Steve McQueen on Paul Gilroy
The first book I read by Paul Gilroy was There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. I was 19 and studying fine art at Goldsmiths, and it turned my head like nothing before. For a young person looking for answers and clues, to have that sort of book was eye-opening. It uncovered and revealed things. And then I read his masterpiece, The Black Atlantic. It was huge. His ideas about modernity and double-consciousness represented a major shift in thinking throughout the world. That book spoke to so many people.
The way his books tell the stories of black lives is surgical and detailed, and at the same time poetic. I think that’s important: truth has to be communicated, but it also has to be felt. His work has been a springboard for so many people – artists, musicians, actors. It has a foundational quality that allows you to jump off. It propels you and allows you to go even further.
He was teaching at Goldsmiths when I was studying there, so I knocked on the door of his office and started asking him all these questions. He welcomed me inside and started to talk to me. This was Paul Gilroy – the premier intellectual of the UK, if not Europe and the world – and I was a 19-year-old kid! I was probably asking the most embarrassing things, but he’d send me off with books to read and essays to write. He had this enormous patience and generosity.
What’s interesting about Paul is that he cares about getting things done. He doesn’t care about who people think he is, or about being known. It’s all about evidence, and the work finding an audience: he wants to be in the public consciousness, not in the public eye. He’s an unsung hero, but consciously so. He’s not interested in being anyone’s hero.
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Steve McQueen is a British film producer, screenwriter and video artist, and the director of films including Blitz and 12 Years a Slave
Vivienne Acheampong on Afua Hirsch
I have been an admirer of Afua Hirsch’s work for about 10 years. When I first came across her, as a Black British woman of Ghanian heritage I formed a connection instantly. Her ability to amplify the stories of Black lives past and present was something that I was in awe of.
Her book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging resonated with me so deeply I can honestly say it transformed my life. She conveyed so profoundly what it is to be Black and British, and to be part of the diaspora, bringing such a nuanced perspective around race in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.
Hirsch consistently confronts, challenges and exposes truths about Britain’s colonial past and its impact on contemporary racial dynamics, and how it still has an influence on racial inequality today.
I love how she celebrates Africa and all the riches and beauty it has to offer, something that we rarely get to witness in mainstream media. Her TV series Africa Rising was uplifting and joyous to watch, highlighting the arts and culture pouring out of our great continent and its ongoing reinvention and growing influence on the global stage.
I again devoured her most recent book, Decolonising My Body, which powerfully explores how our Black bodies have been influenced by colonialism, and how we can reclaim our traditions to redefine our own beauty standards.
Quite frankly, Afua Hirsch is a hero to me. Her activism, pursuit of positive change and ability to empower other Black voices to tell our own stories is something I am for ever inspired by.
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Vivienne Acheampong is an actor and comedian best known for playing Lucienne in the Netflix series The Sandman, and her appearances in BBC3’s Famalam
Clive Myrie on Frederick Douglass
The task of telling the story of Black lives can simply mean providing depth and context around the actions of Black people in certain situations, historical or contemporary, to correct a false record. Writers such as Gary Younge and David Olusoga, in my opinion, properly contextualise Black lives and correct narratives, helping reframe stories from Black perspectives and enriching our understanding of Black lives lived.
However, I have decided to focus on a figure from the 19th century as someone I revere for telling the stories of Black lives, who did so not only through the written word but also photographs. Frederick Douglass, the social reformer, abolitionist and statesman, became the most important campaigner for African American civil rights and human rights in general in the Victorian era. Born into slavery, he escaped at the age of 20, but having learned to read as a boy, he went on to become one of the great writers and dazzling orators of his era. He travelled the world speaking in the newly built Victorian meeting halls to packed and rapt audiences on abolition and racism, women’s rights, female suffrage and workers’ rights. He often equated his own suffering with the universal struggles of people throughout the world for freedom and respect.
But there’s more to this great man than the spoken and written word. (He wrote no less than three autobiographies; I’ve struggled to write one!) There are 160 known photographic portraits of Douglass, and that’s a lot. He is in fact one of the most photographed Americans of the 19th century, and in controlling his image, he controlled his own narrative.
Was he just vain? Well, he was a good-looking dude and he knew it, never seen without a natty cravat and immaculate frock coat. But I think Douglass also understood the revolutionary potential of the image. The camera showed the truth. It forced the viewer to engage with the subject on a human level and it could be reproduced over and over, reaching millions of people through books, pamphlets and newspapers. That image could change minds.
