1930 - Asia and Europe

Europe

Germany

*In 1930, there were between 20,000 and 25,000 people of African descent in Germany.  Most prominent amongst the German people of African descent were the so-called "Rhineland Bastards".

"Rhineland Bastard" (German: Rheinlandbastard) was a derogatory term used in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany to describe Afro-German children, who were fathered by Africans serving as French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland after World War I.  Under Nazism's racial theories, these children were considered inferior to Aryans and consigned to compulsory sterilization.

The term "Rhineland Bastard" can be traced back to 1919, just after World War I, when Entente troops, most of them French, occupied the Rhineland. A relatively high number of German women married soldiers from the occupying forces, while many others had children by them out of wedlock (hence the disparaging label "bastards"). The resulting children numbered from 16,000 to 18,000. The occupation itself had been regarded as a national disgrace by Germans across the political spectrum, and there was a widespread tendency to consider all forms of collaboration and fraternization with the occupiers as moral (if not legal) treason. The fact that it was carried out by what were viewed as "B-grade" troops (a notion that itself was drawn from colonial and racial stereotypes) increased the feelings of humiliation. In the Rhineland itself, local opinion of the troops was very different, and the soldiers were described as "courteous and often popular", possibly because French colonial soldiers harbored less ill-will towards Germans than war-weary French occupiers.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".

However, most of the small population of people of African descent in Germany at that time were children of German settlers and missionaries in the former German colonies in Africa and Melanesia, who had married local women or had children with them out of wedlock. With the loss of the German colonial empire after World War I, some of these colonists returned to Germany with their mixed-race families. While the black population of Germany at the time of the Third Reich was small at 20–25,000 in a population of over 65 million, the Nazis decided to take action against those in the Rhineland. They despised black culture, which they considered inferior, and even sought to prohibit "traditionally black" musical genres like jazz as being "corrupt negro music".  No official laws were enacted against the black population, or against the children of mixed parentage, since they were the offspring of marriages and informal unions from before the Nuremberg laws of September 1935 which prohibited miscegenation. The law also deprived persons of mixed parentage their freedom to marry at all, or at least the spouse of their choice by banning future sexual relations and mixed marriages between Aryans and others. Instead, a group named "Commission Number 3" was created to resolve the problem of the "Rhineland Bastards" with the aim of preventing their further procreation in German society. Organized under Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, it was decided that the children would be sterilized under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased  Offspring. 

The program began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all "Rhineland Bastards" under their jurisdiction. All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized. This order applied only in the Rhineland. Other African-Germans or mixed race Germans were unaffected. According to Susan Samples, the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program.

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Great Britain

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*Allan Minns, the first man of African descent to become a mayor in Britain, died in Dorking, England. 

Allan Glaisyer Minns (b. October 19, 1858, Inagua, Bahamas – d. 1930, Dorking, England) was elected Mayor of Thetford, Norfolk, in 1904.  John Archer, elected Mayor of Battersea in 1913, had been thought to be the first man of African descent to hold this title. However, in reporting Archer's election, the American Negro Year Book 1914 (founded by Monroe Work) recorded that "In 1904 Mr Allen Glaisyer Minns, a col'd man from West Indies, was elected Mayor of borough of Thetford, Norfolk". He had been elected to the town council of Thetford in 1903 and served a two-year term as mayor from 1904.

Allan Glaisyer Minns was the youngest son of John Minns.  Born at Inagua, Bahamas on October 19, 1858, Minns was educated at Nassau Grammar School and Guy's Hospital in London.

Minns was registered with the British Medical Association on February 14, 1884. His qualifications were MRCS (Member of the Royal College of Surgeons) in 1881, and LRCP (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians) in 1884. He was based in Thetford from 1885 until 1923, when he moved to Dorking where he died.

He was one of nine children of John Minns (1811–1863) and Ophelia (née Bunch, 1817 – 1902). His paternal grandfather, also John Minns, had emigrated circa 1801 from England to the Bahamas where he married Rosette, a former African slave.

His eldest brother, Dr. Pembroke Minns (1840–1912), was already in medical practice in Thetford when he moved there.

He was twice married; first to Emily Pearson in 1888 and secondly to Gertrude Ann Morton in 1896. He had children by both wives.

His son Allan Noel Minns, also a doctor, was one of the few black officers to serve in the British Army during the First World War.

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