we want to talk a little bit today about the group that we belong to called the men of the middle passage yes men of the middle passage so what we forward before we get into the back of the look at my notes would ask you a few things about yourself so professionally i teach air and i teach general education primarily to  primary grade students through twelfth grade but i've done work with adults as well my special in education has been for many years the arts specializing in arts integration that's bringing arts into the service  core curriculum so helping teachers be able to use the arts to help students underline understand better where math science whatever it is they're learning in the classroom in addition to helping them to utilize the arts as a tool for their own self expression for expressing things about their communities their environment their ideas about their lives both in the present and the past as well as the future so that's been the focus for many years and i was based here in seattle for almost thirty years and in two thousand fourteen i moved to portland where continued that work down there and more recently moved to tucson arizona where i was teaching second grade up until just the end of this year and next year i'm planning to move back up the ladder in terms of the ages of students and be working with middle school students again so did you know i'm teaching and learning at the same time and i think that's that's always important to be doing so so you feel  was a big push to get there are some back into school there's a program through for culture called creative advantage which has really aimed at creating a closer partnership between working artist and teaching artists in the community and bringing them into schools to partner with teachers and that program seems to be doing very well they're doing a lot of professional development with artists so that when they do go into classrooms they really know how to effectively communicate their lessons to students as well as you know  working with teachers so that there's really a strong collaborative element when you do bring our sense of classroom and and i'm hoping and i think you know folks here who are part of that program are hoping that the success of it and the way that it improves student performances in schools and classrooms will really inspire people to really want to refocus on prioritizing the arts again as part as an here is men of the middle passage which you know i feel a great pride in having been with from its inception back end as a two thousand and eleven roughly and  with themselves and at the deepest level and and then connect also with each other and the community beyond is something that after say initially i wasn't sure how it spoke to  and the longer i had remain involved with the group the more i could see how powerful and relevant it is especially it's becoming more and more relevant given the you know the social cultural forces in our environment that are really pushing us as people of color really to the edges of  the society i think you know finding and creating those places for ourselves where we can our own power is is is so vital so i think the work that this group does and will do and the future as it continues to grow and become  more aligned and and and more varied and the work that it does in the community i think you know i'm always excited about coming back and as many things at the beginning of the group but i think it came about through lots of intense discussion the we i think we all agreed from the start that the  focal point of the group and and the demographic that the group was targeting was men of color and i think we did wrestle a lot with min of color in terms of ethnic background and heritage and you know it became complex because i think we as as  you know talking about any name that alluded to shades of skin became problematic because it excluded the whole you know sections of people who identify and rightly identify themselves as black people and so really we decided this is what i recall we decided that we really wanted something that  encompassed our experience as people here black men living in the united states but it also connected us back to our ancestral heritage and it also could be inclusive enough that there's a logo right the minute a middle passes so could you do to explain what that represents so you know taking into account the various interests and concerns of people in the group i tried to come up with an image that would kind of synthesize the ideas that we were trying to express in in the name that that that we were a group whose that would be composed of men of african descent that much of what we did and do was about looking at ourselves reflecting on our experiences but doing that in a way that really is empowering us to move forward and not be stuck in the concerns and you know the challenges that the past has presented to us both individually and collectively so i think the logo really spoke to that the central am is there is the sankoh for which is a very common image that that we see even here in the americas is also the symbolize in the in the bird there which is at the top of the image and  as the idea that we we look to the past in order to chart our course for the future and and to learn from the past in order to create a better future and i think i thought that symbol very perfectly and eloquently captured a lot of what we wanted there's you know little textual elements around the logo that again spoke to those things that we again individual empowerment but also the empowerment of our families our communities and then first and foremost there at the base of everything is healing again healing of ourselves and our yes i talked about the sankoh for so and going through the center of the image is both at the top end and kind of in the center of the image are you know these kind of swirly images that really represent the ways i was trying to capture the sense of the atlantic and and that transatlantic journey that again that still connects us to both the space where we live now but also to that at one point i thought about trying to put in there a map of the americas and realize yeah you know it just would not fit in terms of the dimensions to put that in there and i still look at it and think it's a little bit off because of that but at the same time i think you know for me the the the more important element was really that the african continent i felt that that was really what needed to be expressed most visually and that said the most about who we are and what we're trying to do in terms of defining middle passage is to build partnerships networks with other community organizations learning institutions businesses and municipal agencies whose focus is the social cultural and economic development of underserved populations and i you know like everything that that we did and have done it was you know a labor of love to come up with the words that would