For Black History Month, figures from the arts, culture and sport reveal the people and ideas that made them who they are today

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On 28 October 1787, Thomas Clarkson pushed through the crowds to reach the pulpit of Manchester Cathedral. A campaigner for abolishing slavery, he spoke urgently about the horrors of the slave trade and the humanity of enslaved people. “He drinks the cup of sorrow,” Clarkson said. “And he drinks it at our hands.”

During Black History Month, these are the stories it is important to remember. They show us the complicated truth of our history. Thousands of people in Manchester signed a petition against slavery after Clarkson’s sermon. And yet Manchester’s cotton industry was built on the labour of enslaved people. There are similar stories up and down the nation. We are a country where brave people led the way in abolishing slavery, but we are also a country that participated in the trade in human lives.

Andy Burnham is prime minister of the United Kingdom

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French forward on how the 1998 World Cup inspired her football dream, her Gabonese background and finding a new family in east London

On Saturday, once West Ham’s Viviane Asseyi was home from the match, she picked up her phone and called her mum. It has become almost ritualistic for them to speak after a game.

On the other end came a familiar sound. “She was just laughing,” says Asseyi. “She was like: ‘Oh, you were so bad!’ She was laughing, but that helped me. She knows that she can tell me anything and everything, I’m good, I’m not good. I will just keep going and working to be better.”

The question of who owns and authorizes the month holds particular relevance amid attacks on Black history in the US

There is a myth that persists about Black History Month that can be heard in the common gripe: “They gave us the shortest month of the year” (they, the unnamed powers that be). Jarvis Givens, the author of I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, hates it. “Every time I hear that backhanded comment it doesn’t seem right,” said Givens, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “If you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren’t ‘given’ anything.”

The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people’s past in this country are under attack. Official recognition of Black American resistance to centuries of racial injustice is being challenged by local, state, and national efforts to restrict, ban and possibly criminalize such information in public schools, universities and other institutions. So the sentiment that Black history can be quite literally given or taken away by state officials is valid.

Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man