Solomon Smith might not be a household name just yet – but he will be.
As a 12-year-old, he would take leftovers from Caribbean meals he enjoyed with his family to the homeless rough sleepers in his area.
As an adult he now runs the Brixton Soup Kitchens in South London, set up with his own money.
It feeds 60 homeless people, locally and across London, every day.
It survives on volunteers and donations, and it wouldn’t even exist but for Smith’s enterprise, vision and hard work.
He is among my inspirational figures of 2019. As is the author, rapper and activist Akala who cut through the political bluster with a knife crime analysis far too reasoned for the mainstream.
Nowhere near hot-headed enough for most TV outlets, he was amplified by social media to ram home the reality that there is no correlation between tougher sentences and a reduction in knife crime.
It has been a year during which leading black figures - including rapper Stormzy - have used their power and their space to take on the establishment.
None more so than the BBC TV and radio host Samira Ahmed who brought an equal pay tribunal against the BBC.
She spoke out to ask why “…the BBC thinks I am worth only a sixth of the value of the work of a man for doing a very similar job”.
She was not the only one to leave the Corporation squirming. It had to back down after Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty was sanctioned for calling Donald Trump’s racist comments about Democrat politicians as she saw them.
Another inspirational figure during 2019 was the director Ava DuVernay. Her Netflix TV mini-series When They See Us made millions weep on both sides of the Atlantic.
It told the true story of five teenagers, wrongfully jailed for a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park. The extent to which the US justice system utterly failed them led to real-life consequences for some of the leading figures.
As a dad, it was the single most harrowing piece of television I’ve watched for years, let alone in 2019.
Meghan Markle had her first baby , guest edited Vogue and found a way to rise above a relentless, unjustified witch-hunt which bordered on the ridiculous.
In politics, the Tottenham MP David Lammy stood strong against the backlash when he addressed the ‘white saviour’ issues posed by Strictly winner Stacey Dooley’s Comic Relief visit to Uganda.
In literature, the British-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other.
The book explored black British female identity spanning generations. It was a worthy winner.
In sport, the footballers Romelu Lukaku, Raheem Sterling and Paul Pogba used their platforms to speak out against racism. And 15-year-old teenage tennis player Coco Gauff provided one of the jaw-dropping moments of 2019 when she beat Venus Williams in the first round at Wimbledon.
In F1, six-time world champion Lewis Hamilton may not have been knighted but he still stood astride the sport like the colossus he is. He’ll be back in 2020, as will the many other stellar talents and voices that have helped to make 2019 such a landmark year.
