TESTIMONY: A #BlackLivesMatter Manifesto after the Credo of W.E.B. Du Bois
This summer, Alexandra Juhasz invited me to contribute to her exciting podcast We Need Gentle Truths for Now.
The result was a collaborative crowdsourced reading of the Credo of W.E.B. Du Bois — one of the seminal texts of the twentieth century’s movements for racial justice and one that, despite being more than a century old, remains very much a text for now. I put up a call to essentially random friends and allies on Facebook, inviting them also to invite their own friends to contribute. In the end, a total of thirty-six readers representing four native languages and seven decades, ages six to eighty-one, contributed — a collective effort to bring Du Bois’s prose-poem into today’s world, a world that very much needs to hear it.
There are three ways to access our production. The crowdsourced reading is the same in all, but the delivery format and surrounding content differ, as does the length.
(1) here is a YouTube video consisting of the reading only:
(2) here is the podcast episode, consisting of introduction and afterword by Alex Juhasz, the reading, and a very brief note on the project from Yours Truly:
(3) here is the podcast episode together with a 12-minute mini-lecture on the text and its historical significance, together with a few words on how this venture came to be:
— JMC
CREDITS
Text: Credo (1904/1920)
from the autobiography
Darkwater (1920)
by
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963)
Readers:
Adrienne Inglis
Alexis Lemus
Alicia Moore
Amanda Dove
Brigid Roberson
Chris Smith
Er-Gene Kahng
Erin McHugh
Grace Sexton
Isabel Tweraser
Jacqueline Cooper
Jason Hoogerhyde
Jessica Bauchum
Jonathan Bellman
Julia Fowler
Julianna Emanski
Katiebeth Brandt
Kimberlyn Montford
Kinley Johnson
Kirsten Chambers
Leslie Nobles
Linda di Fiore
Lois Ferrari
Louise Toppin
Mason Bynes
Melissa Byrnes
Michael Cooper
Nicole Grimes
Olivia Wise
Philippe Bodin
Reiland Rabaka
Rob Elfline
Sara Watson
Shelby Avants
Suzanne Bethel
Terri Johnson
Vicky Unruh
Music:
“Some o’ These Days” (trad.)
Arranged
by
Florence B. Price
Arranged for the Piano
by
Lara Downes
from the album Some of These Days
(copyright © 2020 Flipside Music)
Co-producers
Alicia Moore John Michael Cooper Lara Downes
Originally published at https://cooperm55.wixsite.com on July 20, 2020.