Most pictures of Black people in the 19th century were gross caricatures, racist stereotypes, grotesque minstrels or of lynching victims. Douglass presents himself as a handsome well-dressed man, sitting on well-upholstered chairs, sometimes with a book or papers at hand. He is dignified, intelligent, with a glimpse of the fighter in his eyes. There is one other rather radical photo showing himself with his second wife, who was white, and her sister. He is seated, his wife stands over him: a role reversal of the conventions of Victorian portraiture. A radical image, of a piece with a radical man.
Abena Oppong-Asare on Paul Boateng
Paul Boateng tells our story past and present. He belongs to a generation of political leaders who broke through the barriers of racial discrimination. He inspires me, not only because he cleared a path for a Ghanaian-heritage girl such as me to contemplate a career in public service, but also because of what he did next. He is part of that vital 1987 breakthrough into an all-white House of Commons. He was the first Black government minister, and then the first Black cabinet minister.
As a minister in the Blair government, he tackled child poverty, fought for disabled people, and at the Treasury delivered billions to Britain’s public services. He was the UK’s high commissioner to post-apartheid South Africa. Now he sits in the House of Lords, sharing his wisdom and articulating his fierce passion for justice. He’s also a brilliant chancellor of my local University of Greenwich.
Some tabloids scoffed when he declared at his election count “today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto”, but he was right and they were wrong.
We take it for granted that there should be Black MPs, but in the 1980s plenty of people disapproved. Even today Black MPs are sadly abused, delegitimised and confused for one another. It is assumed so often that a new Black MP must be in the wrong place. Yet thanks to Paul, alongside Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant, we are here, and we’re staying.
Lord Boateng proves that passion plus determination moves mountains. And as he shows whenever I catch up with him in parliament, in politics you can be kind as well as tough.
Nels Abbey on Arikana Chihombori-Quao
In western media Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the former African Union ambassador to the US, is a nobody. Practically anonymous. Yet in western diplomatic circles operating in Africa (notably the French), she is a dagger in the ribcage. Most importantly, however, to Africans at home and in the diaspora, Chihombori-Quao is a rock-star historian and political thinker.
What makes the Zimbabwean-born doctor turned diplomat famous in certain diplomatic circles is exactly what makes her one of Africa’s most beloved intellectuals (and perhaps the only African diplomat most people could name). She tells deeply inconvenient truths, with a knack for joining the dots between the atrocities of the past and the disasters of the present. She doesn’t just chronicle and contextualise African history, but uses it as a powerful force to inspire the children of Africa to right the seemingly permanent wrongs of the past in a bid to create a more prosperous, powerful and harmonious future.
Chihombori-Quao’s speeches on France’s continued colonial activity in Africa, such as currency issuance and fixing, compulsory foreign exchange deposits and first-refusal rights on resources, earned her the sack from the African Union. The same speeches went on to form the intellectual basis for the slew of popular revolutions (some would say “coups”) that have swept across former French colonies in Africa (namely: Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, Mali and Niger) since 2020.
Chihombori-Quao’s most important work, however, has been to bring into public consciousness the damning legacy of the 1884 Berlin conference, which formalised the European colonisation of Africa and, catastrophically, balkanised Africa into perpetual economic nonstarters. Her powerful use of illustrative examples in this regard, including the normalised insanity of microeconomies such as Djibouti, Togo and Burundi being expected to compete with the US, China and Germany, have rendered her one of this generation’s leading pan-Africans.
Maxine Watson on Marlon James
I recently read the novel The Trees by Percival Everett. It takes the case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and turns it into a modern murder mystery with a touch of the supernatural. It struck me as a compelling way of not only bringing black history to life but also of offering us a chance to have an opinion and express a view on narratives often written about us by others.
Black authors who use historic events as the basis for their work perhaps do so as a way of reclaiming the past and rewriting the narrative to explore it with a full-on black gaze. No one does it as uncompromisingly as Marlon James. His A Brief History of Seven Killings, based on the near fatal shooting of reggae icon Bob Marley in 1976, hits you like a sucker punch. James seeks to locate the players: the “bad man” who run and control the tenement yards of downtown Kingston, within the reality of Jamaican life. They are imbued with dimensions and a humanity that shines through the brutality. James, a black, gay, Jamaican native, brings all of this to bear on the world he creates. There is an authenticity and complexity to the inner lives of his characters that can only be achieved when written by someone with black skin in the game.
His 2009 novel The Book of Night Women is no exception. There are no passive enslaved women here. Each has agency and a point of view. Their voices are rich and varied within a hierarchy of their own making.
