In the past few months, after years of preparation, the curators of a new British Library exhibition marking the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush realised it would become one of the most political in the history of the institution.

It opens in the wake of the debacle over the denial of British citizenship rights to the Windrush migrants and their families, which after months of revelations in the Guardian forced the resignation of the home secretary Amber Rudd.

Many of the cases have still to be resolved, and the exhibition now ends with a heartbreaking collage of filmed interviews in the UK and the Caribbean with those involved expressing rage, shock, bewilderment, or deep hurt.

“They were not surprised at the racism they encountered,” said Colin Prescod, a sociologist and chair of the Institute of Race Relations, who arrived as a 13-year-old boy, travelling alone by ship from Jamaica to join his mother in London on the eve, as it turned out, of the 1958 Notting Hill riots a few streets away, when white racists attacked West Indian homes. “They were surprised that having settled here, worked here, raised children here, somebody can knock on their door and tell them that they have no rights.”

The exhibition displays archive objects including this piece celebrating this ‘Empire war worker in Britain’. Photograph: The British Library Board

Prescod was the lead external adviser to the exhibition, which takes the story back far further than the arrival of the Windrush on 26 June 1948, carrying more than 1,000 migrants from the Caribbean to help rebuild war-battered Britain.

Among the manuscripts, recordings, books, letters, newspaper clippings, advertisements and photographs – brought together for the first time from different sections of the huge collections – the displays include an original copy of the Antigua Gazette of 20 June 1816, with a chilling front-page advertising slaves for sale. One offers: “Robert, a stout healthy boy 11 years of age; Lewis a ditto 8 years of age; Lucretia, a healthy girl, 5 years of age. The 3 latter have lost their mother and may be sold separately. They are offered at a low price as their owner has no Use for them.”

By 1948 there were generations of earlier arrivals, and many Windrush passengers were making return journeys, including war veterans. They received an official welcome, and sympathetic coverage, though the Daily Graphic, under the headline “Thames Welcome for West Indians” added the ominous subhead “Start of ‘Invasion’”.

ER Braithwaite’s typescript of his novel To Sir, With Love (1959), with self-censored lines. © The Estate of ER Braithwaite Photograph: The British Library

The virulently racist pamphlet Black and White News picked up the line a few months later: “Blacks Invade Britain” – over a photograph of a notably patient and orderly queue – headed a story beginning “Here is a familiar sight in Britain today. Another immigrant boat has docked and from it another train packed with blacks pulls into a British city.”

Prescod described the exhibition as a story of hope, optimism and the horrors of racism, and it includes recordings of music, as well as manuscripts and copies of celebrated poems, plays and novels created in the immigrants’ new home.

The loans include family treasures from Andrea Levy, whose award-winning novel Small Island was based on her parents’ experience. Beside a blazingly colourful short-sleeved shirt printed with limbo dancers, brought by her father in his luggage as a reminder of home, a photograph shows Levy and her parents in layers of winter clothing heroically trying to look warm and cheerful on a chilly English beach.

The curators, Elizabeth Cooper and Zoe Wilcox, hope that the exhibition, and a wide range of linked events including a Caribbean comedy week, will draw in people who have never set foot in the library before.

