During World War Two, around 130,000 black GIs came to Britain. They were members of the US armed forces, but kept strictly segregated from their white 'colleagues'. For the majority of the resident British population, this was their first exposure to black people en masse and to blatant racism. Public opinion was largely on the side of the black GIs. David Miles in his account of Britain in wartime quotes a West Country farmer who told a reporter from the New Statesman 'I love the Americans - but I don't like those white ones they've brought with them'.

Small Island includes key scenes that describe the racism of the US army camps and local reaction to the GIs. Having signed up to defeat the Nazis and their racist ideology, the character Gilbert is appalled when he witnesses how Britain's main ally in the war has its own form of racism, 'not master-race theory: Jim Crow!'.

The following extract from an interview with a former Jamaican service man is taken from the book Windrush: the irresistible rise of multi-racial Britain by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.

Now, the Americans did not believe in their black troops enjoying the same things that they had in exactly the same way. They have ate the same food, but not in the same mess. You know, they'd see the same movies but I remember going to one of their cinemas once and I said, "Well this is very strange, I don't see any black people here." So they said, "Look behind you", and there they were up in a kind of crow's nest, all of them, all the black troops. And yet here were I, sitting in the front with American officers. Huh? Hard to explain. They have funny ideas. They would treat me as a human being, but their own, they'd probably kick him out if he came into where they were. Hard to understand how people behave like that, but naturally it is something with which you grow up and I suppose it's hard to get rid of.... William Natley from Jamaica who joined the RAF in 1943 and stayed on after the war to work in the Civil Service.

During the course of the war, part of Shepton Mallett prison in Somerset was taken over by the American government for use as a military prison. Eighteen American servicemen were executed there of whom 11 were black. Six of those executed had been found guilty of rape, a crime which did not carry the death sentence under British law. One black GI who escaped execution was Private Leroy Henry. He was accused of raping a woman from Bath but his life was saved when over 30,000 local people wrote to President Eisenhower to protest his innocence. You can read more about the treatment of black GIs on Channel 4's Origination website.