♪ Hold on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Hold on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Hold on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Everything will be all right ♪ ♪ Everything will be all right ♪ ♪ Fight on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Fight on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ We will pray on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Everything will be all right ♪ ♪ Everything will be all right ♪ ♪ We will sing on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Sing on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ We will sing on just a little while longer ♪ ♪ Because everything will be all right ♪ ♪ Oh everything will be all right ♪ (audience applauding) (jazz music) - I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana.

I was born there.

I'm not funny about age.

I was born there in 1971.

All of my family born and raised in Louisiana.

We had some left as a result of marriage or jobs, but most of my immediate family stayed and stayed there really until Katrina.

But New Orleans is such a unique place in terms of the fusion of culture, whether that be from European culture to African diaspora.

So I remember it was a vibrant place, a place that I was around so many different kinds of people, but I probably didn't realize the nature of that, even as a kid.

(rock music) - I didn't really love the arts at first.

I grew up in the church, my father was a pastor and a minister, so we were constantly in the church.

And we were put into the choirs and I didn't really like singing at that point, but crying and singing at the same time, got through it.

But as I got older, I started to appreciate it.

And I do appreciate my parents for seeing that in me, because I didn't see it at that point in my life.

But even before that, Rose Weaver once came to my school, she came in and she taught us about jazz.

She taught us about African American, the African American roots in history and the music and the arts.

And I remember she came in and did ♪ It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing ♪ And she taught us how to swing dance a little bit, you know, a little elementary kids trying to figure it out.

But it definitely sent a spark.

It started the spark as far as the love of the arts and the love of performing and just being you.

And being comfortable in your own skin.

(chill music) - I fell in love with hip hop music when I saw DMX "Ruff Ryder's Anthem" Right?

It was something about the pit bull biting the tire and the four wheelers just, you know what I'm saying?

You hear that beat drop.

(sings beat) I was like, "Ooh, this is hard.

I like this right here."

It was something about it that just drew me in.

So I fell in love with hip hop and through hip hop also a love for words and poetry, because that's really what hip hop is.

Rhythmic African poetry.

That's what it stands for.

That's what rap stands for.

Every night monsters can linger in our minds.

The way... Where I got introduced to it as far as me personally, like my involvement, it was a lot of things that fell into place for that.

There was my mother getting ready to put her foot up my behind because I wasn't doing my schoolwork and I was just being lazy at home so she told me I had to get an after school hobby or a job.

It was this English teacher who actually invited me.

He liked the way I carried myself and he invited me to be a part of this theater program.

Only one year that they ever did it was my freshman year in high school.

Because he even asked me, he was like, "You ever thought about acting?"

I was like, "I've been acting a fool my whole life, maybe I'll be all right at it."

Right?

That was always my joke back then.

And on my way to the first reading, I was sitting there thinking up of excuses for how I can get out of it.

I really ended up finding myself through the process of having a sense of belonging.

(chill music) - I went to Notre Dame and like a lot of things that I've done in my life, I went to Notre Dame, I didn't even know they had a football team.

I didn't even know there was a golden dome.

To be brutally honest with you that even my relationship to Blackness and to understanding with the struggles of our people have been historically, that really became more crystallized for me during college.

You need them to take responsibility.

There was a problem with Black student retention.

There was no center, no hub.

There was no director of multicultural education.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

There was no place to go.

So it all led to, we staged a sit in.

(crowd chants) It was the end of my junior year college that we all met around campus, different satellite campus areas.

And we walked toward the golden dome.

We shut down the golden dome.

We walked in, we had sleeping bags, food, music, Black folk, white folk, all kind of folk, football players, everybody piling in.

And we piled in and we shut the building down for a day after handing them our demands.

And that began a discussion that I'm proud to this day to say that my brother went back to Notre Dame 10 years after I finished.

And there was an office of multicultural affairs.

And there were more Black faculty and the climate was less hostile.

But I was so tired after all of that.

I felt a little bit defeated because there was really no outcome at that time.

And so I'm like, "Well, the last thing I wanna do is mess up my GPA, so I'll take an acting class."

So I took my first acting class in my senior year of college.

And it changed my life.

I didn't know that much about Providence or about the idea of making a life here.

So once again, making a decision purely on my gut.

And my gut was that I wanted to be part of a community.

(gospel music) - [Producer] For me, I see joy as kind of a charging port for Black people in America and getting joy and being like, "All right, I can go out and face the world again."

Have you experienced that here?

People coming in, having a bad day, and leaving more joyous?

