Rachel Elizabeth Campbell, known as Betty Campbell, was born on 6 November 1934 in Butetown, Cardiff's historic Tiger Bay docklands district, to a Welsh Barbadian mother, Honora, and a Jamaican father, Simon, who was killed during the Second World War.
As a bright, bookish child who won a scholarship to Lady Margaret High School for Girls, Campbell announced her ambition to become a teacher, only to be told by a teacher that the problems she would face would be 'insurmountable' for a working-class Black girl.
Undeterred, Campbell became one of the first six female students admitted to Cardiff Teacher Training College, the only Black student in her cohort, and qualified as a teacher in 1963, going on to teach for 28 years at Mount Stuart Primary School in Butetown.
In the early 1970s Campbell became Wales's first Black headteacher at Mount Stuart, where she pioneered the teaching of Black history, slavery and apartheid to her pupils decades before such topics entered the national curriculum, and later helped establish Black History Month in Wales.
Beyond the classroom, Campbell served as a Cardiff city councillor, sat on the Race Relations Board and the Commission for Racial Equality, and continued championing equality until her death in 2017; in 2021, following a public vote, a four-metre bronze statue of Campbell was unveiled in Cardiff's Central Square, believed to be the first outdoor statue of a named, non-fictional woman anywhere in Wales.
- Wales's first Black headteacher, at Mount Stuart Primary School, Butetown
- Pioneered teaching Black history, slavery and apartheid in Welsh primary schools decades before the national curriculum
- Served as a Cardiff city councillor and member of the Commission for Racial Equality
- Helped establish Black History Month in Wales
- Subject of the first outdoor statue of a named, non-fictional woman in Wales, 2021
- Being told something is impossible is not the same as it being true. Campbell was told as a child that her ambition to teach faced insurmountable obstacles, yet she went on to become Wales's first Black headteacher.
- Curriculum choices can quietly shape a generation. Campbell's decision to teach Black history and apartheid to primary school children in the 1970s shaped how an entire community understood its own history.