I graduated from a high school in 1957 that successfully prepared all students for being high achievers in any career field they chose to enter. Years later, I returned to find the school struggling, left behind with students who were being left behind. The band had no uniforms or instruments and the school had unfairly earned a reputation as low-performing, whose parents, teachers and students did not care.
It was then that I joined the Black Liberated Arts Center, Inc. to bring the arts, arts education, history and heritage to a community that has been deprived of the best in education, arts and a rich history mostly forgotten for the past 40 years.
The work that I have undertaken as Executive Director has been accomplished through writing books about the rich history of African-Americans in Oklahoma City, providing professional development training for classroom teachers, raising money for music instruments, bringing in renowned national educators such as Geoffrey Canada to speak and engaging local motivational speakers such as Mama Durant to engage and encourage parents and community to support children who are mostly overlooked.
I encouraged a teacher in the Oklahoma City Public Schools to apply with my organization to become a partner in education with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We were selected and chose a very low-performing elementary school of students that had every kind of problem imaginable.
In a matter of four years, it became a “top ten” school in the school district where it has remained for the last 15 years consistently. The school is nationally recognized and a model school for arts integration where teachers use arts to teach every subject in the curriculum.
I have also been able to bring attention to and build a music festival around a forgotten guitar music prodigy, Charlie Christian, who died at the age of 25. He is now an international icon who is a member of every major music hall of fame in the world, including Jazz at Lincoln Center with college courses named after him, and available on the internet in every major country. All of this was initiated by the work of this nonprofit organization.
There are many ways to make contributions to your community that may lead to a wider impact. I had no idea that the work that I so passionately pursued in giving back to my community would yield such phenomenal results that others would model. My only thought was helping my hometown get up from the bottom of the list in education and become known for positive things, instead of negative statistics.
Older workers may still be able to write, tell meaningful stories and provide wisdom from difficult personal experiences that may be inspirational and motivational to generations of people.