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A FORMER colleague shared a James Baldwin speech last week. It dated from February 18, 1965. The AfricanAmerican author and activist had been invited to the Cambridge Union to debate the question, ‘Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro’.

In an impressive speech — eloquent, commandingly persuasive, restrained — he spoke not only of the daily injustices suffered by Civil Rights-era African Americans, but of the generally damaging legacy of historic racism: ‘Moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called “colour”... the American sense of reality has been corrupted by it.’

It is dismaying that a speech made 55 years ago should still feel pertinent. Again there have been demonstrations in protest against an unarmed black man’s violent death. The anger stirred by the footage of George Floyd’s brutal arrest has galvanised millions to leave lockdown.

Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give is a defining Black Lives Matter novel. Published in 2017, it is the story of Starr, who switches between two worlds: the poor, troubled Alabama town in which she was raised, and the affluent, predominantly white school she attends on a scholarship.

When Starr is the only witness to the fatal police shooting of her unarmed childhood friend, Khalil, she has to choose between staying safe or standing up for what she believes is right.

Last week marked the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, a seismic event explored fictionally in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

The story begins in 1990 with the arrival of Ai-ming — a Chinese refugee — into the Canadian home of ten-year-old Marie.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday takes place on a single day, February 15, 2003. The march against the proposed invasion of Iraq is its London backdrop.

In the past 20 years, I have been on a few marches through Central London. My children have, too.

Last week we stayed locked down. But the right to march safely will always be integral to a functioning democracy.