Ahead of the play’s Liverpool debut on 17 October, Norwood spoke to the BBC to share the complex story of one man’s life – from grand beginnings, to a brave love story and an ultimately tragic end.
Laroche arrived in France in 1901 – barely 50 years since slavery had been abolished in the French colonies.
He was able to become an engineer after going to university in Beauvais, near Paris.
“For a black man in France in the early 1900s, it was extremely racist,” Norwood said.
“At that time French people really still believed that black people had tails.
“He encountered a lot of racial tensions there.”
Despite the challenges that an inter-racial couple might have faced in France at the time, Laroche met and married a white French woman named Juliette Lafargue.
“She had to have been an exceptional woman to have been brave enough to have dated a black man during that time period,” Norwood said of her.
“Not only that but her family supported her because they lived with her father.
“And we know Laroche and Lafargue were [supported] because there is a surviving letter that Lafargue wrote to her father about him.
“Her father was more concerned about him being educated than he was about the colour of his skin.”
BBC News
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