(upbeat music) In middle school, I would go to this place we called the Computer Room and I'd listen to Martin Luther King's speeches and Malcolm X speeches and John Kennedy speeches.

And that's where I first learned poetry.

I think trauma has a way of holding on to you more so than beautiful memories.

And one of those, one of those traumatic memories that I can remember is being in kindergarten and kind of facing a difficult teacher who failed to understand me.

I could feel this racist aggression that I wouldn't, I didn't have the language for at the time, but now looking back at it, affected me greatly.

My name is Christian G. Crawford.

I am from Birmingham, Alabama.

I recently graduated from Vanderbilt University with a master's in theological studies.

And I got my bachelor's degree from Auburn University Montgomery.

And today I consider myself a writer.

I graduated December, 2020 and I was looking for work.

And so for the next six months, I was canvasing jobs and opportunities and coming up short, but we say money was getting funny and changes get strange.

My favorite writers are, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Tony Morrison, Alice Walker, and contemporarily favorite writers, Kiese Laymon, and Deesha Philyaw.

We are very googleable city, if that's a word, Birmingham is the place of the, one of the key places of the civil rights movement.

It is one of the key places for learning about black culture.

And it is one of the key places to learn about American history.

So in visiting 16th street, Baptist Church, and walking up the steps or you walking around the church and you can kind of feel yourself in a historical moment, you can feel the agony.

You can write volumes about what those mothers could have felt.

And Dudley has a way of putting that experience into seven stances, 200 words that's poetry.

'Ballad of Birmingham' by Dudley Randall.

Mother dear, may I go downtown instead of out to play and march the streets of Birmingham in a freedom march today?

No baby, no, you may not go.

The dogs are fierce and wild and clubs and hoses, guns, and jails aren't good for a little child.

But mother, I won't be alone.

Other children will go with me and march the streets of Birmingham to make our country free.

No baby, no, you may not go.

Or I fear those guns will fire, but you may go to church instead and sing in the children's choir.

She has combed and brushed her nightdark hair and bathed rose pedal sweet and drawn white gloves on her small brown hands and white shoes on her feet.

The mother smile to know her child was in the sacred place, but the smile was the last smile to come upon her face.

But when she heard the explosion, her eyes grew wet and wild.

She raced through the streets of Birmingham calling for her child.

She called through bits of glass and brick then lifted out a shoe, "O, here's the shoe my baby wore.

"But baby, where are you?"

(soft upbeat music) Annie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carol Robinson, Cynthia Wesley.

These were the four little girls that lost their lives on September 15th, 1963.

I was born in Alabama and my family's from little Walker, Alabama.

We are the products of a family of hard workers.

We have a land where we grow peas and corn and tomatoes and okra and colic greens with watermelon.

My very first job was picking peas with my cousins.

We sold the peas by the bushel, $18 a bushel.

We have this song called, 'Sweet home, Alabama.'

There's, you know, 'Sweet home, Alabama,' where the skies are so blue.

I truly believe that that Alabama is a sweet place despite our history, despite our struggles, Alabama is a sweet place and full of beautiful people from the cooking to the fishing, to the journeying through all 67 counties of the State, which I've done.

This is the place that I want to raise a family.

This is the place I want to be buried.

♪ Oh sweet home, Alabama, ♪ ♪ I'm coming home to you.

(laughing) ♪ (upbeat music) On government documents.

Whenever it asks you, what is your race?

My mom always marks down American Indian and my dad always marks down White.

So when it comes down to me, there's always kind of this question in my mind, where, what direction should I go?

But you know, unequivocally I always go with American Indian.

Muskogee language is over 10,000 years old.

The word for turtle is rocha.

Turtles are foundational in our creation story.

Hello is hensci.

How are you is estonko.

There is no word for goodbye.

So it's, it's like a, a very long word that says I will be seeing you and I have a hard time pronouncing it.

So I'm learning.

(upbeat music) My name is Rachel Farr.

I live in outside of Birmingham, Alabama in trustful, Alabama.

I am married.

So I live with my husband and I was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

I am a public relations publicists.

(upbeat music) My mother is from Oklahoma.

My grandfather was president of Bacone College, which is a tribal college.

So 1830s, that was when our tribe was removed because of the Indian Removal Act.

So they were removed from Alabama to Oklahoma.

You know if my grandfather and my family were not assimilated through boarding schools and things of that, of that nature, I don't know what my life would be like now.

I don't, I never think that taking someone's culture from them is right or okay.

