TRANSCRIPT:

Talking about resilience for me, I had something to fall back on, had an image in the back of my head that I could pull to the front of the kinds of struggles that I had been involved in to try and create a different kind of world and to reinforce the beautiful manifestations of people coming to that conclusion that had been happening from the beginning of time through my whole lifetime of fighting together against the moves to perpetuate war, hatred divisions among people. And the suffering of many people from not being able to have the lives that everybody deserved and really above all the divisions that were being perpetuated among people like us down on the bottom from one another. More than anything, I think what the resilience that kept coming back to me is that those divisions are destructive and they’re not natural. So in a classroom of kids that come together from different parts of the city who don’t know one another and don’t have anything in common, and, in their neighborhoods where they come together and see each other as people like them and work together to encourage one another, to create plays and, and to do poetry slams, and to read out loud something they come across in a book that excites them. And to listen to an author like Sharon Flake, come and talk to them, and encourage them. And to have somebody who is creating art for students in the Art House in Homewood, come and talk to all of our students about how they’re all artists and giving them paper and saying, look, look what you can do.