Script for Black Assembly

MUSIC: 

A LOVE SUPREME

Lights Down 

1. Title Slide 
2. Frederick Douglass 
3. Frederick Douglas
4. Akili reads brief bio and excerpt from NARRATIVE

As a slave on a landlocked Maryland plantation, Frederick Douglass would look longingly toward Chesapeake Bay and its sailing ships. For Douglass the ships represented everything that had been denied him by slavery, and in his Narrative (1845) he describes how he would "pour out my soul's complaint. . . to the moving multitude of ships":

"You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! ... It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water."

Douglass's linking of the sea with freedom was no idle figure of speech. Although he would never sail as a seaman, he worked for several years in the shipyards of Baltimore where he gained an intimate understanding of seafaring life, and in 1838 he exploited that knowledge to effect his escape. After borrowing a seaman's protection certificate from a free black sailor, he put together the appropriate clothes: "a red shirt and hat and black cravat, tied in sailor fashion, carelessly and loosely about my neck." Even in the slave state of Maryland, the carefully calculated disguise enabled him to board a train bound for Philadelphia without arousing a hint of suspicion, and made his way to freedom, and into history as a brilliant, passionate writer and orator for human rights. 

Transitional Music with Dance: 

“Wade in the Water” - Sweet Honey in the Rock (start: 0. 27 - ) 

5. Slide - Harriet Tubman 

 Makenzie reads bio sketch on Harriet Tubman:

 Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad Conductors. During a ten year span Harriet made nineteen trips down south to escort at least seventy slaves, and perhaps many more, to freedom. 

From an early age, she showed a willingness to stand up for those who could not stand up for themselves.  While still in her early teens, Harriet Tubman tried to block the door from an angry overseer to protect a slave from a beating. The angry overseer picked up and threw a two pound iron at the slave, but missed, and hit Harriet in the head instead, leaving her with lifelong fits of narcolepsy.

As a grown woman, fearing that she was about to be sold, Harriet Tubman set out, guided only by the north star,  for the “Promised Land”, the North, where she found work, saved her money, and returned to the South again and again, leading slaves out of bondage to freedom. 

Harriet Tubman carried a pistol in case anyone got “cold feet”. She never had to use it. 

Harriet Tubman would travel at night hugging the shadows of trees and ravines, and find shelter during the day, sometimes in abandoned barns or shacks owned by freed blacks or sympathetic whites. It is believed by some that spirituals or gospel songs were used as coded messages to let slaves know that the Underground Railroad was coming by.  The tempo of the song would let them know if it was safe to come out or to wait. The spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd, gave directions to the slaves to follow the “big dipper” to find their way north.

During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman worked as a spy for the Union. And after the war, she lived out the rest of her long life in Auburn, New York. 

Music Transition: “Follow the Drinking Gourd”  with dance

5. Slide - Sojourner Truth:

Introduction by Akili: 

Born into slavery in 1797, Isabella Baumfree, who later changed her name to Sojourner Truth, would become one of the most powerful advocates for human rights in the nineteenth century. Her early childhood was spent on a New York estate owned by a Dutch American named Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh.  Her first language was actually Dutch. Like other slaves, she experienced the miseries of being sold and was cruelly beaten and mistreated. Around 1815 she fell in love with a fellow slave named Robert, but they were forced apart by Robert’s master. Isabella was instead forced to marry a slave named Thomas, with whom she had five children.

In 1827, after her master failed to honor his promise to free her or to uphold the New York Anti-Slavery Law of 1827, Isabella ran away, or, as she later informed her master, “I did not run away, I walked away by daylight….” After experiencing a religious conversion, Isabella became an itinerant preacher and in 1843 changed her name to Sojourner Truth. During this period she became involved in the growing antislavery movement, and by the 1850s she was involved in the woman’s rights movement as well. At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered what is now recognized as one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history, “Ain’t I a Woman?” She continued to speak out for the rights of African Americans and women during and after the Civil War. Sojourner Truth died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1883.

Beverly as Sojourner Truth:

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.

Music Transition: 

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” 

Akili reads: 

Two of our greatest educators and scientists were African Americans. One was George Washington Carver, who was born a slave. The driving force in Carver’s life was education. He left home at an early age to pursue an education, working odd jobs across the Mid-west to pay for school. Eventually, he achieved a master’s degree in agriculture, and through brilliance and determination, became a leading scientist in botany who created revolutionary methods of agriculture. It is the peanut, however, which most people link with George Washing Carver. Through his research the lowly peanut was transformed into hundreds of different products, including gasoline and of course, peanut butter. 

On April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington was born a slave on the 207- acre farm of James Burroughs. One of his first memories was of his mother, with tears streaming down her face, kissing him on the cheek after the slaves had been gathered together to hear the news that they were free. Soon after, his mother took her small family to join his father in West Virginia. There, the young Booker T., completely illiterate,  began the process of learning to read and write.

Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and his voice trumpeted the needs and desires of those slaves and their descendants. Washington believed the true emancipation of blacks would occur through education and entrepreneurship. He was appointed the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute, a school of higher education for African-Americans, and the far-sighted educator hired George Washington Carver as a botany professor at his school. 

Music Transition - “The Entertainer” 

W.E.B. Du Bois 

Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Du Bois wrote extensively and was the best known spokesperson for African-American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.