But I still think that he maintained a lot of the ideals of his community until his death.

Fundamentally who I am.

I don't really know that it would really be all that different.

Forced assimilation should never have happened.

It's traumatizing.

(singing in foreign language) Joy Harjo is Muskogee.

And I found her poem a few years ago when I was doing research on the art of our tribe.

'Remember' by Joy Harjo.

Remember the sky that you were born under.

Know each of the stars stories, remember the moon know who she is.

Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time.

Remember sundown and the giving way tonight.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath.

You are evidence of her life and her mother's and hers.

Remember your father, ease your life also, remember the earth whose skin you are, red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth, brown earth.

We are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories.

Talk to them, listen to them.

They are alive poems.

Remember the wind, remember her voice.

She knows the origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people are you.

Remember you are this universe.

And this universe is you.

Remember all his in emotion is growing as you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is that life is, remember.

(upbeat music) This poem echoes a lot of the feelings that I have about a sense of place, a sense of community, purpose, and just remembering that everybody is connected in every way.

So just that reminder of respect that we have to have for one another, in order to survive.

Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.

That really brings a sense of empowerment to me.

And I think to everyone in our relationship to each other.

I think poetry does unite.

It provides an opportunity for someone to sit in someone else's shoes for, six verses or two pages or whatever it may be.

But I think you reach another level of understanding another human being.

I am free.

I don't know why that comes into my head, but I think it's probably 'cause there's been a lot of times in my life when I did not feel free where I felt bound or held back, by other challenges or obstacles in my life.

But I've, I think I've grown past that and so I feel free.

I am free.

(upbeat music) I consider this land my home.

So I wanna be buried here.

I don't wanna move again.

I just wanna stay here for the rest of my life.

(upbeat music) I'm working on a couple of native American history books right now.

I don't care if it's just my mom that reads them one day.

I just wanna get that information recorded and remembered.

(upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) So when I was in kindergarten, I remember this very vividly and there was this woman who said something to my mom like, wow, she's beautiful to be so black.

I think that was a first time I realized like I am a black woman.

I am a dark skinned that stigma of always being like beautiful for a dark skin.

(upbeat music) In Huntsville this year 24 people have been murdered.

When you think about numbers, it's just statistics.

When you think about a specific case, these are real people, real tragedies.

When I think about my father, I do think of him being in heaven, looking down on me, his presence guiding me.

(upbeat music) I am Amber Moore.

I'm 23 years old and I'm from Huntsville, Alabama.

I currently live with my mother and my stepfather.

I graduated from the University of Alabama in 2020.

I currently work for the United States government and I am currently working on a collection of poetry.

(upbeat music) My dad was the kindest person I knew the one of the strongest people I knew.

So it was a very weird experience for me that he was gone.

(upbeat music) I was nine years old at the time.

I did know the person who killed him.

I was angry at the fact that this happened to me, like why me?

This poem gave me the strength to learn, to overcome my anger.

'A Litany for Survival', by Audrey Lorde.

For those of us who live at the shoreline, standing upon the constant edges of decision, crucial and alone, for those of us who are imprinted with fear, like a faint line and the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon, this illusion of some safety to be found, the heavy footed, hope to silence us for all of us, this instant and this triumph, we were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises, we are afraid.

It might not remain.

When the suns sets we are afraid.

It might not rise in the morning.

When our stomachs are full, we are afraid of indigestion.

When our stomachs are empty, we are afraid.

We may never eat again.

When we are loved, we are afraid.

Love will vanish and we are alone we are afraid, love will never return.

And when we speak, we are afraid.

Our words will not be heard nor welcomed, but when we are silenced, we are still afraid.

So it is better to speak remembering, we were never meant to survive.

For anyone who's ever struggled with anything or suffered from something, speak up.

There is no peace found in staying silent in your oppression.

Thanks to this poem.

I found my passion for writing.

It is okay to speak.

It is you, you need to survive like this is your survival mechanism.

So I had to find an outlet.

And that is when I started writing.

Writing to really release all of these thoughts, all these, all of these things that I had gone through all.

That I really didn't wanna talk to anybody else about it just because I was a little ashamed or I didn't want them to know like how angry I was about the situation.

My favorite places in Huntsville are probably the downtown area, because there's a lot of like coffee shops.

There's a lot of, there's always like festivals down there.

Definitely all of the parks.

I love nature.

And definitely the Space and Rocket Center.