- Absolutely.

Every single rehearsal.

There's always somebody that comes in, they had a bad day, but they leave laughing.

They leave at least having a smile on their face at some point during the rehearsal.

There are people that have their own struggles, their own burdens.

People are taking care of their moms or elderly or whatever situation that they're in.

And this is a place where they come to unload and shake that off for a little while and recharge so that when they do go back to their tasks, they have a little more energy to come with, to go with.

This is a charging place.

This is charging station for a majority of the community that comes through.

Conception of the project usually starts with something that needs to be said or something that needs to be done.

Our last concert, Greatness of Gospel 14, was based around freedom.

The reason we chose freedom was because it seemed like during the times that we're living in right now, everybody seems so heavy and everyone seems so bound by the fear.

There's so much fear in this world right now, people just need to be broken free.

They need to be released in a certain kind of a way.

- [Dispatcher] All units responding.

110 Calhoun State.

- [Dispatcher 2] Active shooter.

Multiple people down.

- [Newscaster] (beep) revealed that he had been planning the attack for some time and that he chose the church because it was an historic African-American church.

Sources say he also- - I never forget watching all the coverage around the shooting at Mother Emanuel Church.

I won't say the kid's name, but he walked in and shot up the place.

They were in the middle of praying.

- [Producer] Yep.

- And it was so deep because there were lots of conversations going around on the interweb about the grace of those people and their capacity to forgive.

And I had to be with myself on that too, because my gut reaction was you ready to go out and destroy stuff.

The rage, the anger.

But yet you watched those people who went through something unspeakable still be able to find that grace.

- Felicia had lost her son.

And I said, "She can forgive.

Why are you so hardhearted you can't forgive?"

There's no healing with hatred.

You have to love each other.

- In the midst of so much adversity.

Adversity we really sometimes can't even name and we can go on and on about all those things that have been heaped upon a people.

But to me, the joy is that phoenix rising from the ash.

And we as a people continue to do that.

Narrative is a powerful thing.

We tell a lot of stories in this country, some of which are not true, but those narratives shape how we see ourselves.

- So these days I speak like my tongue has eyes watching everything I say quicker to shake hands than I am to throw them.

Even when my fist wants (indistinct) themselves into someone's face, I found sobriety.

- We're connected.

We live in a foundation of love.

You know what I'm saying?

That's our foundation.

And so like it's sad to see how through, you know what I'm saying, poverty and through manipulation tactics and stuff like that, or whatever, you see it starting to switch now.

But Black joy still always exists regardless to what the situation is in some form or fashion.

Even if it's something that we look at and it's like sad, but they still find a way to have some kind of joy within it.

- [Man] Black joy is grace.

It's in our DNA.

It's from the drum.

It's from the song.

It's from the mother.

It's from the father.

It's from our capacity to reshape and to reinvent.

It's our love of color, because we are so many colors.

It's about the recognition in that moment that you see me beyond how everybody else sees me.

In that I find joy.

(drumming) (audience applauding) (chill music) - I grew up on the south side of Providence, Rhode Island.

I lived in this beautiful house on Warrington Street and I just remember riding my bike up and down the street and falling and selling lemonade on my front porch.

When I was probably like in middle school my mom went back to college and she went to Johnson & Wales so she was taking marketing classes and I occasionally, I snuck in and went with her occasionally.

So I was like, "Mom, I wanna do something too."

I started working on Kin just as a project during COVID.

I was home and I just started thinking about all my favorite moments with my friends and family.

And every time I came back to like Thanksgiving dinner or our summer barbecues where we had all these delicious dishes that my mother grew up, I grew up eating.

My great-grandmother showed me how to cook.

So that's kind of how Kin came to be was me reminiscing about friends and family that I couldn't be with during COVID.

(chill music) - So when I was little, I wanted to be in the NFL, cooking, NFL.

I wanted to cook for my football team.

But as I got older, I realized making it to the NFL isn't as easy as every little kid thinks.

So it's like, I like cooking, I start learning more about cooking.

So I feel like every new step I learn in cooking, whether it's a simple dish or a new ingredient, just to make any recipe that much better, it just makes me feel good.

I just want to cook forever.

- I feel like when you go to other major cities like Detroit, even Boston, it's easy to say, "Hey, where can I find a place where people look like me?"

And I didn't feel like I knew of a place like that here in Providence.

And I've grown up here my whole life.

So I wanted to make sure that we had a space to go to.

It's our food.

It's BET on the TVs, any other night it's the music that we play.

