Dr Harold Moody — Queen’s Road, Peckham

Home and surgery of Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples (1931) — the leading Black civil-rights organisation in pre-war Britain. Harold Moody, born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1882, qualified as a doctor at King’s College Hospital after a struggle against the colour bar in medicine. He set up his surgery at 164 Queen’s Road, Peckham — and from his front room founded the League of Coloured Peoples on 13 March 1931.

The League campaigned against the racial bar in employment, housing and the merchant navy; lobbied the Colonial Office over the case of Learie Constantine; and laid the political groundwork that the Windrush generation would build upon. Moody died in 1947, weeks after returning from a fundraising tour of the Caribbean.

People

• Harold Moody

Themes

• Civic life
• Medicine & nursing
• Pan-Africanism

Place

• Southwark
• Edwardian & interwar

Hero image

• File: /media/people/harold-moody.jpg
• Credit: Unknown photographer, 1950
• License: Public domain
• Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHarold_Moody_1950.jpg

Sources

• Vaughan, David A. Negro Victory: The Life Story of Dr. Harold Moody. Independent Press, 1950.
• Wikipedia — Harold Moody (covers his life and the English Heritage blue plaque). — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Moody