 My name is Aaron Dworkin. I serve as Dean of the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance here at the University of Michigan. First, I would just like to share our appreciation again to Reverend Jackson for joining us as we celebrate your legacy and commitment to civil rights for more than 50 years. Thank you again so much. As we get set up here, I just wanted to share when Dean Collins shared with me her desire that the performing arts and its role in the civil rights movement serve as an important part of this symposium, I was moved and filled with excitement for the opportunity that our students would have to demonstrate some of the ways in which the arts can help us shape a better society. The reality is that the arts have played a pivotal role in social justice movements from the very beginning. Frederick Douglass, the great orator, statesman, freedom fighter, leading the abolitionist movement played the violin as well as his son and his grandson Joseph Douglass was the first black violinist to tour nationally and internationally. Frederick Douglass believed all fully emancipated, civilized men should understand music. To that end, he taught himself to play the violin, which served an important role in his life and which is why you will find his violin atop his desk at the Frederick Douglass Museum in D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others in the civil rights movement grew up with a piano and the performing arts in their homes. Martin and Coretta met at a music school where she was studying voice and violin. Dr. King shared at a speech he gave in 1964 in Berlin Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our freedom movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. For over 50 years, Reverend Jackson has been at the forefront of these issues. Of the great Mahalia Jackson, you stated that's where the power comes from. When there is no gap between what you say and who you are, what you say and what you believe. When you can express that in song, it is all the more powerful. It is now my honor to welcome to the stage a number of our talented SMTD students and faculty who will depict the values and ignite the emotions of the civil rights movement through song, dance, drama, and instrumental music. Each artist and performance will be individually introduced by Justin Gordon, who is an LSNA student minoring in global theater and ethnic studies. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Gordon to the stage. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I am humbled and grateful to be here and I'd like to speak on behalf of all of my family in the room, personally to Reverend Jackson and say that after your remarks today and your presence here on campus, I respect and reverence for you and your legacy has deepened even more. And I just want to give a humble thank you to begin this serenade of music and performance for you. And he, his message has inspired us to be able to say all around the world together. We are going to say it together. I am somebody. I said I am somebody. Thank you, Reverend Jackson. I appreciate you. I'd like to first introduce Mr. Jordan Samuels. He is a musical theater student and a baritone vocalist and his accompaniment would be from Professor Jason DeBoer. He will be singing the song Make Them Hear You from the musical Ragtime. The original singer and performer of this song is Brian Stokes Mitchell. And in the musical, it was the song was sung by the protagonist named Cole House Walker, Jr. And he was a successful black pianist who started a riot and revolt after his wife was shot down by murderous policemen only after trying to shake the hand of them president, Theodore Roosevelt. Ladies and gentlemen, please, Mr. Samuels. I could not put down my sword when justice was my right. Make them hear you go out and tell the story to your daughters and your sons. Make them hear you make them hear them in our struggle. We were not the only ones make them hear you. Make them hear you. Your sword can be a sermon or the power of the pen. Teach every child to raise his voice and then my brothers then will justice be demanded by 10 million righteous men. Make them hear you when they hear you open your. Jordan Samuels, please. Now, some people sing songs. That man just sang that song right there. Next, I'd like to present to you an excerpt from the Documentary Love, Life and Loss, which features the song Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, originally composed by Joel Thompson and will be performed by the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club under the direction of Mr. Eugene Rogers, Associate Chair of Choirs and the Professor of Conducting here at RSD University. Please enjoy. Should do more than entertain. Great art should connect you to things that are going on today. I wanted to process my own feelings about being a young black man in this very racially tense time and also to to do something about it. I remember making a very purposeful decision like I need to say something with this art. I need to provide healing with this art. The Seven Last Words is a multi-movement work that features the last words of African American men who've lost their lives before their time. Music is a good outlet to really tell a story and I think that's what we're doing here with these pieces. We're really telling a story and to have the perspective of the people that were lost. The Michigan Men's Glee Club is one of the oldest choral organizations in the United States. The Seven Last Words is a good fit for the Glee Club because of how diverse the choir is. Having people of various races singing the words of this struggle is very meaningful to me and very moving to me to see people connecting with the pain. This piece purposefully is very shocking and it is meant to inspire our reaction. I don't think great art should always make us feel comfortable. It's easy to get wrapped up in anger but I feel a lot more needs to be focused on honoring their lives. Now more than ever do we need art to create sincere dialogue between disparate groups. That's the point of really truly great art is we're trying to inspire that conversation. It's not about a color of your skin. It's not about the type of person you are. It's really about life. It doesn't matter what the nature of the law says because it is tragic no matter who it happens to. As we focus on love life and loss regardless of one's political opinion we can all agree on the value of human life. I'd like to now with my personal pledges bring to the stage a super soprano vocalist Ms. Kayla Hill. She'll be accompanied today by Mr. Joshua Marzan and she'll be singing a song called Mistral Man by Margaret Bind which is one song in a set of three called The Three Dream Portraits. These set of songs were accompanied with text from poems of the late the great Langston Hughes. This song in particular personifies a mindset of a menstrual performer while always having to continuously have a joyous exterior while struggling and wrestling with inner turmoil that structural racism always brings. Please welcome Ms. Kayla Hill to the stage. Is anyone else just