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October is Black History Month and a time to celebrate the contribution that generations of African and Caribbean people have made to British society.

The Caribbean community in Birmingham has had a huge influence on the city since their arrival in the 1950s. They came full of faith and hoping for a new life across the sea.

Kehinde spoke to Songs of Praise and shared how people from the Caribbean originally came to Birmingham for work and how this impacted the Christian communities locally.

Birmingham as a growing city in the 1950s drew people from around the country and across the ocean to work in a Dunlop factory, an HP Sauce factory and crucially the NHS.

Hospitals were being built and nurses being employed. Kehinde highlighted that perhaps it was no coincidence that the celebration of Windrush coincided with the celebration of the NHS this year.

Kehinde commented - "I think for people in our generation it鈥檚 difficult to really understand just how overt and how obvious the racism the people faced was. Before 1965 it was perfectly legal to discriminate on the grounds of race. So you had signs like 鈥榥o blacks, no Irish, no dogs鈥�. You couldn鈥檛 live in particular areas, you couldn鈥檛 have particular jobs and you couldn鈥檛 sit and join particular church communities".

Kehinde described how this led to people starting their own churches, meaning that there are now many different denominations of churches within African and Caribbean communities. However, the culture of these newer churches is also a factor Kehinde acknowledges - "How do you praise the Lord in that kind of clap hand tradition, that spiritual tradition? It doesn鈥檛 really exist in a Church of England and in Catholic churches people wanted to praise the Lord in a different way鈥�.

The Sunrise Bakery in Smethwick began in 1966 to provide a taste of home for the growing Caribbean community in Birmingham.

The bread made for a Caribbean market is called hard dough bread.

When the early settlers came from the Caribbean they had difficulties sourcing food that they liked. Hard dough bread is a slightly firmer bread due to the process by which it is made. Errol Drummond, whose father established the bakery, described how there were accommodation and acceptance issues, but one of the most basic issues was that you had to tackle was finding food. "You know it鈥檚 okay fighting other issues but not fighting a hungry stomach鈥�.

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