Professor Charlotte Williams OBE
How a Welsh-Guyanese scholar, writer and public thinker helped Wales tell a fuller story about itself
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2,879 entries
Marc Wadsworth
The campaigner, journalist and broadcaster who worked to widen Black representation and bring neglected histories into Britain’s public record.
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Kehinde Andrews
How a Birmingham scholar helped establish Black Studies in Britain and widened the debate about race, education and empire
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Akala: music, writing and Britain’s public conversation
From his 2006 debut album to the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Akala has used popular culture, books and education to bring questions of race, class and empire into wider discussion.
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David Olusoga: bringing Black British history into the national story
The historian, writer and broadcaster has used books and television to widen public understanding of Britain’s past.
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Afua Hirsch
The British writer and broadcaster brings history, race and belonging into the centre of public debate.
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Lemn Sissay
Poet, playwright and broadcaster Lemn Sissay turned a childhood shaped by care into a body of work that brings questions of identity, belonging and public responsibility into view.
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Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu
The British-Nigerian lawyer, writer and commentator who has brought arguments about race, gender and power into public debate.
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Amika George
How a teenager made period poverty a public issue and helped change provision in England’s schools
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Gina Miller
The Guyanese-British businesswoman and campaigner whose court cases tested the limits of executive power
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Owen Jones: Class, power and the arguments shaping Britain
From Chavs to his work as a columnist and campaigner, Jones has challenged how Britain talks about class, inequality and belonging.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge: making Britain’s race debate harder to ignore
The journalist, author and podcaster brought questions of race, history and power into Britain’s mainstream through bestselling writing and work that continues beyond the page.
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Marcus Rashford
The Manchester-born footballer turned his experience of hardship into a national campaign against child hunger.
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Munroe Bergdorf
From a landmark beauty campaign to broadcasting and books, Munroe Bergdorf has used public visibility to challenge how Britain talks about race, gender and representation.
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David Lammy: justice, belonging and the arguments Britain must face
From Tottenham to the highest offices of government, Lammy has pressed Britain to examine unequal justice, Windrush and the people missing from its public memory.
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Doreen Lawrence: the campaign that changed Britain
After her son Stephen was murdered, Doreen Lawrence challenged institutional failure and helped build lasting forms of justice, opportunity and remembrance.
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Simon Woolley
From Operation Black Vote to Homerton College, Simon Woolley has worked to widen access to British public life.
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Trevor Phillips
From broadcasting and student politics to the leadership of Britain’s equality institutions, Phillips has helped shape some of the country’s most persistent arguments about race, integration and rights.
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Peter Tatchell
The Australian-born campaigner made his public career in Britain, helping bring LGBT rights and wider human-rights causes into view.
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Caroline Criado Perez
The British campaigner who challenged omissions on banknotes, in public squares and in the data shaping everyday life
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Jayaben Desai
The Grunwick strike leader who brought migrant women’s working lives into Britain’s industrial debate
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Shami Chakrabarti
The barrister and campaigner who brought civil liberties into Britain’s public debate
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Diane Abbott: a barrier broken, a voice sustained
From her election as the first black woman MP to decades of campaigning on race, education and civil liberties, Abbott has helped change who speaks in Parliament and what it must discuss.
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Claudia Jones
Trinidad-born journalist and activist Claudia Jones built a platform for Black Britain and organised the indoor Caribbean carnivals that helped shape Notting Hill Carnival.
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Barbara Castle
The Labour minister who helped make equal pay, road safety and support for families matters of public policy
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John Stuart Mill: Liberty, equality and the British mind
Raised in London for a life of argument, Mill became a philosopher, economist and Westminster MP whose work challenged coercion and women’s legal subordination.
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Thomas Clarkson: the organiser who helped bring abolition to Britain
From Wisbech to the ports and petitioning networks of Britain, Clarkson built the evidence and public pressure behind the campaign against the slave trade.
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Olaudah Equiano
An African-born writer and campaigner made his life at sea, his hard-won freedom and his own account of enslavement part of Britain’s argument against the slave trade.
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Emmeline Pankhurst
The Manchester organiser who made women’s suffrage impossible for Westminster to ignore
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William Wilberforce
The Hull-born MP who helped turn abolition into law—and whose longer record resists simple celebration
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Mary Wollstonecraft
The English writer who made women’s education and independence a public argument
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June Sarpong: from youth television to public life
The broadcaster, author and diversity advocate carried questions of representation from popular television into the BBC and, in 2026, the House of Lords.
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Malorie Blackman: widening the world of children’s fiction
From Lewisham to the Children’s Laureateship, the novelist made room for young readers to find themselves in stories—and to encounter lives beyond their own.
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Akala: music, education and the argument about Britain
The rapper, writer and educator connects hip-hop, Shakespeare and personal experience to debates about race, class and the British Empire.
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David Olusoga
The historian and broadcaster who widened Britain’s understanding of its past
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Afua Hirsch: Britain, belonging and the stories a nation tells
The writer and broadcaster brings questions of race, empire and national memory into British public debate.
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Charlotte Williams
The Welsh-Guyanese scholar, memoirist and education reformer who helped Wales recognise its diverse histories and place them in the curriculum.
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Jackie Kay: the many voices of modern Scotland
Poet, novelist, playwright and memoirist Jackie Kay has widened the imaginative possibilities of Scottish writing and taken poetry into public life.
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Marc Wadsworth: journalism, anti-racism and the stories Britain forgot
From Labour’s Black Sections to campaigns for justice and programmes about Caribbean veterans, Marc Wadsworth has used journalism and organising to challenge who gets heard in Britain.
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Valerie Amos: public service across politics, aid and education
From local equalities work to Westminster, the United Nations and Oxford, Valerie Amos has led institutions at home and abroad.
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