Dinah Black

Dinah Black, also known as Dinah the Moor and Dinah the Black, was an enslaved African woman who lived in Bristol in the seventeenth century, and was baptised as a Christian. She seems to have been captured in Africa and sold on as a slave in England before English slave-trading with Africa was fully established. She is noted as one of the first recorded black people in England, and among those whose lives are most fully recorded.

Life

In 1647, a maid born outside England, 'Dinah the Black', who has been thought to be the same person, visited the Baptist spiritualist Sarah Wight in London and asked her advice.[1] 'I am often tempted against my life: I am not as others are, I do not look so as others do,' she explained.[2]

In 1667, Dinah had been working as a servant to Dorothy Smith in Bristol for five years. She was put on a ship to be transported to a plantation (presumably in the West Indies), but managed to escape. She took her case to the Bristol Court of Aldermen in July 1667, and, since Dorothy Smith did not wish to take her back, the aldermen judged that she should be free to earn her living until the next Quarter sessions.[3] It is not known what happened to her after this.

Reception

Dinah's story has been described as 'the most revealing of Bristol's black records'.[4] She was included in the 2018 book The Women Who Built Bristol,[5] and her imagined life story has been included on a BBC Black History Month website.

References
  1. Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), ISBN 9780754656951, pp. 210-11.
  2. Henry Jessey, The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by the Spirit of Grace, in An Empty Nothing Creature, viz. Mrs Sarah Wight, 7th ed. (London: Mortlock, 1658).
  3. John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century (Bristol: William George's Sons, 1900).
  4. Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), ISBN 9780754656951, p. 209.
  5. Jane Duffus, The Women Who Built Bristol (Bristol: Tangent Books, 2018).

Further reading
  • Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Buford Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000)
  • Bristol Archives JQS/M/4 (Minutes of the courts of General Quarter Sessions - 1595-1705): Minute Book 1653-1671
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