Was Winston Churchill a racist? A look at the evidence

‘Racist’ read the spray-painted epithet on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square following a climate protest in 2020. This brutal assessment of Britain’s wartime leader wasn’t a one-off: ‘Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one,’ says the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. In recent years, a movement to ‘tell the truth’ about Churchill has sprung up. He should be knocked from perch, plinth and prominence, his critics argue. So what is the truth about Churchill?

Churchill’s critics say the language he used is proof he was a racist. But is this right? Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project has put together every one of Churchill’s 20 million published words, including nearly 60 books, 2,000 articles, thousands of speeches and private letters and papers. It also includes 60 million words about Churchill by biographers and memoir writers. With some trepidation, my research team and I searched for every racist epithet in this enormous canon.