Top: Soleil Nelson performs "Three Little Birds." Bottom: A small (but mighty!) student choir performs throughout the night. Their numbers included "Lift Every Voice and Sing," "Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," and "Killing Me Softly." Lucy Gellman Photos.
Soleil Nelson rocked forward on one knee, hips swaying gently as her left foot kept time. On a makeshift stage, piano swirled around her, the sound bright and bouncy. Her hands, clasped for a moment before she started singing, relaxed at her sides. Don’t worry! About a thing! she sang. Cause every little thing! Is gonna be alright!
Outside, it felt like the world was falling apart: the Department of Education had just been announced as Donald Trump’s next federal target. But Nelson pressed forward; nothing was going to disturb this moment of peace. At stage left, someone picked up a tambourine, and jumped in.
Joyful noise, poetry and visual art filled the second floor black box at ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) on a recent Thursday night, as students and staff gathered for the school’s inaugural Black Joy Showcase. As students leaned on both each other and on their respective art forms, it became a call to resistance, a reminder of explosive creativity, and a chance for peer-to-peer education through the arts.
It comes largely out of a student-led effort to celebrate Black voices at the school, a majority-white, conservatory-like arts high school on Audubon Street in New Haven. Earlier this year, that began with a Black Joy Assembly in February, designed to get students talking about white supremacy and structural racism. Thursday marked a kind of continuation of that conversation, focused on both current students and generations of Black artists who have paved the way.
Perjah Delgado: "Every time we refuse to shrink ourselves, to be silent, to disappear, we are making history.”
“Every step we take is a step our ancestors could only dream of,” said senior Perjah Delgado, who attends Hamden High School and ECA for music, reading from an original poem. “Every breath we take is a breath of resistance. Every time we refuse to shrink ourselves, to be silent, to disappear, we are making history.”
“Tonight is designed to build community through the arts,” Principal Kevin Buno said as attendees slipped into their seats. Behind him, teacher-turned-emcee Jibril Hakim waited to take the mic. “We are celebrating the rich diversity and tapestry in this room … hearing diverse perspectives in this place makes us better human beings.”
From an opening drum circle to the final notes and remarks of the night, it did. Taking the stage early in the set, a student choir wrapped the room in song, voices swelling with the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Long recognized as the Black National Anthem—but rarely performed in the city’s schools—it set a sort of tone for the evening, pushing back gently, almost wordlessly, against a national assault on public education, Black history and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“To be able to come together through our art, it’s really special,” said Monaysha "Mo" Bostic, a senior who is studying theater, in an interview before the event. Noting the room’s intimate setup—rows of chairs encircled a performance area, where everything from duets to drum battles would take place—she and other organizers invited the audience to come in close, and experience the night in community.
Top: Dontae James and Claudia Persinger. Bottom: Ciaran Borné-Brennan, Ben Sachar and Audrey (Drey) Beausejour.
It was as if a door had opened, and students were able to walk through with their senses newly ablaze. As they took the stage with Sonny Rollins’ 1956 “St. Thomas,” a jazz quartet (Dontae James on saxophone, Ben Sachar on drums, Linus Tsang on piano and Claudia Persinger on bass) eased into the piece, making it their own in a language of bobbing heads and quick glances at each other. As the saxophone sang out over the room, its voice strong and smooth, attendees began to sway along.
Musicians, it seemed, were just getting started. At one point, James turned and smiled at Persinger, still playing as his mouth tipped upward around the reed. Persinger, without missing a beat, smiled back. Beneath her hands, the stringed, shining neck of the bass seemed more like an extension of her arms, comfortable and easy in her grip. On drums, Sachar kept the piece rolling forward, with a kind of vivid, persistent energy that was hard not to dance along to.
Much later in the evening, the same momentum flowed through a rendition of “Ayiti Cheri,” a song based on Othello Bayard’s poem of the same name, from senior Audrey Beausejour and a small group of backup musicians (Leo Slattery on banjo, Ciaran Borné-Brennan on percussion and Sachar on djembe). Wrapping herself in the Haitian flag, Beausejour launched into the song as the lyrics appeared in translation behind her. Prior to the event, she helped organize both the assembly and the showcase.
