Harold Moody - Biography

Biography

Moody was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1882, the son of pharmacist Charles Ernest Moody and his wife Christina Emmeline Ellis. In 1904, he sailed to the United Kingdom to study medicine at King's College London. Having been refused work because of his colour, he started his own medical practice in Peckham in February 1932.

In March 1931 Harold Moody formed the League of Coloured Peoples, which was concerned with racial equality and civil rights in Britain and elsewhere in the world.

He also campaigned against racial prejudice in the armed forces, and is credited with overturning the Special Restriction Order (or Coloured Seamen's Act) of 1925, a discriminatory measure that sought to provide subsidies to merchant shipping employing only British nationals and required alien seamen (many of whom had served the United Kingdom during the First World War) to register with their local police. Many black and Asian British nationals had no proof of identity and were made redundant.

A devout Christian, Moody was active in the Congregational Union, the Colonial Missionary Society (of which he was chairman) and later the Christian Endeavour Union (1936).

Read more about this topic:  Harold Moody

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)