Poetry and spoken word stand at the center of the youth performances in Echoes of Brown. Students created, shared, and burnished their pieces in an intensive writing workshop led by Urban Word NYC (formerly known as Youth Speaks NY). Established in partnership with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1999, Urban Word NYC has provided thousands of New York City teenagers with free, safe, ongoing, and uncensored writing and performance opportunities.
Here we present in their entirety some of the poems the Opportunity Gap youth researchers brought to the stage as they reflected on the meaning and legacies of Brown.
A Call to Action
by Yasmine Blanding
Umm...What crowd of people do I want to talk to...
Truthfully I want to call you all out.
I want to call each and every-one of you out who put more thought into the problem than the solution.
I want to call each and every-one of you out who have a chair in the meetings that are supposed to make a difference in our schools, and society.
I want to call all of you out who make call to actions and not make actions we can call on.
I want to tell all the secrets of how you make all your decisions by what you believe, by what you value, never once taking YOU out of the equation.
How at all the wrong reasons you're acting all stout.
Holding the truth, what needs to be shared...What my Educational situation is really about.
The lack of inventory of books, computers, and most important teachers,
the judgment of more than just my old beat up sneakers... the real issues.
With powerful thoughts, I'm not worried with your faults...
because we are all human.
With controlling eyes, we watch with our lives (we live follow the leader)
With a heart with might, for what's right you’re not putting a fight...without your acknowledgement your ideas are taking flight...in the wrong direction and with words to command you never, you never speak up.
Denouncing your capacity to exert an influence—you live beneath
yourself, trying to please those that dwell beneath you.
After all those meetings, and all those seatings, all the phone calls,
all the falls. The long lines and paid physical fines. Through all the
research, pain and hurt. You're going to tell me the time has been worth no more
than dirt.
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.
I'm robbed of my good days out weighing my bad days, and without an input...
You - dare to complain-this is as serious as people being rob of departing planes.
You’re all out of character just to get fame, and still you have your sane brain and still about the wrong issues you complain.
Ah, If I could just share with you how much my generation has in store.
I’m not talking about pushing others to the floor, just to make it.
I’m talking about conquering some more, just to make it...
To make the way for the future to come, I get angry at your lack of interest just thinking about when the end result of our lives are finally done.
Every moment of the day we should be working. Each one, Reaching one, teaching one. Each one You and I, Reaching one. The old. The new and the few, Teaching one. Teach about our beauty, our history, and our battle.
We must rise to our true selves.
We have work to do, I encourage you to not die with your work balled up in your fist.
Time is of the Essence.
Speak up and while freeing your self and your words...prosperity will then be among my generation.
The Butterfly Effect
by Joanna Roberts
All the words we say today will come back to us on our doorstep in the newspaper tomorrow.
Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon could cause a violent storm on the other side of the earth.
I have discovered that when a stranger offers to push another stranger in her wheelchair as she struggles to carry her grocery bags filled with orange juice and pent up emotions, it could cause a revolution of blind giving, everywhere.
It’s easy to limit your understanding of yourself to believe that you are insignificant, that your act of saving a spider on the floor by bringing it outside on a tissue will have no effect on our infinitely interconnected world. But, in truth, it could cause a deaf man to choose to teach sign language after a lifetime of being mainstreamed.
And when a teacher in my high school, unchallenged by any authority, screams at and throw our hands up in our march for equality. a group of Latino kids outside his classroom that Food Emporium is looking for help, the youth of America will shiver at first, but then we will rise up and dance and sing our pride
Yesterday I was standing on a street corner in the rain, and I looked around and noticed that there was a man standing to my right holding his umbrella over my head. I could faintly hear the children in Southern Bihar bursting into laughter over sunbeams.
All the words we say today will come back to us on our doorstep in the newspaper tomorrow.
Go Blue!
by Kendra Urdang
“Go Blue!" roars the bumper sticker on the back
of her SUV, a cell phone covered by blond hair,
she pulls out of her Starbuck’s parking space without
glancing in the side-view mirror.
Horns retaliate, I sigh. This is my hometown.
drive by the "ghetto" part of town.
pretend not to see the boarded up windows,
the cops at every corner,
the train tracks where houses should be.
drive by the houses with seven bedrooms,
through the floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see
the indoor swimming pools,
hear the swish of tennis rackets
and pretend that it all looks like this.
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.
...and this is the place I call home.
soccer moms driving SUVs hold fundraisers for the football team,
“Go Blue!” plastered on their bumpers,
black men are fine as long as they’re tackling each other, let’s raise some more money!
say nothing when they fail school
and keep them away from your daughters.
so let’s stay quiet, ride this pseudo-underground railroad,
this free ticket to funding from the board of ed.
racism is only our problem if it makes the front page.
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.
Classification
by Amir Bilal Billups
I was walking up the street with my boy Anthony and this other kid.
Anthony was making jokes and the other kid turned around and asked, “Are you in special ed?”
My man said, “Yes.”
Soon after, being in my six person class, like yesterday I remember South Orange Maplewood School District classified me.
It was 2000.
She said I was “eligible for special education.”
Possessing this label they gave me, I swallowed the stigma and felt the pain of being seen in a room with six people. Yeah, it fell upon me and the pain was like stones raining down on me. From the day where school assemblies seemed segregated and I had to watch my girl Krystal from balconies...Away from the “normal” kids to the days where I found myself fulfilling self-fulfilled prophecies. See I received the label of “special education” and it sat on my back like a mountain being lifted by an ant—it just can’t happen.
It was my mind’s master. It told me I was dumb, I didn’t know how to act in a normal class.
I needed two teachers to fully grasp the concepts touched upon in class, and my classification will never allow me to exceed track two. So what is it that I do—so many occasions when the classification caused me to break into tears? It was my frustration.
My reaction to teachers speaking down to me saying I was classified and it was all my fault.
Had me truly believing that inferiority was my classification.
Cause I still didn’t know, and the pain WAS DEEP. The pain—OH GOD! THE PAIN!
The ridicule, the constant taunting, laughing when they passed me by.
Told me that community college should be my goal.
It wasn’t until Ms. Cooper came and rescued me with her history class.
Showed me the importance of my history and told me the secrets my ancestors held.
She told me about the Malcolm Xs and the Huey Newtons.
She told me to speak out because this is the story of many and none of them are speaking.
And the silence is just as painful.
No You Shut Up!
by 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 down 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’d rather stand in the truths of my great grands
tiptoeing on their shoulders as I reach for higher grounds
beyond all your textbooks pound into my innocence
You brainwash me with glories of X and King
Including Rosa and how her poor feet were aching
But what slipped your mind; what you forgot to mention
is a captain, a king, like Bayard Rustin
Afraid that being gay would retard progression
he held his lifestyle in quiet suppression
to maintain the credit of a Marching Washington
These generals in the fight—their stories weren’t different
They all had a dream in the freedom movement
Ella Baker traveled the south in hopes of creating
Individual communities capable of sustaining
A struggle that had become worldwide
Shifting focus to a human pride
One filled with knowing the truth of our past
And enforcing a way of serving that would last
SSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You see,
you tell stories of only individuals, forgetting that they moved and collaborated with a mass of many
You want us to wait for the resurrection of a dream that never even died
Moving civil rights hasn’t ended
You just succeeded in telling us that what we needed
Was to hang around waiting for someone to guide us from the fall
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?