absolutely floored by that performance? Man oh my I'm from the west side of Detroit Michigan and we don't get a lot of opera singing the first time I ever heard anyone personally sing opera was three weeks ago during the practice and well my whole perception during singing has changed ever since I heard Ms. Hill's voice. One more time for Ms. Hill. This next program and the leader of this program deals with a certain demographic that we forget about. A certain demographic that sometimes does not get the resources that they were entitled to as citizens and they were taken away technically by the 13th Amendment. I'm speaking to the Institute of Prisons in the prison industrial complex and the prison curator of arts project who was fighting against those inhumane practices that are happening behind those walls but to our brothers and sisters the prison curator of arts project which will you will see here in a film presentation and subsequently after the film presentation the director herself will come and give a scene of her play doing time behind the visiting glass. I'll allow you to learn and see what fighting for lives really looks like when you can't physically touch someone. Thank you. My students and I are here for a theater exchange program with Winnihio which is the federal university in Rio de Janeiro. We are a program at the University of Michigan called the Prison Creative Arts Project or PCAP and we do theater work in prisons with adults and children throughout the state of Michigan. Here in Rio we have collaborators who do incredible theater for social change work in hospitals prisons and favelas. This theater is a space that is a safe space in which particular issues of those communities can arise, that they can put their own opinions, that they can create from their reality and recreate their reality. So in fact I think the heart of this work is in open spaces so that the voice of these people is heard or is offered. In Brazil theater is of the people for the people. This is a very Latin American tradition it doesn't just belong to Brazil but when my students come here they realize that theater can happen in many different ways that they had not previously imagined and that theater has many different practical roles in people's lives. Really high quality professional theater can happen in a cramped waiting room of the hospital where the actors have this much room to do a whole play and it can be marvelous. My brother is an artist. He draws and paints but mostly he does graffiti. Right now he's doing seven years for graffiti. Imagine seven years of your life for a crime where nobody got hurt. Who's it helping for him to be in prison? The guy whose wall he wrote on. Would have helped that guy more if they gave him community service and made him clean up the pinch of wall. I think mostly they locked him up because he's a smart ass. So when we was kids we took this trip to El Paso and we saw this mural that said God is Mexican. And Danny my brother loved that. When we got back to Phoenix he started going everywhere writing it on all the walls. God is a Chicana. Dios es un mojado. God comes from the barrio. God hangs out at Titos. He didn't just paint the words. He made them beautiful. We grew up having this real strange relationship with God because of my mother. So we were Catholic and we went to church on Sundays and prayed like everybody else but during the rest of the week Amma would talk to God like he was her compadre or something. Like he was right there washing the dishes and folding the laundry and then she'd get mad at God and call him stupid and yell at him. And then she'd have to apologize because he's God, right? So she'd say something like perdóname Diosito pero I was angry with Jew this morning for sending rain on the day of Lolita's First Communion. But then I realized that Jew sent the bad weather on purpose so that it would blow Doña Violeta's ugly dress over her head on the steps of the church to punish her for being una vieja chismosa. Now that your plan has been revealed to me I want to say how sorry I am for yelling at you this morning and for eating that extra communion wafer durante la misa porque tenía hambre. Pero ya no quiero hablar más de eso. So this was my mother, right? We heard this all day long and then my brother, well he'd been hanging out with all these guys, right? And one night a bunch of those guys got arrested and if Danny had been with them he would have got picked up too. So we started going to all those places where he used to write God is an undocumented immigrant and God dances cumbias. And he started writing his friend's names instead. Aldo Gutierrez is in prison. Israel Sien Fuegos is in prison. Freddie Ramirez is in prison. Today the cops caught him. He was writing Leo Archuleta is in prison. God is with him. God is a prisoner. He tried to run when he saw the cops but they caught him and three of them beat him until he had a concussion and they broke his right hand. So are you alright so good? No more. And after that I must stop talking to God for a week and now Danny, he writes us letters and this real shaky handwriting and at the bottom underneath his signature he always writes God is a prisoner. I am honored to say that Dr. Ashley Lucas is my mentor and arguably the greatest human being I personally know and if you don't know who she is uh as the late great contemporary poet Christopher Wallace aka Biggie Small said if you don't know now you know students. Next I'd like to present an excerpt from a moving dance piece called City of Rain created by Camille A. Brown and performed by U of M dance majors and masters of fine arts candidates. This film moving dance piece represents the spirit of perseverance in the face of struggle, loss, and grief. Please enjoy. If I could dance like that I wouldn't be a pair talking to you all right now. I just moved for a living. That was amazing. That was amazing. Now we're almost at our conclusion and we have had some triumph. We have had some encouraging words. We got to end with some jazz right? We got to end with some music correct? Yes, yes. I'm proud to present a jazz quartet for the ages. We got Cassin Belgrave on saxophone every read on drums, Brian Jarez on bass, and David Lazar on trumpet. They'll be playing well. A song by Bud Powell. He was a great jazz pianist back in the 40s and 50s that battled police brutality and racism despite making classic music. Afterwards they'll play a song called Cyclic Episode. Now as all good parties go and all good celebrations go, we got to give you something to leave with, something to go home with. We got to send Reverend Jackson Jackson home on a good note, on a great note, even as he walks outside of the door, correct? All right. We have one of our esteemed professors and musicians. Tiffany Ng will be playing on the carillon out in the bell tower. She will be playing Negro spirituals as we leave as you walk to your cars or buses. Songs such as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, and the Black National Anthem, lift every voice and sing. Ladies and gentlemen, that is my time. I love you all, family. Hope to see you soon. Thank you.