Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School | Black History Month | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Arts & Anti-racism
Top: Fifth through eighth graders in “They Don’t Really Care About Us”. Bottom: Nyasia Bell at the opening of "Rooted In Creativity." Lucy Gellman Photos.
The intro to Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care About Us” floated through the dark auditorium, chatter rolling beneath it. Hands clapped, forming a heartbeat-like rhythm. Dancers beat their chest in time with the percussion, smudges of war paint gleaming beneath their eyes. Behind them, a screen glowed with the words We Will Not Be Erased, reminding viewers of the Black hands that built the U.S. brick by brick, without any credit or compensation.
Slave labor made this country rich, read the text beneath it. Black History is American History. Without us, this nation wouldn’t be what it is. A line break, as if the screen were breathing. We are the hopes and dreams of our ancestors.
That performance came to Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) last Friday, as students and staff presented “Work & Worth: A Black History Celebration of Labor” in the school’s first-floor auditorium. In just under an hour, arts students took an audience through centuries of Black history and culture, lifting up labor organizers, working artists, educators and even a few New Haveners in the process.
The theme comes from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which honors the life and work of founder Carter G. Woodson. Woodson launched “Negro History Week” for the first time in 1926—a full 50 years before Gerald Ford officially recognized it on a national scale. This year, the theme has extra resonance as the Trump Administration works to minimize and erase Black people from the historical and federal record.
For the first time this year, the assembly also joins a multimedia Black History Month collaboration with the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale. More on that below.
Top: Arts Director Tavares Bussey. Bottom: Julian Durio leads choir students in Nina Simone's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To be Free."
“It felt amazing. It just felt so special to have that space,” said Lamarkus Cooper, a seventh grader studying theater with Justin Pesce. “Without these people [historical figures, activists, organizers], we wouldn't have this ability to be together here. It's amazing for us kids to be able to do Black History Month.”
“I would say that it feels good, because most people try to quiet people of color and cut off their opinions,” added Naomi Rivers, who is studying dance with Hannah Healey. “But like, when we're dancing, we're basically dancing about what our ancestors had to go through, and we're expressing ourselves through that.”
The assembly, some iteration of which happens every year, is very much a collaborative effort between BRAMS students and their arts instructors. In their emphasis classes—and sometimes after school—students have been studying Black labor history, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century union organizers to leaders in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
While those include long-taught figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. they also feature overlooked history-makers including Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Phillip Randolph and Hattie Canty, who are responsible for some of the efforts in racial and educational equity, gender parity, and unionization that exist today.
In Daniel Sarnelli’s theater classes, for instance, students prepared short group presentations on Bethune, Randolph and Canty, learning about labor unions and the long battle for Black education in the United States. They breathed life into Randolph’s long fight for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which led to a decade of organizing and collective bargaining agreement for Black porters at the Pullman Company.
Top: Sarnelli's students. Bottom: Students dance to Aloe Blacc's "Shine."
Or in Hannah Healey’s dance classes, where students studied and researched Black choreographers like Joan Myers and Katherine Dunham, learning “what they had to go through” before they were inscribed in the annals of dance history, Healey said. Sometimes, that history revealed a single teacher or class who advocated fiercely for them, Healey recalled—a reminder that a single person can make a difference.
As they researched, Healey remembered, she searched high and low for the right musical selection, ultimately choosing Aloe Blacc’s “Shine.” As it played Friday—the song is dedicated to those working in humanitarian crises—so too did a presentation on worker’s rights that she had put together.
“I think it’s more important than ever to feel like we are stomping out hate and nastiness,” Healey said in an interview in her classroom after the performance. “It’s scary and I feel like hope is the answer. We have to remember that people had to fight, and maybe we do too.”
Friday, that feeling was everywhere as lights came up and students fell to a hush, buzzing with a palpable excitement. Just past 10 a.m., choral students set the tone with James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” their peers ready to stand and sing along in their Valentine’s Day reds and pinks. As teacher Meaghan Sheehan cued them in, one hand jumping between the keyboard and the space above it, students swayed to the sound, a vision in blue and gold.
“It felt good!” said eighth grader Janicemar Jimenez afterwards. “It felt like there was a lot of empathy in the room.”
And then, as if a great motor had sputtered and stirred to life, students were off, jumping in and out of history with a few costume changes and musical assists. One moment, they were back in 1886, as Bethune entered a one-room schoolhouse that would set her on the path to transformative education for Black women and girls. The next, and members of the BRAMS drumline had jumped ahead to Dallas C. Burke’s spirited “Crank U Up,” with rafter-raising sound that got the audience cheering and clapping along in appreciation. They later stunned with "D&K," a cadence from the movie "Drumline."
The next, and they were traveling back through history again, this time to Harriet Tubman’s centuries-long legacy of liberation. When string students came in with a cover of Cynthia Erivo’s “Stand Up,” which honors her life and bravery (and has graced the school’s assemblies before), a few voices in the audience began to hum along knowingly.
Other students leaned into artistic and intellectual labor. When the first strains of Quincy Jones’ 1989 “The Jazz Corner” played over the room, a video swirling in technicolor, students filled the stage, striking poses as buttery vocals laid down the track. On a screen behind them, names and portraits flashed one by one: Charlie Parker, James Moody, Big Daddy Kane, George Benson, Sarah Vaughn.
