Harold Moody

Harold Arundel Moody was born on 8 October 1882 in Kingston, Jamaica, the eldest child of a chemist, and travelled to London in 1904 to study medicine at King's College London, quickly encountering the racial discrimination that would shape much of his life's work.

Despite winning several prestigious academic prizes, Moody was repeatedly refused hospital positions because of his race, with one matron explicitly refusing to have a coloured doctor working in her hospital; unable to find employment with an existing practice, he set up his own general practice in Peckham, south London, in February 1913.

Moody's Peckham home became a welcoming refuge for Black visitors who struggled to find accommodation elsewhere in London, with lodgers over the years including the Jamaican writer and future BBC broadcaster Una Marson, who remembered the house as always open to travelling Black people who couldn't find a room or meal elsewhere.

In March 1931, drawing on his own experiences of discrimination, Moody founded the League of Coloured Peoples with the support of the Quakers, Britain's first organised Black civil rights group, publishing the newsletter The Keys and campaigning on issues from employment rights for Black merchant seamen to the informal colour bar in Britain's armed forces.

Under Moody's leadership, the League campaigned throughout the Second World War, organising a major 1944 conference that produced a Charter for Coloured Peoples demanding full self-government for colonial territories, foreshadowing the following year's Pan-African Congress in Manchester; Moody died in London in 1947, and the League did not long survive his death.