Ayiti cheri pi bon peyi pase ou nanpwen, she sang, her voice rich as she leaned back into the sound, and the flag gleamed red and blue beneath the lights. Fòk mwen te kite w pou mwen te kapab konprann valè—
When Bayard wrote the poem in 1925, it was published in Haitian Creole, a gesture of artistic defiance to the Spanish, French and American colonial forces who had all been trying to claim and carve up the island for centuries. Decades later in the 1990s, democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide often folded performances of the song into political events, equating it with freedom and democracy itself.
And yet, it’s not widely known outside of Haitian and Afro-Caribbean communities. For Beausejour, it’s as much a teaching tool as it is an embrace of Haitian people, language and culture. Before performing, she noted that the song was meant to feel like a celebration: the country made history with its revolution, becoming the first Black nation to liberate itself from colonialism.
Top: Senior Quintarus McArthur. Bottom: Members of a student choir.
Some of the most moving performances, meanwhile, were those that recognized the breadth of a diaspora and the lived experiences of Black students at the school. Taking a beat as he reached the podium, senior Quintarus McArthur steadied himself, then launched into a new poem titled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” On the page, he carried whole centuries of history with him, from a country built by stolen people on stolen land to the state-sanctioned murders of Black boys and men in this century.
The work, which garnered audible, knowing Mmmms and Ohhhs in the audience, documents McArthur’s own experience as a young Black person in New Haven, where the city’s rich diversity does not protect him from the fear and racial bias that lurk around each corner, on each sidewalk, down each city street and on his way home from school. Reading in an even, steady voice, he recalled seeing a dad walking with his three young daughters, who saw McArthur as a threat rather than as a neighbor.
“As I let him and his girls get further in the distance / I’m walking slower, and not crossing at the walk sign,” he read. “The people in the cars are probably making jokes about how the sign says walk, disregarding the fact / I need to stun myself for the comfort of others.”
He continued, the audience hanging on to each word. In McArthur’s world, he was cautious, slow, methodical, controlling his own actions because of another person’s anti-Black bias. He kept to himself, and still could feel and hear the loud footprints of racism everywhere. Imagining a world of knights and dragons, he spelled out the narrow, constricting space in which he found himself.
“They see me and seem tense,” he read. In the audience, it was quiet enough to hear breath, the shifting of bodies in seats. “If I look forward, I only seem more suspicious. I see their already pained faces and frantic movements, in an attempt to save their kids. I bury my head in my phone, so the threat appears distracted. I walk on a tightrope as I pass them …”
Even at home, he explained, he had to worry that if he looked too long for a house key, a passer-by might see even that as suspicious. When he finished with that tableau—him on the stoop, searching for his key—the audience burst into cheers and applause. It was not just for the poem, it seemed, but also for McArthur’s willingness to say the quiet part out loud.
So too in Verbatim Rodriguez’ poem “Mirrors,” in which the young artist addressed a sense of unease around mirrors as an unexpected path to self-discovery. For years, “all I see when I stare in the mirror are flaws,” Rodriguez read: acne, blemishes, flyaways and frizzy black curls and makeup so caked on it felt “suffocating.” Beneath that, there was a body at war with itself, on which clothes never seemed to fit the right way.
Top: James Jones performs "End of the World." In an interview before the showcase, he called events like the Black Joy Assembly a chance to educate his peers. As a freshman, he faced microaggressions and verbal harassment because he is Black, he said. At the time, he knew what was happening was wrong and reported it, but “I never got no resolution because there was no apology,” he said. During the assembly, he started teaching his peers about microaggressions—the small, sometimes unintentional but often very biased behaviors that contribute to a feeling of unease or lack of safety in a space.
“My skin is violated just by existing,” Rodriguez read, and years of social messaging—so often coded thin, white, and cisgender—came crashing down all at once. The mirror began to talk back. “I’ve lost hours of my time and happiness obsessing and stressing / over completely and utterly perfecting / Something that isn’t supposed to be perfection.”
