In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country.
Andrew Yang
Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.
Andrew Young
Birmingham did a truly remarkable thing in building Symphony Hall, which is the finest concert hall in the U.K. and one of the best in the world. The city has supported music without putting on the brakes.
Andris Nelsons
I feel unbelievably blessed that I have had the opportunity to photograph Malala in her classroom in Birmingham.
Annie Leibovitz
While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.
Anthea Butler
I started in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. I wanted to be a sponge, wanted to learn and progress. I knew I didn't want to work in a hotel forever, but I had some good teachers there.
April Bloomfield
My enthusiasm for L.A. stems from my father, who was a lecturer in American literature at the University of Birmingham. Through his work, our family did several house swaps with L.A. families. It was a dreadfully daring thing to do in the early 1980s; there was no Internet, so you had no idea of what you were getting into.
Ben Miller
I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
Charles Hazlewood
I went to university in Birmingham in the 1970s just when the curry revolution was starting in Britain.
Chris Tarrant
When I was at university in Birmingham, I used to spend half my grant betting on horse racing. Seven terms out of nine, I made a profit.
Birmingham is my second home.
Christopher Timothy
Pebble Mill was packed with a lot of talent and a lot of really, really good stuff came out of Birmingham. It was a tragedy that it closed. It was the most famous TV centre in the country.
There was a shop in Birmingham called Autographs, where I'm from in Birmingham. My uncles and dad used to shop there. They played professionally, too. When I started, I went to Autograph, and they had brands like Rick Owens. There are loads of brands, like my go-to brands that I will go to if I want to buy jeans, like DSquared or Balmain.
Daniel Sturridge
I grew up in Hockley, Birmingham. It was an environment I'll never forget in terms of playing football on local pitches, kicking a ball around in the front garden and all over the house. It was a positive place to live, and somewhere, that gave me the right grounding for where I am today.
I grew up in Birmingham, but my parents are originally from Barbados. My dad, Romeo, was a long-distance lorry driver, and my mother, Mayleen, worked in catering.
David Harewood
Birmingham people are the salt of the earth, and I've carried that with me all around the world. People respond to a certain down-to-earthness that I have, and that's purely as a result of coming from Birmingham.
I grew up in an environment in Birmingham that was really multicultural, with black kids, Irish kids, Indian kids.
I'm the only member of my family who dared to move away from Birmingham - my brothers and sister are still here, along with my mom.
The area where I grew up in Birmingham was very diverse - I was aware of my race but not overly aware of it - and there seemed to be an understanding that we were all very much in the same boat.
We come to Birmingham every January for the 'Britain's Got Talent' auditions and always have a great time.
Declan Donnelly
I love Birmingham, Michigan. It's lovely - you know, it's very similar to the Hamptons.
With the big clubs embracing women's football and the professionalism you see at the likes of Liverpool, Birmingham, Arsenal and my club Chelsea, it's really impressive. We're making great strides.
It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.
I would be writing an essay that was due in the next day until about 1 A.M., and then I would be up at 6 A.M. and on a train to Birmingham to record 'The Archers'. It was pretty intense.
I remember I played Birmingham and I'd been awake for about a week and I was walking about like a raving lunatic.
There are four of us, and we were all born in different cities because my dad worked all around the place. We settled in Birmingham, so I spent most of my time growing up there. We were all given very Welsh names - Geraint, Owen, Rhiannon and Gwilym. My mum's called Cainwen, and my dad is somewhat disappointingly called Tom.
It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.
My parents are from the South - they were both born in Birmingham - so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the '80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.
My parents were both born in Birmingham, Alabama, and come from large Catholic families with lots of Michaels, Marks, and Patricks, so they wanted to choose two names that I don't think you could find anywhere else in the family tree: Haley and Joel.
I wrote 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', and 'The Dumb Waiter' in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.
I told Birmingham I don't want nothing, I'm not interested in the money.
In Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool there are white gangs that share the same backgrounds - they come from broken homes, completely dysfunctional, mums for the most part unable to cope, the fathers of these kids completely not in the scene.
After graduating high school, Betty attended the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, the alma mater of both her parents. My mother relocated to New York because she refused to accept the oppressive racism of the Jim Crow south.
It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.
I had a fantastic time at Birmingham and I never regret anything that happened there.
I get on with Joe Hart really well. He joined Birmingham on loan when I was there and to see him working day-in, day-out was brilliant. As I've progressed I've tried to model myself on him.
I hardly had any coaching until I joined Birmingham where I had Dave Watson for five years. He's one of the best and I knew how important that was for me.
The saddest face I ever saw on Martin Luther King was at the funeral of the four little girls slain in Birmingham, Alabama.
If you were asked to go on 'Mastermind,' what would your specialist subject be? I wouldn't have a clue what I could answer questions on. Birmingham City Football Club would be a start, I suppose, but with a hundred odd years of history, thousands of matches, players and incidents to recall, even access to Google would leave me struggling.
Touring has been a major part of my career. I've done a lot of huge shows, including a 13-night sell-out stint at the Indoor Arena in Birmingham, playing to a total audience of 65,000.
In my third year at medical school in Birmingham, I joined the Air Force as a medical cadet so that I was sponsored to become a doctor.
I was born in Birmingham and raised in Birmingham.
If you cut me I bleed Birmingham. Others would say it's being a woman, but coming from Birmingham is the single most important part of my identity. I'm not always sure I feel English or British, but I always feel like a Brummie.
For Birmingham, I scored four on my debut. It's not bad. First one was a tap-in; it set me up nice for the day, and I think I got a hat-trick in 13 minutes. So obviously I was cruising, then got one in the second half and came off!
This kind of music was just hitting England, so we were getting this following in clubs in Birmingham just cause we were trying to do something different.
The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.
The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.
In Birmingham, England, I had a match with Tyson Kidd, and Mick Foley was at ringside and delivered a socko to me at the end of the match. That was another one of those moments that, if you told me I would be in the ring with Mick Foley giving me a socko, I wouldn't believe you.
Playing at Birmingham helped me grow as a goalkeeper: it made me better all round, being a regular part of a team.
I think the city isn't talked about enough, there are not enough people championing Birmingham. When I was at university in Manchester I wasn't a fan, I was a bit down on my home city. But as I've got older I love living here. It's easy to get around the country to gigs, and it's a calming, friendly city.