When doctors told Doreen Lawrence her son had died she thought, "That’s not true." Spending time with his body in the hospital, aside from a cut on his cheek, it seemed to her he was sleeping. The death of a child will always be strange, and in the aftermath Neville, his father and her husband, even wondered if he might have been struck by the Biblical curse of the loss of his first-born.

Even after the venue’s 30-month refurbishment, you still would not choose the sprawling foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall as the prime site for a pre-concert speech. By the time, last night, that Heritage Lottery Fund chair Sir Peter Luff got to say his piece – after Southbank Centre luminaries Jude Kelly, Elaine Bedell and Gillian Moore – the ambient din from a full house gathered to celebrate the QEH re-opening almost drowned his words.

In the same week that saw the arrival of Arinzé Kene’s Misty, a play that passionately questions the clichés of plays about black Britons (you know, gun crime, knife crime and domestic abuse), Black Men Walking opens at the Royal Court.

Arinzé Kene is having a bit of a moment. He won an Evening Standard Film Award for The Pass opposite Russell Tovey in 2016, is about to appear in a BBC drama with Paddy Considine, and has just finished lending his lovely tenor to Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country in the West End.

They don’t commission many television documentaries like Being Blacker (BBC Two) any more. That is not unconnected to the fact that Molly Dineen downed her camera a decade ago.

Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Black Panther arrives with all the critics displaying superhero-sized goodwill for its very existence. It’s a big budget mainstream Marvel movie that not only features a nearly all-black cast, but it also has an African-American writer director (Ryan Coogler) and co-screenwriter (Joe Robert Cole).

Kendrick Lamar has never been afraid to experiment. Since his first studio album, Section 80, was released in 2011, he’s explored funk, jazz, rock, soundtracks, ballads, and (of course) hip-hop, building himself a reputation based as much on his musical risks as his outspoken political views (as seen in the Black Lives Matter-orientated To Pimp A Butterfly, released to critical acclaim in 2015).

The Chineke! Orchestra has won golden opinions for its ground-breaking work and musical achievement, and Manchester caught up to the extent of a visit from the eight-person Chineke! Ensemble to the Royal Northern College of Music.

The queen of R&B is no stranger to struggle – the Staples Singers, led by Pops, played a key role in the 1960s civil rights movement, emerging from the gospel circuit as so many great black singers did. Mavis’ first paid gig was with her family in in 1948.