To mark the start of Black History Month, the Drum - in partnership with Birmingham City Council - held a launch event last night, bringing together local, national, and international artists and speakers. Speaking at the event, our CEO Joy took the opportunity to answer some of BHM's critics.

I’ve always felt positive about Birmingham. I was born and brought up here, and have lived here all my life, and there’s something about Birmingham that I have always felt welcoming. I like its communities living side by side, the way people generally get on. I like the way that Birmingham has adapted to post-industrialism and to being a big multicultural city.

I think you can like something and still know its faults. Birmingham isn’t perfect. Most of our black and minority communities still live in the poorest parts of the city. Black and Asian unemployment is still higher than unemployment in other groups, and in recent years there has been some tension between communities. Some white ethnic groups are also facing challenging issues such as long term unemployment, poor health and educational outcomes.

But I have never believed that building on the positive means turning a blind eye to the things that need to change. Being positive means also being honest and open about the need for change; it means acknowledging the problems we face. It means recognising that the experience of some groups and individuals is far from positive.

All diverse cities have their challenges. I’ve been lucky enough to have travelled to different parts of the world – from townships in South Africa and Pakistan to international conferences and speaking engagements – and most recently to Toronto, which is often held up as a city that has got diversity ‘right’. In my humble opinion, there is no single successful city that can be held up as the exemplar. They all have their challenges, and there is no single successful blueprint for how cities should deal with diversity. And that’s why a sense of history is important: history can show us how – and how not – to respond to these challenges.

I know that Black History Month is criticised by some. Some feel it’s no longer necessary. They argue that all that stuff that happened was so long along, and we should get over it.

But I disagree. I think a sense of history is vital. David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, puts it best.

“History,” he says, “is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”

The history of the black presence in Britain has been much on my mind recently, because at brap we have just finished researching and writing a new book on the history and future of the BME voluntary sector. The process of researching this publication made me very aware of historical parallels and contemporary echoes.

Exactly fifty years ago this May, for example, Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, was stabbed to death by a gang of white men. His death was the culmination of a series of organised attacks against black communities in Notting Hill. Like Stephen Lawrence’s murder thirty-four years later, investigating police officers initially denied any racist motive – and no one has ever been convicted.

And as Stephen Lawrence’s murder prompted the McPherson Report, Cochrane’s murder prompted its own high-level enquiry – in fact, the first ever government enquiry into UK race relations, chaired, curiously enough, by Amy Ashwood Garvey, the first wife of Marcus Garvey.

Recently I have been reminded of other parallels too. John Denham, Minister for Communities and Local Government, has got himself into hot water by likening the English Defence League’s recent provocations in Birmingham and elsewhere to the marches of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and the Battle of Cable Street. In identifying the EDL’s activities as deliberately provocative, he is certainly right.

In the 30s, left-wingers, trade unionists, dockers and factory workers and Jewish and Irish residents united to halt the blackshirts.

Just a few weeks ago, in Birmingham, black, white and Asian anti-racists also united to stop the EDL.

Of course, like everyone else here, I dearly wish that we did not have to combat the rise of yet another racist movement.

But here, history helps illuminate our contemporary experience.

It illustrates that our greatest strength has always been in unity.

I think we sometimes forget this. I think we sometimes forget that black history is not solely the story of black oppression. Black history has also frequently been the story of black and white unity – of human solidarity, and that this is our most valuable asset and our greatest goal. Black history also reminds us of ‘new’ oppressions and the need to be ever on our guard against the ignorance and apathy which can turn effortlessly into tyranny and oppression.

At brap we like to say that the next phase of equalities will not be about how we treat minorities – it will be about how we all treat each other, as people.

Until that becomes a reality, we will continue to need a Black History Month – to help remind us of “who we are and why we are the way we are”.

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