James’s writing is bold and audacious for sure – but, like a black cowboy at a Texan rodeo, it is his ability to wrangle our history and bend it so perfectly to his will that sets him apart, and makes him an unflinching and unapologetic chronicler of our story.
Daniel Kebede on James Baldwin
As we await the US election, I’m reminded of what James Baldwin said during the 1980 presidential race. In an essay for the Nation, he unpicked with customary wit and insight how the political system had failed Black people. Evoking Gabriel on Judgment Day, he writes: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognising this may be incapable of morality.”
In his centenary year, Baldwin still communicates an important message of human equality. As someone at the forefront of the civil rights movement for decades, we would do well to keep his eloquent words in our heads when we see conflict and unrest the world over. My thoughts are always for the plight of children, and what we can do to make their lives better and to set an example for the next generation.
Raised in Harlem during the Great Depression, Baldwin saw poverty with his own eyes every day. That experience never leaves you. It shapes you, and in later life it drove him to articulate the voice of the disfranchised. He understood the power of words. His penetrating insights are nothing without his persuasive prose. And if that meant a bit of righteous anger too, then all the better.
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Daniel Kebede is general secretary of the National Education Union, the largest education union in Europe
Natasha Beckles on Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is the storyteller’s storyteller: the psychological midwife; the Melchizedek prophet-priest who blessed me as a teenager through exquisite words and epigenetically remembered histories.
Chloe Anthony Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, expressed in essays and demonstrated in interviews a devastating gift of situational insight. Her books were like tents made of seminal statements that opened liminal spaces, into which sojourning readers might enter and discover something about themselves and the world.
Her writing is unflinching, uncompromising and unapologetic in its intent. Her unblinking stare and healing hands anoint the faces of racialised people, honouring their “living while Black” experiences.
Mother Toni’s work exposes whiteness in its atomic genesis, its epidemic acceleration, its systemic and generational violence without ever really giving it the time of day. Instead, she devotes her energy to each of her characters – kissing their tears, recording their trauma, testifying to their humanity with whispers of love, wisdom and compassion – while allowing the legacy of their learnings and philosophy to irrigate the observant heart.
Her writing takes stories of terror and bends time to hold them tight and precious, stitching them together in love and dignity like jewels. Never to glorify the horror but always to teach the reader to see the faces and not turn away from those who are unseen and not comforted.
Her epistemological grip within bewilderingly difficult human experiences taught me to stay present, to think and feel past the entirely appropriate responses of shock, rage, fight or flight. She taught me to find equanimity and resistance by being with myself and others, in the moment.
St Toni loaned me respectful hands and arms to truly embrace those who mourn. She taught me how to bear witness to love and hope, by listening and attending to human testimony until the grief within the speaker, the listener and the reader, finds its peace.
She curated rooms where self-compassion and courage flourished. That has shaped my leadership and my priesthood.
Dean Forbes on Akala
My introduction to Akala was through the songs Shakespeare and Find No Enemy. To get a sense of his work, that’s a great place to start. Then listen to any of his Fire in the Booth performance and you’ll hear the freestyle version of him, which is the first version I came across and where his skills really shine.
I’ve always been a fan of rap, especially music that has brilliant vocabulary, sharp lyrical content and strong storytelling. Those things all stood out to me when I first heard Akala. What drew me in was his ability to represent topics that are not usually represented in rap music and hip-hop: topics around our heritage, the oppression black people have faced, and his overall societal observations.
Akala grew up in a working-class background, just like me, and on the surface he presents as a kind of stereotype: black guy, rapper, not very clean-cut, no suit and tie in sight. But then he opens his mouth – and what he comes out with is so unexpected, yet so profound. He’s incredibly educated, articulate and able to make his point in such a measured way – whether that’s addressing the Oxford Union, facing off against someone with an opposing view on Question Time, or in his book Natives.
Akala does two things that are very important. First, he’s one of the most relevant spokespeople for the black community, as often a protest is to shout and bang our fists and demand action; and in the most beautiful and elegant way, he challenges racial stereotypes with points that are substantive, well-researched and founded in education, without bluster and emotion.
I actually met him a couple of weeks ago. It was at a mutual friend’s party and we were listening to hip-hop and reggae and having a whale of a time. You’re always anxious about meeting someone you hold in high regard in case they let you down, but he was as brilliant, articulate, challenging and engaging as I had hoped he would be.
