Ignatius Sancho. Credit: National Gallery of Canada. Public domain (from commons.wikimedia.org).
Voting in British elections has not been restricted by race, but rather gender, age, income and property ownership. With such conditions that left voting rights in the hands of the aristocracy and the middle classes, one might think that no Black voter existed until the late 19th century or beyond. However, Ignatius Sancho, a writer, composer, shopkeeper, and abolitionist, is the first known Black Briton to have voted in Britain, a right he exercised in 1774 and 1780.
Credit: Luke McKernan. CC Attribution Share Alike Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/33718942@N07/21707199406/
He owned a grocery shop where he sold merchandise such as tobacco, sugar and tea in Mayfair, Westminster. Sancho blazed a trail for blacks in Britain. It is estimated that blacks make up a third of the 4.8 million ethnic minority voters in the UK. The ‘Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African’, edited and published two years after his death in 1870, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English from a first-hand experience.