This chapter concerns the history of anti-Black racism in American medicine. For a very long time, medical professionals either refused to treat Black patients or required they be treated in segregated, dramatically under-resourced settings. This was due to both racist laws and social customs that produced systemic racism within the medical establishment. Major medical professional organizations both actively and passively supported segregated healthcare. Black people were also largely excluded from professional schools and greatly restricted in their ability to practice medicine. Further, Black people were often abused and exploited by unethical medical practices, which included robbing their graves to provide cadavers and forcing them to participate in dangerous and unethical medical experiments. Black Americans were further harmed by physicians’ involvement in the eugenics movement. Based on gross misunderstandings of genetics and heredity, eugenics proposed that society could be improved by limiting reproduction among socially disadvantaged groups. This resulted in involuntary sterilizations that disproportionally targeted Black Americans. Most racist medical policies and practices were eliminated by legislation and changes in professional and societal norms. However, the legacy of racism in American medicine can still be seen in current healthcare practices that harm Black patients and greater medical mistrust among Black Americans.

Chapter 5 explores the reasons why the Sheffield area settlement (as well as those located by marriage records for other British towns) has remained largely unnoticed by historians and questions the prior assumption that the presence of non-white immigrants in an area can always be located by remarkable instances of resistance by state institutions or by the working-class population. It also closely examines evidence and personal testimony of the everyday lived experiences of natives and newcomers who inhabited the same neighbourhoods. These individuals frequently describe integrated lives and point to a non-ideologically aligned phenomenon, here described as ‘everyday tolerance’, which existed within many working-class communities. Fostered by values of ‘getting by’ and ‘mucking in together’ and of bonds of family, work and neighbourhood, many neighbourhoods were able to accept the inward migration and intermarriage of non-white newcomers without the hostility and violence displayed during the port riots of 1919–1920. To view the period through a historical lens focused on hostility is to overlook much of the nuance and fine grain of quotidian relations between natives and newcomers.

The ’inter-racial’ or ‘mixed’ marriage should be, Chapter 4 argues, central to discussion of South Asian immigration to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter examines evidence from the marriage records and argues that the role and widespread distribution of mixed marriages across Britain have been neglected by historians. It explores the backgrounds and social position of women who entered into relationships with South Asian men and questions J. B. Priestley’s assertion that mixed working-class couples were formed from ‘the riff-raff of the stokeholds and the slatterns of the slums’. Couples in mixed marriages have also been presented by historians as isolated from the neighbourhoods they inhabited. This chapter, however, argues that these couples were often thoroughly integrated into their neighbourhoods and maintained frequent contact not just with close friends, but also with blood relations, in-laws and neighbours. Additionally, these marriages, and the families and households they formed, played a significant, if not crucial, role in acting as anchor points in enduring chains of migration spanning the inter-war period and into post-Partition era.