The history of black people in Cambridge, UK cannot easily be separated from the history of Cambridge University. The university has attracted students from Africa and the African diaspora to the town of Cambridge for more than two centuries. Several notable black people had a Cambridge association in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the end of the eighteenth century Cambridge became a centre of abolitionist sentiment. From the end of the nineteenth century the university started to admit black students in larger numbers. In recent decades, however, the relatively low number of black students admitted to the university has become a topic of media comment and public concern.