Legendary black civil rights activist and physician Dr Cecil Belfield Clarke has been immortalised in a blue plaque in Elephant and Castle.
A huge crowd of people flocked to London South Bank University’s Perry Library building to witness the unveiling yesterday (Wednesday, April 13).
Milton Inniss, High Commissioner of Barbados, who spoke at the event, said: “His contribution to the country has been immense and indeed immeasurable.”
Born in Barbados in 1894, Dr Belfield Clarke ran his surgery from where the library now stands.
From here, he tended to patients between 1920 and his retirement in 1965 – even when bombs rained down on the area during the blitz.
He also fought the rampant racism of mid-20th century Britain, founding the civil rights group The League of Coloured Peoples in 1931.
Asked whether Britain appreciates its homegrown black civil rights activists enough, Black History Walks founder Tony Warner said: “We’re talking about Martin Luther King and not what happened here.
“When I speak to schools they can’t explain why they talk about the March on Washington in 1963 but don’t talk about the New Cross Fire in 1981 and the protests for human rights and equality that followed.”
After arriving in the UK in 1914, Belfield Clarke attended Cambridge University, later becoming president of his old college, and was also a member of the Council of the British Medical Association.
He also devised the misnamed Clark’s rule, a mathematical formula that is still used to calculate medicine dosages for children.
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The scale of his achievements is only enlarged when one considers that, for most of his life, there was no UK legislation against racial discrimination.
Addressing the doctor’s lack of recognition despite his work, the Bishop of Croydon the Rt Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett said at the event: “I met people who knew Harold Moody and I knew nothing about Dr Belfield Clarke.
“He was not invisible he was invisibilised… his contribution should have never been made unknown.”
Clarke is thought to have had a gay relationship with lifelong partner Edward ‘Pat’ Walter, which he concealed by employing him as his secretary.
In his 1951 book No Green Pastures: The Journal of Negro History Roi Ottley described the doctor as a “light brown freckle-faced man of 50-odd years inclined to corpulence with the buoyancy of one who has lived well and happily.”
In October 2021, just two per cent of Historic England’s blue plaques commemorated black historical figures.
This plaque, installed thanks to a collaboration between community trust Nubiak Jak and Black History Walks, aims to remedy that figure.
“Rampant racism”, so rampant that the New Cross fire is still trotted out as an example (over 40 years later), despite two inquests concluding that the fire was most likely started by someone who had been thrown out of the party earlier.