Brutish Necessity: A Black Life ForgottenPaperback, 15 September 2022

Oswald Augustus Grey was a Jamaican immigrant. He was 20 years old when he was executed and 19 when the crime for which he was convicted took place. To talk to people who lived in the city at the time, or to scour the nostalgia forums that proliferate online, is to discover an episode that has almost entirely disappeared in terms of public remembrance. This book unearths something of a place and a society that allowed a young life to become expendable and forgotten. The Birmingham in which this happened is both alien yet familiar.