Micha Frazer-Carroll on Angela Davis
At the turn of the millennium, my primary school celebrated with a dress-up day. We all had to dress as a significant figure from the past 100 years. Aged six, I had no shortage of Spice Girls in my class. But my mum decided to style me as Angela Davis, complete with an afro wig and flared jeans. I had no idea who the American Black feminist scholar and activist was, but looking back at age 30, I feel a strong sense of pride in my mum’s radicalism.
My present-day work as a Black feminist writer has been completely shaped by Davis’s thinking, which attempts to transform the material injustices of Black life. In addressing issues that affect Black people globally, Davis puts forward unapologetically radical solutions. When I was 23, my mum gifted me a copy of Davis’s book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, which was my first introduction to the concept of prison abolition. Having been engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement for years, the idea seemed unthinkable and exhilarating. Davis’s ability to connect the Black struggle to issues of state, gender, class and the economy was firmly rooted in her experience as a Black working-class lesbian and prisoner in the 1970s.
When I was 24, I was invited to a Black feminist symposium at Cambridge (my alma mater) that Davis attended. The energy in the room, which was filled with Black female student activists, was electrifying. This was the woman whose work had directly informed initiatives such as FLY, Cambridge’s consciousness-raising group for women of colour, which had been such a crucial lifeline for Black female students at an overwhelmingly white university. Myself and a friend ended up mingling in a circle with Davis, and found ourselves speechless, giggling schoolgirlish messes when the time came to introduce ourselves. Unable to articulate the way she has helped me understand Black womanhood, I wonder if I was a little transported back to being that six-year-old in the Davis wig.
Mike Gayle on Donald Rodney
I’d never heard of the late Birmingham-born artist Donald Rodney until I happened across his work at the Nottingham Contemporary gallery earlier this month. But when I was asked to think about who I admire for telling the stories of Black lives, his name jumped into my head. It’s an indicator of just how impactful the show, Visceral Canker, is, that of all the Black people who have inspired me, he came to the fore.
The show, a collection of his work from 1982 to 1997, spoke profoundly of what it means to be Black and British. In addition, it drew attention to what it means to live with constant pain and be in and out of hospital, as he was as a sufferer of sickle-cell anaemia, a disease that eventually claimed his life at the age of 36.
For Rodney, who first studied art in Bournville in Birmingham, then later Nottingham and London, art could be personal and political. That’s a position powerfully established in the photographic work Flesh of My Flesh, which features a brutal and unflinching close-up of his own hip scar – caused by a surgeon who believed Black skin was so tough that it needed more stitches than white. His 1992 piece Doublethink, made of cheap sporting trophies engraved with the casually racist statements he’d gathered from various sources over time, is equally powerful. It serves as a reminder, if one were needed, of how white society venerates Black excellence on the sporting field while denigrating Black society away from it.
His work as a whole is at once thought-provoking, enraging and deeply moving. Despite the almost 30 years since his passing, it is still blisteringly relevant today.
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Mike Gayle is the bestselling author of All The Lonely People, Half a World Away and A Song of Me and You. His 20th novel, Hope Street, will be published in February 2025
Kimberley Bownes on David Olusoga
David Olusoga is a historian but also a storyteller. When he tells the stories of black lives, he does so with all the knowledge and credibility of someone who has done the research, but the way he talks about his own story and background makes him very relatable. He’s telling stories for black Britons, and I don’t feel that happens often enough.
I first came across him when his 2016 BBC series, Black and British: A Forgotten History, was rebroadcast in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. All of the history I’d been taught at school had been about significant white players, and this was the first I’d learned about the history of black British people. It was the first time I really felt a connection to British history. It gave me a sense of validation, and it kind of blew me away.
Last year, he came to speak at the National Black Police Association conference in south Wales. He talked about the impact and history of racism and policing, and how the government around the 1950s painted a picture to the public about the threat that black people coming to the country would pose. Yet simultaneously the government was encouraging migration from West Indian colonies. He told us how, at the time, the government had gone to several chief constables and asked them to conduct research to prove their theory that black people were the cause of all the problems in society.
It was really useful to understand the distrust between black communities and policing, and how far back it goes. I think that’s something that should be taught to police officers and importantly future generations in policing, so they understand this is intergenerational trauma and can help build empathy when interacting with black communities.
Olusoga honestly opened my eyes to a lot of these things. I just wish more people would watch his programmes and read his books.
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Kimberley Bownes is a detective sergeant with Hampshire and Isle of Wight police and a cabinet member of the National Black Police Association
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