 Everyone, welcome to Sister Power. I'm Sharon Thomas Yarbrough. Today, Sister Power is excited about having a conversation with Stokey Kenyatta. The world is my home, the life of Paul Robison. Jamaican-born Brooklyn Brad Stokey Kenyatta is a working actor, writer, comedian with 20-plus TV and film credits. From sitcoms to shows like ER, Jag, Bernie Mac's show, species like species Half Past Dead and Batman and Robin. Last month co-starred in an independent film, A Quest for Identity, which shot a week in Jamaica and three weeks in Ghana, West Africa. Still currently touring his acclaimed one-man Broadway show on the life of Paul Robison, which has been the number one show on the U.S. and Caribbean College circuit for the last 10 years. He's performed at U.S. embassies in 16 countries and over 200 universities and is one of the top and African teaching artists in the world. We are looking forward to bringing him here to debut his one-man Broadway show in Honolulu this fall for Sisters in Parang, Hawaii. Stokey Kenyatta, welcome to Sister Power. Welcome. Thank you, Aloha. Aloha, how are you? Great to be here. I'm fine. Thank you. Just a little glare in my eyes, but I'm fine. It's a pleasure to be here. Oh, good. This is live, so they've had to drape me in another color. I wore the wrong color to the studio, so we're going to make this work. This has been a long time coming, Stokey, and we're so excited to have you on the air here. And so let's get started with this conversation with you. I told them a little bit about you, but I want you to educate our viewers and tell them a little bit about the late great legacy of Paul Robeson. Well, Paul Robeson is one of the most unique people in American and black history. He's the son of a slave. He was born in 1898, which is approximately 35 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, which means basically we were not free yet. But still, slavery was over, but he was the son of a freed slave, of a runaway slave, and born in 1898. He graduated from Magna Cum Laude from Rutgers University. He was the third African-American to get an academic scholarship. Went on to Rutgers University, graduated from there, and then went on to law school. And was the first African-American attorney hired by Manhattan Law Firm. He's an actor, a singer, a scholar, an all-American football player, basketball, and was just one of the most unique people in American history. Wow. And tell them about the Harlem Renaissance and bring us forward about Paul Robeson. Well, they were actually, the Harlem Renaissance was one of the most profound periods during American history because it was during that time where jazz and bebop and culture and arts became the predominant global culture that it is. And so what the Harlem Renaissance did was it gave Africans in America a platform for which to show their brilliance and their mastery of everything that they could do. And so it was a profound period in American history. And how did you choose the late great Paul Robeson to do your one-man show? What motivated you to step into his huge shoes? Well, Paul is without a doubt the most unique person we have in American history. We've had great leaders before. We've had great speakers and orators like Dr. King and Malcolm X. We've had great athletes like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali and Joe Lewis and Jackie Robinson. And we've had great singers like Nat King Cole and musicians like Duke Ellington. Paul was all of those rolled into one. He was an all-American football player, basketball. He went on to play in the early NFL. He then graduated past the New York State Bar the very first time out, was an attorney. He fought for social justice. He spoke 16 languages fluently. He spoke all the romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, German. He spoke fluent Russian. He got the Stalin Peace Prize. He toured all over the world. He performed in different languages. He recorded anti-Nazi songs in Yiddish. Him along with Josephine Baker started resistance movements against the Nazis. And so it was, he was just tremendously amazing. Now, when you look at people's life, whether it's Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or even Frederick Douglass, they were pretty much one-dimensional. They fought for social justice or stayed in their field. Paul touched on everything and was a paradigm for African-American success because he excelled in everything that made African-Americans famous, which was, and wealthy, which was music, entertainment, athletics, law and social justice. Those areas laid the foundation and were the paradigm for African-American success because it was one of the few areas where we could not be denied because in music, no one could match us in athletics. If you couldn't guard us or play with us, we excelled, you know. And this fight for social justice was a never-ending goal for us. So he was the most unique. He was the most fun. He was very popular with the ladies. He married, had kids and had a great sense of humor. And in spite of the social criteria under which he lived, he had an impressive and he enjoyed most of his life. Well, let's talk about your one-man show that is just, you've performed at U.S. embassies and it's the number one show right now. How many characters do you play in the show and do you need to know? Well, you've told us a little bit about Paul Robeson, but tell us about how many characters you play in this one-man show. I play around 15 characters in the show, 15 characters. I start the show. I open the show when Paul Robeson's father as a runaway slave, Harriet Tubman, brought him to Philadelphia. And so it opens with Harriet Tubman, so she's the first character. And then I cover him all the