom.

In the aftermath of anti-immigrant riots this summer, the British government has refused to confront the root cause of the violence and cracked down on immigration instead. One night in late August 1958 a white Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, got into an argument with her Black Jamaican husband, Raymond, outside the Latimer Road tube station in West London. When a group of young people known as “teddy boys”—distinguished by their high, slicked-back hair, big suede shoes, and Edwardian-style frock coats—joined in and started hurling racist insults at Raymond, Majbritt turned on them. The next evening the teddy boys saw her again and started pelting her with milk bottles. One called her a “Black man’s trollop.”