Lord David Pitt

David Thomas Pitt was born on 3 October 1913 in St David's Parish, Grenada, and attended the Grenada Boys' Secondary School, wanting to be a family doctor or a priest. He came to Britain in 1933 to study medicine at Edinburgh University. After qualifying he returned to the Caribbean, working as a district medical officer in Trinidad, where he also led the West Indian National Party in the 1940s.

Pitt came back to Britain in 1947 and opened a practice in Euston, north London, in 1950, which treated patients of all races. He became active in the Labour Party, and in 1959 he was selected to contest Hampstead, the first time a major British party had adopted a Black candidate for Parliament. He was not elected, and the experience of racism during the campaign shaped what he did next.

Inspired by Martin Luther King's visit to London in 1964, Pitt co-founded and chaired the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, CARD, in 1964 to 1965, often described as Britain's first civil rights organisation. It united immigrant associations and anti-racist groups to press for legal protection against discrimination. He later served as deputy chairman and then chairman of the Community Relations Commission.

In 1961 he was elected to the London County Council for Hackney, and from 1964 he sat on the Greater London Council. He was deputy chairman from 1969 to 1970 and in 1974 became the first Black chairman of the GLC. He was also London's first Black magistrate, appointed in 1966.

In February 1975 Harold Wilson recommended him for a life peerage, and he became Baron Pitt of Hampstead, the second peer of African-Caribbean heritage after Lord Constantine, and the longest-serving Black parliamentarian in British history. He played a role in the creation of the Race Relations Act of 1976. In 1985 he became president of the British Medical Association, which he said was his most valued honour. He died in London on 18 December 1994 and was buried in Grenada with full honours.