way up, so you meet him at five years old. So if you come into the show, not knowing anything about Paul Robeson, which is why it's so popular on college campuses, you're not required to know anything about him because when you meet him, you meet him at five years old. And the reason why I chose at five is because right before his sixth birthday, his mother had, there was a kitchen fire in the kitchen. And back then in 1904, the freed slaves made their own clothing, or someone sold it for you. And so it was homemade clothing and it was usually cotton dresses because it was cheaper. But it wasn't fire retarded because back then cotton was not treated. And so, and they cooked with coal. And the unique property of coal is that you think it's out and then you blow on it, and then it's light up and lights up again. So her dress caught on fire and she burnt to death pretty much in front of Paul at six years old. And it was right before his sixth birthday. So that's where the first time you meet Paul right before that, which is why I started at that age because there's a watershed moment in his life and it would forever change him for the rest of his life. It changed him and his family. So as we go through this very state and it's told chronologically, so you meet Paul at five and you take the journey with him all the way through his high school and college and his marriage and it's just journey, you know, to be free. Oh, wow. This is exciting. I can't wait to see you here in Honolulu. I heard the show has a lot of humor in it as well as music throughout. Tell us about that journey. Well, that's, yes, it is. It's a music, music, humor, poetry. There's a Langston Hughes poem that is because Paul was very good friends, him and his wife were very good friends at Langston Hughes, who also went to Columbia University, by the way, which is an Ivy League university. And so we did all of this because this was the beauty of African-American life, which is why we're the most unique race on the planet, that we have found ways to, in the middle of suffering, to live and laugh and love and create and, you know, to survive creatively. Our ancestors were able to do. We as Africans in America, descendants of Africans, have created every single form of music on the planet Earth except opera and classical. Every single form of music on the planet Earth has come from descendants of African slaves. And jazz, which is a grandfather tool, a lot of other art forms, and the blues and all of that. And then you have reggae and calypso and rock and roll and soul music, which lets a gospel music and which sets a country music. And all of this was our cultural contribution to the world. And so in the journey of it, you know, like, they always say, you know, sometimes you used to laugh just to keep from crying, you know? And so it was this, it was this thing to find, to make a way out of no way, you know? And to, and to find that silver lining. And so, so that is what they did. So yes, I'm a performer, a stand-up comedian. And so I have a unique sense of comic timing and I'm a natural storyteller. And so I've embedded it with it and laced the story with as much heart and love, because for me, it's not just a play, it's a prayer. It's a show that speaks for my ancestors. So I take my grandmother Rosa, who raised me at Kingston Jamaica, who's of Kenyan ancestry, and I bring her on the stage with me. And one of the last things I say before I go on is that prayer, which includes them because we're not here alone. And if you're African in America, then someone paid the price for you because they endured that middle passage so that you could live and they would somehow find a way to live, laugh and love so that they could have a child and that child could have a child and that grandchild could have a child and that great-grandchild could have a child and then hopefully that child would be free. I just love it. It's just so empowering and you're educating us about our history and we're educating everyone else about our history. I'm excited about you coming to Honolulu to tell this story. Now, you said that Paul Robeson spoke 16 languages. That is correct. So do you speak other languages as well? No, not really. I know, I'm workable in Spanish. Spanish is most because I depend on a new way. My wife is a Black Puerto Rican, but even though she doesn't speak the language fluently either, but Spanish is the only language that I'm fluent in. Our educational system, that's one of the big disadvantages of it that we were not multi-lingual. When I was just in Ghana, I would meet people and it did not have maybe as much formal education as myself. They still spoke three languages fluently. So you would find people that speak English, French, and the native African language as well. That's amazing. So using theater as a vehicle for social change is one of your missions with this multicultural one-man show. Explain a little bit more about that. Yes, that is the overall mission of the show, using theater as a vehicle for social change. The theme of the show when I wrote it is that if we accept the fatherhood of God, then we must accept the brotherhood of man. And that means that if we see, regardless of how you feel about your brother, if you share the same father, then whoever all of his offsprings are your brother. And so in our efforts to have this society to where men can live as brothers, we first must acknowledge that relationship. And so the best way to do so is if we shared the same universal God that we would then try to find some hope for brotherhood between mankind. And so using theater as a vehicle for social change is that reading, writing, and arithmetic develops those particular skills. But we've had mass shootings to where