Lift Up Your Voice for Justice: A Reflection from the Founding Director
We stand with young people, their families, our staff, and communities around the country who are uplifting their voices to demand racial justice, dignity, and respect for all.
My earliest memories were shaped by cries for racial justice and against racist violence, restrictive housing covenants, and other institutional attempts to restrict the rights of black people and deny their full human dignity. Today, as I myself march, and as I listen to reports from my daughter marching across the county, my heart and mind is filled with images from my own childhood: countless children’s marches for civil rights; time spent in “Freedom School” learning African American history and about the fight for freedom; and watching my parents, and their passionate community of friends and allies, working tirelessly to overturn laws, policies, practices and attitudes that reflect the worst of what human beings are capable.
Each new murder of an African American man, each barrier placed in front of an immigrant child, each story of countless slights and aggressions reminds me of how endless is the work of justice. With that in mind, I reaffirm our absolute commitment to doing what we do best: helping young people to find their voices and to uplift it through their art, so that they may speak to us all. And I commit to redoubling our efforts to assure that each and every young person who walks through our doors leaves with the light of hope and their own beautiful possibility inside of them.
In honor of my parents, who gave me the gift of ideas and action, family and community—and who taught me the overriding importance of love and compassion—I share my father’s favorite quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, a call to embrace our mutuality. In the last year of his life, when my father could barely speak because of a stroke, he found a way to ask that his oldest granddaughter share this wisdom with her younger cousins, so that they might share it with their children, and their children’s children—in the hope that the stories of the struggle for human dignity are never lost.
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.” -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writing from the Birmingham jail, April 16, 1963
Lynn Warshafsky, Founding Director, Venice Arts
[Photo: 1967 Open Housing March in Milwaukee, WI. From the Milwaukee Independent, June 2017, photographer unknown.]
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