ROSCOE VILLAGE — The creators behind a one-act play to teach students how to navigate racial differences are pitching the production throughout Black History Month in hopes more Chicago schools will stage it in February and beyond.
“Lift Every Voice,” a nod to the Black national anthem, was created in 2021 by G. Riley Mills, a playwright and Emmy-Award winning filmmaker, and Willie Round, a playwright, songwriter, hip-hop artist, actor and community activist from North Lawndale. It’s a 30-minute production that can cast six students of any gender as young as middle school, according to the playwrights.
The inspiration dates back to 2019 at Lane Tech High School, where Mills’ daughter was a senior at the time, they said.
More students had been pushing back against the school’s tradition of playing the Star Spangled Banner at the start of each day, the school paper reported. As more people nationally protested the anthem to spotlight oppression of Black people, more students began publicly questioning and protesting the message of the anthem.
“This whole situation started after the student body voted to no longer have the national anthem played at the beginning of the school each day,” said Sadie Mills, now 23. “Just with everything that was happening in the country, including everything happening with Colin Kaepernick, many of us students didn’t see the necessity of the national anthem being played at the start of our school days.”
Once students voted to stop playing the national anthem, a viral post by a white, female student circulated when school leaders decided to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during the morning during Black History Month, Sadie Mills said.
The hymn, written in 1900, is about Black Americans’ struggle for freedom amid racist discrimination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“This particular post said, ‘Why can’t we sing our National Anthem, but they can sing theirs?'” Sadie Mills said. “It didn’t take long for the message to spread like wildfire, and the entire school was talking about it.”
The resulting fallout informed “Lift Every Voice” the play, in which members of a student council at an “elite inner-city high school” try to move forward after a “racially inflammatory” social media post from its class president, the elder Mills said.
The play has shown all over the country, and received the 2022 Distinguished Play Award from the American Association of Theatre and Education. “Lift Every Voice” is now available as a production and/or workshop series to Chicago Public Schools educators, starting this month.
CPS educators are offered the workshop for their classes either in person or on Zoom, the playwrights said.
“We are going back into schools to present our ‘Lift Every Voice’ workshops to kids in grades six through 12,” Mills said. “We are offering an hour-long session that includes students reading the play, followed by Willie and I facilitating a discussion exploring themes such as friendship, compassion, and inclusion.”
Mills asked Round to collaborate on the piece after having met years ago mentoring on the South Side, both volunteering with underserved youth. Despite having extremely different backgrounds, they saw eye-to-eye when writing the play, they said.
“It really did take the two perspectives coming together to write, trusting each other and being vulnerable to write this play. There’s a lot of both of us in this play and in these characters,” Mills said.
The play has six young actors, stuck in a room having to figure something out and dealing with emotions and biases and different experiences. The cast includes Black, white and Latino students.
“There’s no adults in this play so that the young people get to speak honestly, and they probably wouldn’t if there was an authority figure in the room,” Mills said.
Their play is a way to open up in-depth conversations about race without fear, Round said. In traveling to other schools to promote the play and workshop, many students were having the same tensions around the “Star Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice,” Round said.
“I think this play will help students accept themselves and others and its different demographics of people and different cultures,” Round said. “I want them to take away the history of racism.”
Still, there are a lot of mixed emotions about how students felt during the production and discussion of the play, the writers said.
“There are no heroes and no villains in the play. It’s not preachy,” Mills said. “There’s no overt lessons to be had. We just present these characters in a very tough situation. The audience can make up their own mind, but the reactions are incredible.”
Some teachers and directors who have watched the play said it helps them talk about empathy, compassion, friendship and bullying, Round said. Others had a more “conservative viewpoint,” stirring up “explosive emotions,” the writers said.
“The emotions come from our own history,” Round said. “We touch on a lot of American history inside of ‘Lift Every Voice,’ from the Black Americans that’s been fatal to gun violence and mentions of those names. It’s a lot of trigger warnings in this piece, and that can get anybody triggered. It’s a lot to digest.”
That’s why they offered the message in a series of workshops, allowing time for discussion and reflection of the play and its themes, Round said.
“It’s a fantastic way of rolling this out, versus students just jumping into the conversations,” Round said. “I hope that anybody that does a production of this gives the knowledge behind some of the things we mention in the play as far as discrimination.”
You can learn more about the play here.
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