The forgotten woman who took on white supremacy in Victorian Britain

When a Quaker woman from Somerset started publishing a radical newspaper that challenged late-19th century readers to think about race, her ideas were far ahead of her time, and built the foundations of the movement for years to come, says Liam Drew

Catherine Impey founded Britain’s first anti-racist journal (Public Domain )

It’s 7 June 1878 and Catherine Impey is riding a train from Philadelphia to Baltimore, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line. Aged 30, Impey is in the US for the first time, 3,500 miles from her home on a Somerset apple farm. The heat is relentless and growing worse the further south she goes. Passing through forests, Impey notes how alien the plants seem. At the stations, she takes in the crowds of African Americans.

Impey is tired. At 6:30am that day, a telegram had summoned her and her companions to Baltimore to attend a meeting. She ate half a breakfast and raced to the station, recent events weighing heavily on her mind. She’s carrying a bunch of wild magnolias, bought for her by her friends from a child at one of the stations. Lying back in her seat, Impey gazes at them and sighs: “Oh, such beauties.”

The week before, Impey was in Boston, a delegate at an international Quakers conference convened to discuss their global temperance campaign. Equally at stake had been the movement’s unity. These are fragile, fractious times. Thirteen years after the American Civil War and emancipation, America’s new reality is still being made. And many non-American Quakers are concerned about lodges in the southern states being segregated.