Celebrating Black History Month

• I’m grounded in who I am, and I am a confident black man. A confident, Nigerian, black, chocolate man. I’m proud of my heritage. And no man can take that away from me.
• Black lives have always mattered. We have always been important. We have always meant something. We have always succeeded regardless. And now is the time. I ain’t waiting. I ain’t waiting.

• Accept yourself. You don’t have to prove anything to no one except yourself.
• Nobody understood what it was like to be black and Jewish… being different from everyone else just made me a lot stronger.

• In my pronunciation, in my diction, in my stance, in my dressing, in my attitude. This is Black British. I wear it with pride and honour… We should never be under the water. Black British is part of British culture.

• I’m a black woman. I come from a black woman, who came from a black woman, who came from a black woman and I’m gonna give birth to a black woman. And so, it doesn’t even…it’s a no brainer. That’s who I am, it’s the core of who I am in spirit and in DNA. And, I’d always stand up for what I believe in and who I love and who I know, who I respect…We’re impeccable. We are impeccable. We’re special and the world is just gonna have to deal with that.

• When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

• People are people. Black, blue, pink, green—God make no rules about colour; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.
• Racism is a form of ignorance. There's no two ways about that. You know, the Bible says, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself.' So if you don't love yourself, you can't love your neighbour. If you don't respect yourself, you can't respect me.

• This is about the bigger problem of homophobia in the black community, y’all can sit and pretend all u want but imma risk it all for us.

• Thank you dad for paving the way for me. For all of us. I will forever be proud of who and what I am.

• My wearing my hair in locs on a red carpet was to showcase them in a positive light, to remind people of color that our hair is good enough. To me, locs are a symbol of strength and beauty, almost like a lion’s mane
• It is important in this journey to remember that just because someone has inflicted hurt upon us, it does not give us the right to do the same
• Don’t try so hard to fit in, and certainly don’t try so hard to be different. Just try hard to be you

• For people of color and specifically for young Black Britons, the importance of representation in all parts of society, of seeing role models that share the same color skin as them, and seeing and reading stories of success and of hope from those who look like them, is absolutely vital in opening doors of opportunity.

• Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

• It’s important for us to stand up and to continue to do the work we do and give people hope, and continue to change, and I think it is changing… but in everything, you will find challenges.
• For me, my kids have values… it doesn’t matter about color, it doesn’t matter about religion, it doesn’t matter about the color of their hair… just respect people and get on with them.

• My being Black, working class, and queer has prepared me for whatever challenges the universe has in store for me

It’s about time, The character is a shape-shifting alien. It can be anyone. So for there to only have been one representation of the character, I think is just quite limiting. … Who wouldn’t want to see themselves in the shoes of The Doctor?

• It was never acknowledged at school, which was really frustrating for me, but knowing my family knew about it and being educated at home about certain individuals, the struggle, the empowerment, the movement, some of the amazing accomplishments that have happened through history, that gave me a lot of hope that firstly there's a place for someone that looks like us, and it was incredibly informative.

• The virus has been declared a pandemic. This is out of control. And I'm not talking about COVID-19. The virus I'm talking about is called racism.

• You don’t want to just bring up the past to bring up the past. You’re bringing up the past because we still have unjust qualities of living in both the Americas and the UK
• I always wondered who was the equivalent of our Martin Luther Kings, Malcolm Xs, and Marcus Garveys [...] meeting the leader of the Bristol Bus Boycott, your version of our Rosa Parks, was fantastic.

• We are all in search of safety and light. Many of us want change. I believe that when black people tell our own stories, we can shift the axis of the world and tell our real history of generational wealth and richness of soul that are not told in history books.

• Being Black is my power. I want young Black girls to see that
• All we want is equality and justice for our black community
• I wanted to use my voice to address colourism because I am so aware of how awful it is and it is just something that needs to be spoken about