best be fine and succinctly define what it is that we want to do and are trying to do within our community  the whole group and they get a chance to talk about some of the traps that they were in when they were the age of the people that were incarcerated and how they got out and didn't get out of finally got out but what it took for them to do that and that was one of the important and most impressive things i think that we did in terms of looking at young men who thought they were doing the right thing but it was all a big trap and then when they found out they were trapped you know what do i do now see and so we were able to come in and share our stories our life stories and give this a miss for a show and i remember one brother he brought a friend of his up there who wrote a book you know and he was just talking about his life you know how i grew up running around the streets like everybody else playing games and everything you know he got caught up in the  system and you know he had to some point he had to just say wait a minute you know this is not where i wanted to go and i want to go somewhere else with my life you see and then he changed his life around he became a professional  business person and he wrote a book about his life you know so so the thing for me when i went there to get the name of the place that he went his way but two three hours  there was like about fifty young men it came out to me this they were all african american one caucasian one samoan maybe a native america but all the rest were african american yeah and you know that that's not surprising because we know statistically that we're under represented in those places where we really need to be represented but the prison industrial complex is the one place you can go and find you know more than the fair share of black and brown people so there were for there was a large population of  absolutely so but that's one of the things that we do we do on a regular basis and you know i think that's you know that is consistent with we know where we started because i'm  recalling now that very early on in the group there were in fact even before we were men of the middle passage when we were just a collection of men of african descent who were meeting trying to define a group and trying to decide on whether to be you know how and what kind of collective we would become i know that you had that one of the core concerns from the beginning was was how do you do outreach with use and and and adults who were in the system and then there were many people and those early meetings many brothers who had come out of those  systems so it's nice to know that actually the group has gone full circle now and is really actively seeking out engaging and seeking to mentor those young men and and and even elders who are you know still caught up and in that trap some of the things we do is we go to to support issues at city council meetings where someone will call us and say we need to show you have some community support so you know so with this logo you know we generated some t shirts with beautiful logo on the front you know that there were strong lives in the community there were unified that cared about the community you know yet and were and who were keeping their fingers on the pulse of issues that impact the community which is i think something that a lot of people don't believe that we do and in fact you know and i don't mean we men of the middle past i just mean we as black people that and black men particularly that we are not  conversant with what is going on in the wider world around us and in fact you know that is far from the case so the other thing we do is we bring in gues speakers to inform us about what they're doing and we had people come in talk about health issues we've had people come in to  inform us about finances you know how to be better with handing over finances so we also we have a brother there who has invited us to come to africa  strand of trying to create spaces where you know african african brothers from the americas can connect with with those from that cause that i think that is an essential and vital piece of work that i am looking forward to the group building on because i think that that is a dialogue that has long needed to happen and you know it's one of those wounds that  will support moving that further along the point that you're talking about going to was brought out in the blood of the absolutely absolutely i was so glad that movie got the traction that it got got the attention that it got made the money that it has made because that it really breaks a myth that hollywood has embraced for a long time which is that if you have a cast is largely black and the subject matter is not slavery or crime or drugs there will be no audience for the film and and this this film has very clearly shown that you can create a positive forward thinking story about black life black culture and very particularly about african culture and have it be something that is not only accessible to everyone but that is attractive to everyone and that within that story these filmmakers you know took on  beyond beyond their main that mandate to simply entertain the public the they embraced as they were putting together this project and understanding that they must've had  black people that we want to say something that is going to matter to people from our communities and that they understood also that that you know that this distance between africa and the diaspora is one that needs to be bridged and that that was a theme in that film really moved me and then again i hoped that young people seeing it old people seeing it people seeing it would really use it as bringing board to it to start some conversations across the aisles that they really have kind of divided us from each other you know for you know i think largely for historical reasons and you know centuries of colonisation have have only you know kind of calcified  some of the issues and though you know you when i was growing up and i don't think it's changed very much now you know one of the one of the most insulting things that you would call an american black person was it was african that was looked on you know as a kind of disparaging statement and and you know i know from some of my conversations with you know with african acquaintances that many of them have their issues with those of us who are not from the continent i mean it's just an interesting kind of pathology spiritual path allergy that  just continues to snowball so people to look at the address for the minute the middle passage on hope hope to have enough time to pull it up so you can see it and want to come and check us out  make a phone call and get more information on it can we get the back of that car put up there as we as we leave i know they are working on the back there already so we want to thank everyone for watching with thank you brother live for coming and to our viewing orders will see you next