Find out more about the global icons illustrated on Reading’s Central Club Black History Mural created in 1988.
King Akhenaten of Egypt
Akhenaten, was a pharoah king (c. 1353–36 BCE) of ancient Egypt in the 18th dynasty who established a new cult dedicated to the Aton, the sun’s disk (hence his assumed name Akhenaten, meaning “beneficial to Aton”).
His wife Queen Nefertiti is on the left.
Queen Amina of Zaria – Mother Africa
A Hausa who ruled in the mid 16th Century in what is now Nigeria. Mother Africa (1533-1610) is the common ancestor of all people of African descent irrespective of their physical characteristics and current location on this planet. Africa is the oldest inhabited continent (5 million years) on Earth.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist supporter who escaped from slavery before the Civil War to rescue 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, through safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.
Oloudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797) was a writer and abolitionist who became a prominent figure associated with the campaign to abolish the slave trade. Equiano was born in what is now Nigeria and sold into slavery aged 11. He purchased his freedom in 1766.
Toussaint L’Ouverture
Toussaint L’Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda (1743-1803), was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. He led a successful slave revolt and emancipated the slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (died 1833) was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826.
King Cetshwayo
Cetshwayo kaMpande (1826–1884) was born into royalty as the son of Zulu king Mpande and Queen Ngqumbazi. He reigned as king of the Zulu Kingdom from 1873 to 1884 and its Commander in Chief during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879.
Martin Luther King Jr
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968) is famous for his ‘I Have a Dream’ public speech at the 1963 Washington march for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States of America.
Angela Davis
Angela Yvonne Davis (b. 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic and author. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918-2013) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician imprisoned from 1962-1990 for conspiring to overthrow the state. He served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
C.L.R. James
Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. He was a leading figure in the Pan-African movement and author of Beyond a Boundary.
Claudia Jones
Claudia Vera Jones (1915-1964) was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist, activist and Black nationalist who organised the first London carnival event in 1959 to lift the spirits of West Indian immigrants facing racial tensions and social challenges.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913-2005) known as the mother of the civil rights movement was an American activist best known for her refusal to move from her seat on a Montgomery Alabama bus in defiance of Jim Crow laws, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.
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Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon (1925-1961) was a French West Indian psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from French colony Martinique. His works became influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.