In the audience, a few people murmured and snapped in agreement. “The thoughts stop. I stop them,” Rodriguez read.
At other points in the evening, that history drifted through the space in song and music. Performing an arrangement of the freedom song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” music students centered a tradition of resistance that runs centuries deep, from spirituals to Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.
During a drumming competition, they built a bridge from West Africa to the Caribbean to New Haven, teaching a history of forced migration and resilience with their palms open to the drum skin. When Nelson led the call-and-response “Hamba Nathi,” used to protest Apartheid in South Africa decades ago, it reminded the audience of the power of collective action at a time when the country seems to need it.
Both she and other Black students, many of whom organized the event, noted the power of not just performing together, but seeing white allies and accomplices step up to help.
“One of my favorite things is when people that aren’t part of your culture, they engage with your culture, or at least try to,” Nelson said. “Because it shows a different level of connection and wanting to be a part of something.”
Delgado, who helped organize Thursday’s event, also noted the importance of sharing those histories, particularly in the current moment. In an evening woven thickly with music and poetry—Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou and Amanda Gorman all made an appearance, as did Lauryn Hill and Stevie Wonder—she acknowledged that Black joy can and often does exist alongside great pain.
“Let’s be real for a second,” she said, reading from an original piece of writing. “This world was not built for us to thrive. It was built to contain us, to control us, to break us down. And yet, here we are.” From a know of students at the right of the stage, a spontaneous cheer went up, followed by the stomping of feet.
“Thriving anyway,” she continued with a smile spreading on her face. “Thriving anyway. Loving anyway. Building anyway. Building anyway. That is Black History. That is Black future. That is us.”
Connect, Embody, Liberate
Some of the organizers behind the assembly and showcase included (from left) James Jones, Soleil Nelson, Audrey Beausejour, Monaysha "Mo" Bostic and Perjah Delgado.
The showcase, which followed an all-school “Black Joy Assembly” in February, has been months in the making. Late last year, half a dozen students began talking about the need to celebrate and amplify Black stories at ECA, which remains a predominantly white institution despite the diverse city in which it finds itself.
And yet, “We do have Black students, and we have Black faculty that deserve to be celebrated,” said Delgado. After meeting with both administrators and peers, a group of students devised a framework based on the words “connect,” “embody,” and “liberate.” In February, nationally recognized as Black History Month, they brought that vision to the school, inviting fellow students to imagine a more equitable and anti-racist future for themselves, and for ECA.
“We were very intentional throughout the process of like, every single little thing that we did and how we had people engage in certain things,” added Nelson, crediting Black faculty members Nazorine Paglia, Hakim, Michael Jefferson and Ashley Hale for their support. “We had the words beforehand. We had our framework. We knew what we wanted to do. But turning it into workshops, delegating tasks to our Black faculty to do certain things, those were all intentional decisions.”
In early February, the assembly became the first of those efforts. From “Hamba Nathi,” which made a second appearance at the showcase, students opened the afternoon to “mind-mapping” and imagining sessions, healing drums, and workshops in poetry, dance and music. It became a template for future work that students hope to do this year, and in years to come. They have yet to decide what to do with the maps that students came up with, Delgado said—but feel optimistic.
“It was the beginning of a conversation,” said Assistant Principal and Music Department Chair Amy Christman. “And now, it’s our responsibility to follow up. This was just the beginning.”
She added that that focus extends to the school’s curriculum, from ECA's invited teachers and guest artists to lesson plans that include Black writers, thinkers, and creators (Audre Lorde, for instance, in an ongoing “Feminist Theatre Project,” or “The Hill We Climb” in poetry and creative writing classes.) For instance, the school centers Black artists in its teaching of jazz—but what of other arts disciplines?
“Like culture, curriculum needs to be constantly developed and interrogated, just to continue to be relevant to not only the times, but to the students who are in our classrooms,” she said. “To be responsive to who they are. It’s work that always needs to be done. That’s the work of an educator.”
For more from the showcase, check out the Arts Council's Instagram.