The US and the UK are quite different in this regard, mainly in the antiquity of their black populations. To put it very simply, there wasn't really slavery in the UK in the same way that there was in the US. Slavery has been officially outlawed in the Kingdom of England (Great Britain after the act of Union in 1707) since the Norman Conquest and while slavery was permitted in the colonies, if a slave made it back to Britain then they would technically be a free man. This was upheld in a court case in 1700 where the Chief Justice John Holt stated that as soon as slave set foot in England he was a free man. Due to this fact there not much importation of people of African origin into Britain, especially not the scale that was the case in the US. There was however a fashion for wealthy people in the 18th century (especially those with links to the colonies) to have black servants and you often see them in their portraits. Despite this however the black population of Britain was very small until the post-war period. During the late 1940s the Labour Government under Prime Minister Clement Attlee passed the British Nationality Act of 1948. This extended British citizenship to everyone in her colonies. This allowed large amounts of people from the Empire to emigrate to Britain in order to fill the shortfall of the post-war labour market. A large amount of these immigrants came from places such as Jamaica and the Bahamas were dubbed the 'Windrush Generation'. These Afro-Caribbean immigrants and their descendants account for most of the black population of the UK (currently around 4% of the population). Of course since slavery had been abolished in the British Empire since 1833 these people had been living as free people in the West Indies long before they emigrated to Britain they already had their own surnames.