Paul Stephenson

Paul Stephenson was born in Rochford, Essex, in 1937, the son of a West African father and an English mother, and was the only Black child in his school. He served in the Royal Air Force and trained as a youth worker before moving to Bristol in 1962, where he found that the Bristol Omnibus Company, backed by the local union branch, would not employ Black or Asian drivers or conductors. This was entirely legal; there was no law against it.

In April 1963 he arranged for a well-qualified young man, Guy Bailey, to apply for a job as a conductor. When the company learned that Bailey was Black the interview was cancelled. Stephenson called a press conference and announced a boycott. Students marched, the local MP Tony Benn and the cricketer Learie Constantine gave their support, and the national press picked up the story while the company's general manager insisted in public that Black crews would drive away white passengers.

On 28 August 1963, the day Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, the company gave in. The following year Stephenson refused to leave a Bristol pub that would not serve him, was arrested and acquitted. The Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, which outlawed such discrimination, were shaped in part by the case he had made.

He was appointed OBE in 2009 and given the freedom of the city of Bristol. He died in 2024.