On stage, dancers moved to the rhythm, their bodies in sync and service to the music. They felt the music travel up from the floor, their limbs loose and expressive. When Jones announced a name with that hot, poetic swerve—No one goes the mile like Miles Davis! Watch how he plays this trumpet and pump it!—one dancer would break ranks, soloing as if time had stopped for everyone else in the room.
The list went on, with a nod to New Haven’s own Monterey Cafe before it ended in a freeze-frame tableau. The jazz club, part of a self-sustaining Black business corridor on Dixwell Avenue, closed in 1991 after 57 years in business. The husk of the building still stands on Dixwell Avenue today.
Top: Students in “The Jazz Corner.” Bottom: In “The Seat That Changed History,” written and directed by theater teacher Justin Pesce, seventh grader Kaliyah Bivens transformed the story of Rosa Parks, bringing an attitude and fierceness to the role.
Teacher Nikki Claxton, who celebrates 30 years with the district this fall, noted afterward that it was also inspired by a kind of hyperlocal and oft-overlooked educational labor: the life-changing work of Christine Kershaw, a dance instructor and former Ailey company member who has worked at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School for decades.
“She’s why I am who I am,” Claxton said after the performance, as she worked with students in her second-floor studio classroom.
That legacy now lives on through her. In “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” which closed out the show, dancers ran-marched onto the stage, beating their chests as they jogged in place. The lights came up, and students extended their arms, speaking volumes to one another without using any words at all. They flattened their palms and shook out their fingers, then within seconds were on the floor, their bodies arching down and bouncing back again.
They criss-crossed the stage, bodies cutting through the space as they wove in elements of West African dance, step, and jazz. Just as it seemed that there might be a pause in the music, a student sprang forward and lifted her leg toward the ceiling, steadying herself in place. It unleashed a flurry of gymnastic movement, as dancers began to split leap, spin, and jump from the table.
Ear-splitting screams filled the room as the stage faded to black and blue. But dancers weren’t done: the track shifted to Kendrick Lamar’s “We Gon’ Be Alright,” and they went airborne, their bodies suddenly buoyant. Claxton later said that it was important to her—and to students—to end with that expression of certainty and joy, particularly in the current political climate.
In several interviews after the performance, both students and teachers said they were grateful for the chance to amplify Black History and Black voices, especially this year. In Claxton’s classes, for instance, some students weren’t familiar with the rich history of jazz, or that it once wove a mellifluous trail from New Haven to Waterbury to Hartford and back. Or in Sheehan’s, some hadn’t heard of Nina Simone, despite her role in the struggle for civil rights.
Seventh grader Julian Durio, who started at the school last fall, said the assembly helped ground him in the weight and urgency of Black history in a country that seems increasingly hostile to it. In and outside of the classroom, he keeps an eye on politics, and has seen the current government’s pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
On a school-wide level, he said, moments like Friday’s are a reminder to let students express themselves just as they are. That was clear as he introduced Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” then sang in the first verse in a voice as clear as a bell.
“I think that what I've learned from this is that everybody, they have their own talents, and people should not be putting people down,” he said. “Everybody has a chance to be themselves and nobody should be taking that away from them.”
Creativity Meets Collaboration
Top: Tobias Exted and Kadjata Bah. Bottom: Work by Maura Galante's students.
This year, the school’s celebration also includes “Rooted In Creativity,” a BRAMS student show at the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale that is open through the end of the month. At an opening last week, Yale students-turned-gallery managers Kadjata Bah and Tobias Exted stressed the importance of celebrating young people during Black History Month and all year round.
“We’re happy that this can be a tradition that we keep going,” said Exted, a Georgia transplant who is currently studying molecular biology. “This Black History Month, we are looking into the future.”
“When I say to you, the opportunity to be in a historic venue like this, for Yale to seek us out, I’m extremely excited,” added BRAMS Arts Director Tavares Bussey.
That was true for seventh grader Nyasia Bell, whose illustrated portrait of a Black woman now hangs on one of the gallery’s walls. A student of Cody Norris’, Bell said that she was inspired by both close family members like her mom, and national icons like Billie Holiday.
The portrait, in which a woman looks out onto the room without a pair of eyes to see, is meant to represent the weight that Black women carry with them on a daily basis. Beneath a manicured, curly bun, the figure wears a shirt that reads Black Lives Matter and two large, bright hoop earrings that both read BLM. They are, fittingly, the color of the sun—that life force from which the world stays alive.
“I think about my mother, because we have been going through a lot and she’s been very strong,” Bell said. “She’s been keeping it together and able to take care of her kids at the same time.”
Isaiah Henley, a seventh grade student who is currently studying photography, is also one of those young people. A few years ago, Henley became interested in photography through his dad, a wedding and event photographer who is rarely without a trusty telephoto lens.
Somewhere around 2022, he saw a photograph of Lionel Messi at the World Cup, and decided that he wanted to try his hand at the form too. He is most interested in sports photography and long exposures, in which it feels like he can bend light through his shutter and lens.
“I feel at peace when I’m behind the camera because it feels like everything is coming together,” he said. He later added that “Black History Month means that my culture gets shown on the biggest stage and my culture gets the recognition that it should.”