we're the only civilized society to where our children go to school and kill their classmates. And so we have more unprovoked mass shootings in any other industrialized nation on the planet Earth. It's not that these people are lack intelligence. What they lack is something that reading and arithmetic, writing and arithmetic will not fix. It's the soul, it's the heart. If you don't develop the soul and the heart, then you will have a society in which we do today to where technology has made it possible for us to have methods of mass destruction at our disposal, to where one person can kill many people because technology has allowed us to do so. We need to develop a new generation. Yes. Well, you know, this is interesting. What we're going to do is take a quick break and then we'll come back and you can continue about the mass shootings that are going on. Thank you. Stay tuned. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to join us on Wednesdays at 1 o'clock for Cannabis Chronicles, the 10,000-year Odyssey, where we take a look at cannabis as food, cannabis as medicine, cannabis and religion, cannabis and dear old Uncle Siam. So please join us to learn all about cannabis. Again, Wednesdays at 1 o'clock. Thank you. Welcome back to Sister Para. I'm Sharon Thomas Yarbrough. And today's episode is a conversation with Stogie Kenyatta. The world is my home, the life of Paul Robison. And Stogie, you're telling us about, you know, first we were talking about Paul Robison and then the conversation shifted over to, you know, unfortunately the mass shootings that are going on. But continue your last statement. We have so much to cover in such a short time. Right. Yeah, as I was saying, was that in using theater as a vehicle for social change, we need to develop in students the ability to intuitively understand that since technology has made it so easy for us to kill masses in large amounts of people rather easily either through chemical weapons or just handguns with magazines and all sorts of fancy bullets that do maximum destruction. We need to develop a generation of young people that understand that just because technology says that you can doesn't mean that you should. And that only comes from developing not just reading, writing and lipstick, but the soul and the heart to where you have a love for humanity because what kindness doesn't have anything to do with intellect or intelligence. It has to do with compassion and the soul and seeing the same face, the same God in a different face. And that is one of the things that we hope theater does, that theater and arts can do because music can soften the soul and soon to the savage beast and so can poetry and all art forms. And thus far it has been arts and culture that has gotten us here. One of Paul Rawson's great quotes were that nations may go to war, but it's arts and culture that unites us. Oh, I love that. I love that. Say that one more time before I ask you another question. That nations may go to war, but it's arts and culture that unites us. Okay. People remember that. And we're talking about Paul Rawson and I still get you and I have had this wonderful conversation because you've written, performed and created this one man show. So you stated that without Paul Rawson, we wouldn't have had Barack Obama as president. Please explain that. Yeah, that seems a unique statement from the standpoint that they never actually met. But when Paul Rawson was in his heyday, he was the number one artist in the world, number one performing artists in the world. And he was a mentor to a lot of other artists, particularly the great Jamaican Harry Belafonte and his best friend, Sidney Portier. And when Paul Rawson and Bill Bojangles Robinson from the Negro League, a Negro League millionaire, the dancer went to see Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers to see about getting a young African American baseball player to join the major leagues, Jackie Robinson. He came west to California. He got Jackie Robinson. And then Jackie Robinson along with Sidney Portier and Belafonte became a mentee of Rawson as well. Rawson taught his mentees many things, but among them three things in particular. Number one, he taught him that education was the number one way to advance in the society. The second thing was was that he said intellectual populations do less damage to their fellow human beings and their fellow citizens. The second thing he taught him was that the African American and the continental African were one people. And the third thing was that he said successful African Americans have a cultural and a moral obligation to try to get a quality education for Africans on the continent. So in 1959, Belafonte, Sidney Portier and Jackie Robinson started a foundation to pay for college scholarships tuition for qualified African students. But they needed to find a university that would host them. They checked all of the lower 48 states. And every one of them said, no, thank you. We don't want Africans coming here to study. We don't care who's paying for it. But our newest state was Hawaii. And Hawaii said, well, we haven't been part of America long enough to learn how to hate anybody. And we're kind of brown ourselves. So by all means, you can send them here. So Belafonte, Portier and Jackie Robinson flew to Africa and they started West Africa. They went all the way through Central Africa and they went all the way to East Africa looking for these students. The requirements were you had to speak fluent English via high school graduate and pass the college entrance examination test. They found as they went through Central Africa, West Africa, East Africa in 18 African nations, they found 72 kids. And they bought those 72 students to study at