We play everything from Earth, Wind, and Fire to Kanye West.

It was really just about sharing that Black culture that we have.

Like if you went to a regular barbecue in the summer, what would you see?

You would have your auntie who's acting up, which is why we have a cocktail called Auntie's Kool-Aid, it's a spiked Kool-Aid.

It's just everything from that.

And we do have staff and family that come in and on a Friday night they act up, we get into it.

It's fun, but it's also authentic.

It's just who we are.

We have a good time when we're together.

- Individually, the whole staff, we all pitch our ideas to Julia.

But as a team, we come down, sit together.

We usually do a voting.

What do we want to try?

And head chef or myself, we'll make it for everybody to try.

And then when it hits the menu, that's up to the boss lady.

- Hiding out in the office.

(upbeat music) What needs to be at the barbecue?

Was essentially how I came up with the menu.

So if we're going, we gotta have mac and cheese.

We have to have collard greens.

There needs to be sweet potatoes, yams.

There's must have items.

And then as for the cocktails, we really wanted to do a program that was focused around rum, because a lot of the rum comes from Caribbean islands and we really want to showcase Black owned businesses, Black curators.

And then of course we tweak our own cocktails, lots of rum.

(upbeat music) - I do like the Black girl magic.

I do like that.

- It was really just about sort of sharing that Black culture that we have.

Oh, I feel like that's what we have here in America.

That's sort of our only tie to each other is what we pass down to each other.

Any time that we get together and we share a dish or share food or we cook for each other, that's us sharing our love, our soul, our joy, our history.

And that's something, a tradition that we just have to keep going.

And that's pretty much why I have Kin, because I want to share that with other people and they should have it.

Black joy is just our happiness when we're together, whether it's when we're fighting for each other, fighting with each other, just being together.

That's when we're most happy.

I think no matter what, whenever we're together, we're just instantly connected.

Even if I just met you off the street, we have that acknowledgement between each other that you just can't bottle up or sell.

(playing tuba) (audience applauding) - So I grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

So Atlantic City's home, 609, the garden state.

And I grew up with my grandparents.

I was in the third grade when I started getting bullied and I got bullied all through third grade, all through fourth grade, all through fifth grade and not a soul knew about it because I didn't know how to talk about it.

We didn't talk about anything in my crib.

When I was bullied, man, these guys, they chased me home every day.

And one day they caught me.

Well, they caught me a lot of times, but this one particular day they caught me and they wrapped me up and they threw me in this dirty mattress, threw me and the mattress in the dumpster, took the gun out, said, "I dare you to move."

I was in the third grade, like how am I supposed to, how am I supposed to talk about that experience?

I sat in that dumpster for hours.

And because me and and my grandparents didn't have that type of relationship yet because a safe space, a brave space wasn't built, right?

When I got home, I told my grandma I was outside playing.

Like I said, "G, I was outside playing."

All of these things is a culmination of what I experienced when I was younger and what helped me begin my journey.

And so I said to myself, "Whenever I work with young people, whoever I work with, I am going to make sure that they understand the importance of prioritizing their mental, emotional health."

- So my family is of Haitian descent.

My parents came here to America when they were in their early twenties.

I was like born in America and like growing up, I wasn't really too connected with the culture.

Like my parents spoke Creole and we would speak, me and my siblings would speak back to them in English.

And so there was a little bit of that connect, but disconnect.

I don't even know how I landed across the Leadership Journey.

And it was like a dream come true.

I got an internship as fundraising manager.

And honestly, it's so funny because I know nothing about fundraising.

Well, I knew nothing about fundraising, but I just loved the mission of a Leadership Journey so much that I was like, "I don't even care if I have to sweep the floors, I'm going to be here."

- My niece, she is Kate Verdian, so she's the owner of this small business who lives in Patucket, and the food is from Distinguished Catering.

It's a Black owned business.

She lives here in Providence.

I was here in this library where we had our very first ALJ sessions.

Leadership became a component because advocacy is important.

And I started to learn just how much young people have always been a part of social movements.

The leadership piece is more about the self-awareness.

Because when you know who you are, when you know your voice, when you know the power of your voice, you can move in this world with a sense of confidence that nobody can take from you.

And then we talk about Ubuntu, right?

Understanding that I am because you are, my humanity is tied to yours.

Understand that your challenges aren't that different from someone else challenges.

And that in itself brings us closer than it divides us.

So when you can start tapping into humanity, seeing the other person across from you as a human, right?

We can start breaking these barriers.

We can start having conversations, productive, healthy conversations.

