Meeting her half sisters for the first time aged 77 Mary Phillips has finally found out who she is after a lifetime of yearning for one side of her family. Mary, from Abertillery, is one of the 2,000 children born to African-American GIs and British women during World War Two.
Like many of the other children she faced racism and rejection during childhood and was the only mixed race person in her community. Growing up in a post-war mining town Mary’s father’s identity was kept a mystery from her and she knew nothing about her Black identity. “I always knew I was different,” she said.
What she didn’t know then was that her father had written to ask her and her mother to join him in the USA, that she was named after his mother or, later, that she had younger half-siblings. Describing racism through her childhood in Abertillery Mary said: “Growing up in a small mining community everybody knows everybody and it would be: 'Where’s your father?' When people called you the N-word you didn’t know exactly what it meant but knew it wasn’t nice.”