the University of Hawaii. Among those students was a brilliant Muslim boy from the mountain sides of Kenya. And he came to the University of Hawaii to study along with them. And the name of that particular student who was gifted in the math and sciences was none other than Barack Obama. And that is how Barack Obama got to the University of Hawaii and Honolulu. While there, he met a co-ed and done him from Kansas. They fell in love and at the end of she was four months pregnant, they got married. And Barack Obama, the global economic student from the mountain sides of Kenya named his first born son in America, Barack Hussein Obama. That's amazing. And that is how he got there. Now the beauty of this thing is that when I started it was a through line through the piece. And because there's a connectivity which connects all of us. And the connectivity is that in the beginning I started, there's an African proverb that says, civilization begins at the feet of women. And that without an upright and pure woman, it is impossible to build a righteous nation. So I started this in writing it with a female. And that was the 19 year old slave girl, Harriet Tubman. And so when she was escaped from slavery through the help of some abolitionists from Massachusetts, she left her two sisters, two brothers and her mother down there. She vowed to go back and get her. As she took several trips, she didn't find her siblings right away. She found all the slaves and she freed them. One of the slaves that she freed was none other than William Drew from the ropes implantation in Raleigh, North Carolina. That 19 year old slave girl did not know at the time that she was starting a series of events. And that young boy would go to Philadelphia with her. He would later join a fight in the Civil War by joining the army. Then he would use that money to study at a small black college, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He'd studied theology, become a minister. He would later meet a Philadelphia school teacher who we married. The school teacher and the minister with the college education had four children. They educated them at home. So by the time they got to school, if they got to school, they were already very brilliant. And then 14 years after the last child, they had another son and that son was Paul. And he was then tutored by his older brothers and sisters and his parents. And he was brilliant in school and an excellent athlete. And he would become world famous and he would introduce, he would influence a Jamaican named Harry Belafonte, a Bahamian named Sidney Portier and the son of a Texas Louisiana slave, Jackie Robinson, to go all the way to West Africa, go through Central Africa, go all the way to East Africa. To bring back the boy, he would later become the man who would later become our very first black president. And so the moral of that story is that one person can make a tremendous difference in the lives of someone else, even if they're not around to see the difference that they made many years in the future. So that is a story and that is why Paul Robson gets the credit because he got Barack Obama's daddy to Hawaii so he could be their mama and they could have him. I'm loving this. I'm loving this. So we need to have a part two and a part three to continue the story. This is amazing. And of course, you know, Barack Obama's sister, Maya Satori-ing lives right here in Honolulu and she was a professor at UH. So this story needs to be told here in Honolulu. Do you agree? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This has been, I've performed in London and I've performed in Tokyo. I've performed all over the world and through the Caribbean. And this is part of America. And the fact that your state gave us our very first black president is profound. And years from now, it's going to mean a lot more to you than it means right now. But it will always, it puts what was too many in the lower 48 and in significant 50th state to making it monumental from the standpoint that there is a place where your culture can nurture the human being that would be as classy and as elegant as our president Barack Obama was. You know, I'm just looking so forward to you. Right now you reside in Los Angeles, which speaking to you from Los Angeles. But Stogie, we are looking forward to you coming here with your one man show. I'm almost speechless. As they call it, you have chicken skin to hear that I'm living here in Honolulu where the first African-American president was raised. And a Columbia graduate, a Harvard Law graduate and the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. Harvard and Yale have produced 95% of the United States presidents have gone to one of those two schools. And the fact that the son of an African can do so 50 years after Dr. King was assassinated is just tremendous. It is tremendous. And this has been just wonderful. We've been talking for a long time and finally when you're dealing with two busy people, they say if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person. But we're going to make it happen. Thank you, Stogie. I appreciate you taking the time out of your very, very busy schedule to educate and motivate and inspire us to definitely want to see you here in Honolulu for your one man show. So before we leave, is there anything else you would like to add in 30 seconds or less? Yes. The show is suitable for all ages 14 all the way up. And it's a faith-based show. It's a grand baby to come see it. And it has music and laughter and love and it's an inspirational piece to uplift our common humanity. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Stogie. And thank you to our audience for spending your time with us. Oceans of aloha, peace, joy and love. Aloha.