- Honestly, being in Haiti was the first time where I felt like I belonged because everywhere I turned, everyone looked like me.

The Haitian people are very hard working.

And so here you hear on the news, it's the poorest country.

And there's always political turmoil happening in the country, and to actually be on the ground and experience the everyday life of an average citizen in Haiti and then to come back here, it makes me think of how much stronger I can be and how much stronger we all can be and more intentional in the work that we do here.

- So we just came back from Ghana, right?

And Ghana hit different because we went to the dungeons where they kept enslaved Africans before being shipped.

And when those young people got the opportunity to experience that and then experience how the individuals and the young people living in the communities in Ghana was still filled with joy and still celebrating us.

We left there with this Black energy never dies concept.

And that in itself puts a smile on our faces because in America, we see Black energy taken from us every time we cut the TV on, we see Black energy taken from Ahmaud.

We see Black energy taken from Brianna.

We seen Black energy taken from Trayvon, from Tamir, from Sandra Bland.

And so to go to Ghana and be reminded that Black energy never dies.

When you see these young people embrace this and understand that, no, you can't take that from us.

(chill music) - When I was in school, I didn't really learn much about myself.

It was just like strictly educational.

And so getting younger students to learn about who they are, it can help bring out that joy sooner.

Just being myself is one, just like sharing little bits of laughter and little bits of who I am with others spreads Black joy, especially like with now, what I'm doing now.

Like that's a little piece of joy that I'm spreading.

Even for my younger brother, I took him on spa day and I feel like men of color don't really do the self care thing.

And so being a person that allowed him to do that, be in a space where he can take care of himself is an important piece of spreading that Black joy.

- It's how we express ourselves.

It's how we dance, it' how we eat, it's how we connect with others who look like us.

Black joy is radical.

It's beautiful.

Black joy is us.

- Yes, sir.

Listen.

♪ I said this is America ♪ ♪ So many people look up to America ♪ ♪ This is America ♪ ♪ American dream been sleeping on us ♪ ♪ But this is America ♪ ♪ See we had a dream they put us to sleep ♪ ♪ This is America ♪ ♪ You still don't believe me what happened to King ♪ ♪ I can't believe after 400 years in them fields ♪ ♪ We're still working for freedom ♪ ♪ If justice was blind in this US of A ♪ ♪ She would feel me and give me my freedom ♪ ♪ I'm very proud to be Black ♪ ♪ Ain't no denying the fact ♪ ♪ It's only wack that my color portrays me ♪ ♪ A criminal only in my country's eyes ♪ ♪ I only went for a jog ♪ ♪ I ain't committing no crime ♪ ♪ If your life is so precious oh liberty ♪ ♪ Why did you take away mine ♪ ♪ Rest in peace to Ahmaud Arbery ♪ ♪ This is what we're living in ♪ ♪ I just wanna live but this country suffocate ♪ ♪ I just wanna see tomorrow ♪ ♪ Have a daughter walk her down the aisle ♪ ♪ Go outside and even walk a mile ♪ ♪ I just wanna live ♪ ♪ See I just wanna live ♪ ♪ I just wanna live ♪ ♪ I just wanna live ♪ ♪ Tell me how can you protect me ♪ ♪ If you do not see me the same ♪ ♪ You get a call so you already angry you pull on the scene ♪ ♪ Don't even move or I'll snap ♪ ♪ Give me your ID no cap ♪ ♪ See I try to get it and all of a sudden ♪ ♪ Shot me so fast ♪ ♪ My daughter right in the back ♪ ♪ Why did you overreact ♪ ♪ You mad at these protestors calling you ♪ ♪ Rest in peace Philando ♪ ♪ Justice for our people ♪ ♪ Treating us like Pharaoh ♪ ♪ Every Moses we done had been killed so let our ♪ ♪ George he was begging to breathe ♪ ♪ Couldn't you let him just breathe ♪ ♪ You shut out your conscience your knee on his neck ♪ ♪ Man he can't even breathe ♪ ♪ But this is America ♪ ♪ So much for justice ♪ ♪ The land of the free ♪ ♪ We want to be free ♪ ♪ No more rest in peace just give us ♪ ♪ I just wanna see tomorrow ♪ ♪ Have a daughter walk her down the aisle ♪ ♪ Go outside and even ♪ ♪ See I just wanna live ♪ ♪ I just wanna live ♪ ♪ I just wanna live ♪ ♪ See I just wanna live ♪ ♪ I just wanna ♪ (audience applauding) (upbeat music)