Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the son of a Sierra Leonean doctor and an English mother, was born in London in 1875. His father abandoned Samuel and his mother in England due to feeling blocked in his career as a surgeon because of his skin color. At the age of fifteen, Coleridge-Taylor enrolled in the Royal College of Music to study the violin and composition with Stanford. He visited America several times between 1904 and 1910, gaining acclaim as a role model for black composers and even meeting President Roosevelt. He passed away in Croydon in 1912.
