Wendy Jane's Soul Shake

It didn’t matter to me that I had already seen The Every 28 Hours Plays at Trinity Repertory Company last October.  I wanted to see them again.

Trinity Rep actor, Joe Wilson, Jr., was one of a group of fifty actors, playwrights, artists and activists invited to be part of the non-profit organization, The One-Minute Play Festival’s, Every 28 Hours Plays project. All fifty went to Ferguson, Missouri a year after the young, unarmed, black teen, Mike Brown was killed by a white police officer , and met with […]

As 2015 draws to a close, I wanted to take a look back at this year’s blog posts and share some highlights from each month. I am of course hoping that you’ll find the posts of interest to you.  I know for me, I thought it would be a good way to see what was going on around me, what I made note of, and recorded.

In January, I saw […]

Today in my city of Providence, Rhode Island I attended a rally for the Black Major Movement on the steps of City Hall.

The Black Major Movement is working to make change in law enforcement, the judicial system, the school department and community organizations by calling for an increase in black leadership throughout the city of Providence, and in particular there is a call for the city to hire a black Major in the Providence Police Department, since there are no black officers higher than rank of Sargeant, and it has been this way for quite some time. The movement is being led by among others, community organizer, Kobi Dennis, founder of the Night Vision program, and the Providence Midnight Summer Basketball League, and Jim Vincent, President of the local NAACP.

The rally was a peaceful one, with people holding signs calling for attention to the lack of representation of people of color in leadership roles throughout the city, as well as wearing signs on their backs that read, “Black Major Movement.”  As noted in the Talk Back following Trinity Repertory Company’s “Every 28 Hours” I wrote about last week, the call for equality, and the statement that Black Lives Matter is not calling for violence against police–in fact the flyers announcing today’s rally circulated support that, clearly stating at the bottom, “Please Come In Peace As We Are Pro-Police.” The rally is instead a call for awareness, a call to validate the rights and concerns of people of color, and a call to validate the deservedness that black people  should have people that look like them represented in community leadership.

Here are some photos from today’s rally. I’m hoping that change will come soon, and wish to keep doing what I can to support this important work.

Helen Baskerville Dukes and Eugene Monteiro

Some of the crowd at the rally, Kobi Dennis (far left)

Every 28 Hours

I witnessed a historic theatrical event Monday night–the world premiere of the One-Minute Play Festival’s Every 28 Hours at Trinity Repertory Company here in Providence.

The One-Minute Play Festival is a theater company out of New York City that produces one-minute plays which aim to tell a neighborhood’s story through community engagement.  Every 28 Hours is the current festival theme, and is based on the events surrounding the killing of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white police officer in the summer of 2014 in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. Every 28 Hours stands for […]