Kenneth Morris, Jr. On Celebrating Black Excellence with HITRECORD

The Tight Rope

SpkerBox Media

Society & Culture

5 • 605 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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In this exciting collaboration with Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and HITRECORD, Kenneth Morris, Jr. walks The Tight Rope. Kenneth Morris, Jr. descends from two of the most influential names in American history: he is the great-great-great grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great grandson of Booker T. Washington.

Morris continues his family’s legacy of anti-slavery and educational work as co-founder and president of the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, a nonprofit organization based in New York. His career and life path have been driven by a clear focus on FDFI’s mission “To Build Strong Children and to end systems of exploitation and oppression.“

We discuss Morris’ collaboration with HITRECORD, an open online community for creative collaboration founded by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Kenneth Morris and HITRECORD are partnering to create a series of art pieces that celebrate Black Excellence and highlight influential figures from Black history. Contribute your ideas and get involved with the project at hitrecord.org/monuments.

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Credits:

Creator/EP: Jeremy Berry

EP/Host: Cornel West

EP/Host: Tricia Rose

Producers: Allie Hembrough, Ceyanna Dent, Dustin Hodge

Coordinating Producers: Lindsey Schultz, Christian Ware Berry

Beats x Butter (IG: @Butter_Records)

#TheTightRope

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Kenneth B. Morris Jr. I'm the great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglas and the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington. And I'm on the tightrope.
0:12.8	And so I spent really the first part of my life, 30 years or so, not engaged with this lineage at all.
0:25.7	And everything changed in 2005.
0:28.3	I read a National Geographic magazine and the cover story was 21st Century Slaves.
0:33.2	And it was an article about human trafficking and modern day slavery existing all over the world,
0:38.1	including right here in the United States.
0:40.5	And Dr. Rose, you talked in your introduction about how slavery may have ended 150 years ago,
0:47.4	but you're always finding other ways to be able to enslave us.
0:52.0	And I remember reading that article and thinking that, wait a minute,
0:55.1	I know that slavery ended with the work of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, signing
1:00.8	of the Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War, ratification of the 13th Amendment. But slavery still
1:07.6	exists. And so I wanted to get more information and I started to read other articles. And it was one night I was sitting in my living room and I was reading an article about a 12 year old girl who was forced to be a sex slave in the brothels of Southeast Asia and service countless men almost every single night. And down the hallway, I could hear my daughter is getting ready for bed. So my older
1:28.6	daughter was 12. She was the same age as the girl that I was reading about. And my younger daughter
1:33.1	was nine. And when I walked in to say good night to them, I had this moment where I couldn't look
1:40.5	them in the eyes. I couldn't look them in the eyes and walk away and not do something
1:46.0	about this. And it was almost immediately, all of this stuff started welling up inside of me. And I started
1:50.2	thinking, well, wait a minute, I've got this platform that my ancestors have built through struggle and
1:54.6	through sacrifice. And perhaps we could leverage the historical significance of my ancestry to do
2:00.5	something about this. So we looked at the legacy
2:02.5	of Frederick Douglass as a great abolitionist. The legacy of Booker T. Washington is a great educator.
2:08.0	Aha, abolition through education. And the work that we do is based upon the foundation of one story
2:14.6	in Frederick Douglass's life that he described in his first autobiography,
	...

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