This award is a huge honor I am so humbled. Since I first heard from @TheKingCenter I’ve been working hard on what to say—almost one month. It’s seven minutes long—but it’s important and it’s from my heart.

STATEMENT: THE MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS IS ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE ME The Manchester Evening News has contacted me with a list of allegations it intends to publish. I am making this statement because the public has a right to know what is happening and why. The allegations are false. Every one of them. They were put to me without a named source, without a single document, and without any indication of who commissioned them or on what evidential basis they were prepared. The communication was not even signed. A major regional newspaper, demanding a right-of-reply response by Monday 2pm, did not put a name to its own email. That tells you everything you need to know about the confidence this newspaper has in what it is about to publish. That is not journalism by any recognised standard. It is a smear, constructed and delivered under the procedural cover of a right-of-reply request. The @MENnewsdesk has form. This newspaper has spent the better part of a decade looking away from the institutional failures I have spent the better part of a decade exposing. It did not break the Oldham grooming gang story. It did not demand the national inquiry. It did not stand with survivors when doing so was costly and unpopular. I did. The people of this town did. Now, at the precise moment Reform UK has destroyed Labour in Oldham and the national inquiry is formally underway, this newspaper has chosen to come for me. The timing is not accidental. Andy Burnham is manoeuvring toward a parliamentary return. Labour's grip on Greater Manchester depends on controlling the political narrative. My campaigning, eight years of documented, sourced, legally tested investigative work, is a threat to that narrative. A threat to the project that would see Burnham as Prime Minister. The MEN has historically functioned as a press office for Labour's Greater Manchester operation. What is happening now is the continuation of that function by other means. I am a decorated anti-racist. I hold an MBE. I have sat in rooms with Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State. I have designed and implemented counter-extremism interventions at the highest levels of government. I have faced down Nazis, white supremacists, Islamists and jihadists. The idea that this man is a racist, peddling hatred for profit, does not survive thirty seconds of contact with my public record. Any journalist who had done the most basic due diligence would know that. The MEN knows that. They are proceeding anyway. I have sent the MEN a formal warning letter. I am already conducting active High Court proceedings in the King's Bench Division. I have solicitors engaged. Any publication of these allegations will be treated as an actionable wrong and pursued accordingly. There is one further matter I am placing on public record. I am a known figure in a town with a documented history of communal tension. Publishing content that portrays me as a racist because I spoke out against the Pakistani Rape Gangs does not merely damage my reputation. It creates physical risk. If the MEN publishes this piece and I or my child are attacked as a result, the question of editorial recklessness will be answered in court. I have not been silenced by arrests. I have not been silenced by false charges, by de-platforming, by blacklisting, or by years of coordinated harassment. I will not be silenced by a politically motivated hit piece from a newspaper that spent a decade refusing to report what was happening to the children of my town. Raja Miah MBE

With the King family marching today, we remember that the fight for voting rights takes perseverance. As Dr. King said, “There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going.” May we honor his memory through action forged in faith.