You feel like the moon is at your fingertips.

That's why I like to go there.

Not in love, myself right now I am in love with myself.

Really learning who I am right now.

So yeah, no, there's no one else in the picture.

I'm assuming maybe.

(upbeat music) I am a black woman.

I am a believer of God.

I am honest.

I am a daughter.

I am a sister.

I am a friend.

I am a survivor.

Yes, I'm a survivor.

(upbeat music) (rocket engine roaring) It was close to my birthday.

Second or third, I was playing with be red helium balloon.

And somehow I lost my grasp on the string and the balloon began going up and I can still remember this image of the balloon going up.

I don't know what to do to get it back.

(upbeat music) A typical day for me starts around 5:30 in the morning.

I'm an early riser.

And so the first thing I will do is coffee.

And I'll just have a few moments to myself.

And I follow that with a walk.

I always take my phone with me because I love to take photographs.

My name is Walter Givhan.

I'm a senior vice chancellor at Troy University, but I was in the United States Air Force for 33 years as a fighter pilot.

I'm from a farm near Selma, Alabama.

And I've after my Air Force career, I have returned to Alabama and now pursuing a second career as an academic administrator.

I live here with my wife Francis and we have five children.

All of whom are grown and off doing different things, have one in Germany, one in France, two in New York, one in Massachusetts, very proud of all of them.

Three things that I was looking for.

When I joined the Air Force, I wanted to serve my country.

I wanted to fly fast jets and I wanted to see the world.

Seeing the world for a, an Alabama country boy he used to dream of these places as I was on my tractor or on my horse on the farm to see 'em was wonderful.

A lot of times the horizon disappears, there's this haze.

You could very easily lose a sense of what is up, what is down.

You might be pointed directly down at the ocean or the ground.

And then and we've had people who died because they didn't know.

We have instruments within the aircraft.

You have to look at those instruments and then here's the hard part.

You have to trust them because your body is telling you something else.

And you have to look at those instruments.

You have to believe them.

You have to say, this is what is truth.

(upbeat music) When I was in college.

I sort of lost my way.

I didn't know what I was...

I questioned everything that I was doing.

And so I came back to Alabama to work construction, but I still wanted to stay in touch with the world of art and ideas.

And so I was taking Harper's magazine and there, I found this poem.

'There are Things I Tell to No One', Galway Kinnel.

There are things I tell to no one, those close to me might think I was depressed and try to comfort me.

At such times I go off alone in silence as if listening for God.

I say, God, I believe rather in a music of grace that we hear sometimes playing from the other side of happiness.

When we hear it and it flows through our bodies, it lets us live these days, intensified by their vanity worshiping as the other animals do, who live and die in the spirit of the end, that backward spreading brightness, then it is not so difficult to go out and turn and face the spaces that gather into one sound, the waves of spent existence that flow toward and toward and on which we flow and grow drowsy and become fearless again.

You know, that's one of the things the poem enabled me to do was to become fearless again, I had become seized by doubt, paralyzed by possibility.

And the poem gave me that courage and fearlessness again.

It gave me a point on the horizon as well as an understanding of what I should do.

I went back to college and I was fortunate the Air Force needed pilots at the time I applied.

And so I finished college and within two weeks of graduation, I was in the Air Force.

It prepared me well for my current role, working in Troy University, which prides itself on being Alabama's international university with wide variety of international students here but also study abroad programs.

(upbeat music) I am always trying to bring people together.

I'm on the board of a Black Belt Community Foundation, which is trying to do good things for the less advantaged people of the Black Belt which is the region I'm from.

I grew up at a time when I was just old enough to understand what was going on in the civil rights movement.

In the mid sixties.

So I was listening to television news, Dr. King talking about people playing together, working.

I thought you, yeah, that's, what's wrong with that.

Why is there a problem with this?

Why are, why is everybody resistant.

Recently Brian Stevenson of Equal Justice Initiative invited a group of regional civic leaders to the new Legacy Museum.

It really is not about, feel bad about this or blame put on this person or that, you know, it's about the truth of what happened.

And it's a comprehensive history of what's happened.

A lot of people are resistant to reliving these things or to look at that and say, well, why do we have to go through that?

No, and I said it's important.

And it's about understanding a history we have to be honest about it.

(upbeat music) What I am trying to figure out is how to be part of this ongoing transformation in the State of Alabama, an ongoing effort to create a better Alabama.

That is my point on the horizon these days.

That is where I'm heading.

(upbeat music)