“Over the last nine months, we have gathered a collective of 13 youth—drawn from wealthy and economically depressed communities in the suburbs surrounding New York City and within the city—...and we [have] created a Social Justice and Arts Institute where we immersed ourselves in the history of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in lectures, readings, music and discussion, as well as the findings of our own research with nearly 10,000 youth nationwide.
Simultaneously we interviewed elders who worked for civil rights during the 1940s through to the present day. Doubly clothed, then, in the history of struggle and the evidence of contemporary (in)justice, we dipped into the inviting waters of spoken word, and moved to the rhythms of dance. ... Stretched like the tight and yet elastic leather that protects and re-sounds percussion, across the generations of our research collective, we have produced Echoes of Brown, 50 Years Later.”
— from Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v.
Board of Education (Teachers College Press, July 2004)
One of the most powerful products of the Opportunity Gap Project is a multi-media performance by its youth collaborators. Working with artistic director Rosemarie Roberts, choreographer Ronald K. Brown, and Urban Word NYC, they spent almost a year creating “Echoes of Brown. This winter, WKCD student intern Marc Berger attended an informal debut; below he shares voices from the performance. On May 17, 2004 Echoes will have a formal premiere at John Jay College in New York City—exactly 50 years to the day of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
NEW YORK, NY—On a late-February evening, over 200 students, parents, researchers, and educators crowd into the Horace Mann auditorium at Columbia University’s Teachers College for the dress rehearsal of Echoes of Brown, 50 Years Later. The all-youth cast—a diverse group of teens of mixed race, religion, and income level from various neighborhoods in and around New York City—have assembled a repertoire of personal spoken-word pieces and dance that situate their own lives in the greater narrative of the Brown case.
The audience quiets as the performers take the stage. One by one they step forward to recite their original verses. When it is her turn, 17-year-old Kendra Urdang moves to the front to perform her poem title “Go Blue!”:
-
and in the classrooms, the imbalance is subtle,
undercurrents in hallways.
AP classes on the top floor, special ed. in the basement.
and although over half the faces in the yearbook
are darker than mine,
on the third floor, everyone looks like me.
so it seems glass ceilings are often concrete...
although brown faces fill the hallways,
administrators don’t know their names,
they are just the free ticket to funding,
and this is not their school.
As Kendra speaks, three dancers transform her words into interpretive movement. When they finish, the audience applauds wildly, as they do after every performer, moved by both the power of the poetry and the cast’s passion to fight racial injustice in their schools.
Minutes later, student Amir Billups works the crowd like a preacher, eliciting affirming shouts from the audience during his performance of “No You Shut Up!” written by fellow cast member Annique Roberts:
-
No you shut up!
You—the miseducator and misinformer
You—the history rewriter that tries to contain my generation to one-sided tongues
You shut up because I’ve shut up so long my door is wide open
gaping for voices hungry for words unspoken
your lies of my story are depressing to sit in
oozing and surrounding my temple’s foundation
that quivers at the very thought of sinking into nothingness...
I no longer come to you for answers
I lower my raised hand and raise my lowered head
to educators outside the classroom walls
And now in your silence
We see the ability to lead thrives in us all
... Ahhhhh, now how does it feel to be silent?
The rhythms of poetry and dance continue to fill the auditorium.
The wisdom of elders
Videotaped interviews with elders who recall their own long quest for social justice provide a counterpoint to the youth performances. The late civil rights lawyer Arthur Kinoy remembers his first encounter with a young Martin Luther King on the night before an important court date, when Martin advises Kinoy: “Sir, with all due respect, tomorrow when you go in there, remind them that there are, in fact, four branches of government: the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and The People.”
Eighty-year-old social service administrator Thea Jackson, who grew up in Virginia, explains: “I grew up in an all black community....I went to an all black school, all the teachers were black, the principal was black. And my church...all of the congregation was black. So that’s what segregation looked like to me. It looked like I was part of one community.”
Poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez, who had attended a segregated school in the south and then moved to New York City, says she had a better sense of herself in her closed in and segregated southern school than in New York City, where she attended an integrated school, could “ride buses everywhere,” and eventually enrolled at Hunter College. “At some point in those classes,” she says, “I was lessening, I was becoming smaller and smaller. I no longer could see myself, I had no sense of myself at all.”
Adam Green, an assistant professor of American History at New York University, cautions: “Integration was not a moment, it was not an event in which closure has been achieved. It’s not some sort of finite thing that can be held up and appraised as you would a jewel.” Instead, Green reminds, “integration is an ongoing, changing condition that people constantly have to think about.”
“As far as we’ve gone, we have a long, long way to go,” concludes Roscoe Brown, Jr., who once commanded World War II’s all-African American military flying unit, the Tuskegee Airmen. “Power concedes nothing without pressure.”
Adding it up
After the final poem and dance, featuring the full cast, the students sit in a line along the front of the stage, their feet dangling over the edge. With arms linked and smiles beaming, they share a single microphone to thank the elders for their wisdom, tell their own stories of growth, and field questions from the audience.
Yasmine Blanding, a student at York College in Jamaica, NY, is the first to reach for the microphone. “We are poets, so poetry is our outlet,” she says. “But we are nowhere near as big as these issues. I learned from this experience that there is so much work that still needs to be done, that we are only a small step in what we’re hoping to change.”
She passes the microphone to Elinor Marboe, a Mamaronek High School student who heartily agrees. “Change has begun, but we have a lot farther to go. We’re learning that racism in schools is a problem for everyone, not just something that students of color should speak out about. White students and teachers need to fight against segregation so that we can actually live up to the Brown legacy.”
An audience member asks the group, “What do you think has changed in the 50 years since the Brown v. Board decision?”
“What’s changed since Brown,” answers Tahani Salah, who attends the Brooklyn School for Global Studies, “is that we no longer have to worry that we’re talking too much. Now we’re supposed to talk too much,” she continues. “‘Echoes’ is a venue for us to let it out, to stop keeping our poetry inside.”
Indeed, earlier in the program Yasmine’s piece, “A Call to Action,” sums up students’ year-long discovery of their own voices:
You must speak up for your words are arrested.
You must speak up for your words are congested.
You cannot afford to stop here! You are not giving anymore than you can bear. You do not have the spirit of fear. So the doubting of your self must stop here
Speak up and while freeing your self and your words...prosperity will then be among my generation.
In July 2004, Teachers College Press will distribute a DVD (and book) that includes a video of the 54-minute performance of "Echoes of Brown, 50 Years Later." For more information, click here.
Support for the Opportunity Gap Project has come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Open Society Institute, Leslie Glass Foundation, and the Edwin Gould Foundation.
