We owe many popular music forms to the Black community. Rock and Roll, Techno, Jazz, Disco – you name it. Hip-Hop was born in New York of Black, Latino and marginalised communities, and hip-hop in the mainstream developed to largely to be seen as Black. Developing an awareness of ‘hip-hop history’ can be important to understanding how the contemporary west treats and represents Blackness and how Black popular culture works in the mainstream.

A teenager named Claudette Colvin got arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white woman. Some local civil rights leaders saw the event as a chance to highlight the city's unfair bus policy, but decided that Colvin was too young to represent the struggle. Still, Colvin's act inspired Rosa Parks to do the same thing nine months later — and Parks' arrest sparked one of the biggest civil rights campaigns of all time.

All too often, Black history has been overlooked, minimized or — even worse — erased. Yet the contributions of Black people to society influence every part of how we live, from the art and culture we consume to the rights we have.