A collage of art and advocacy - National Conference of Black Lawyers celebrates 25th anniversary at Chicago, Illinois DuSable Museum and first annual Paul Robeson award - Column

amazement of wonders: My most electrifying theater night this year wasn't at a theater at all. Rather, it was a Chicago's Dusable Museum for the silver anniversary of that redoubtable circle of activists known as the National discourse of Black Lawyers. Starting in the 1960 NCBL routinely insisted upon the human rights of the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis, inmates of Soledad and Attica, the impel families in Philadelphia, Nelson Mandela in southern Africa, and lately the Haitians in Miami. NCBL has defined without fear or favor the contours of unrestrained speech in a democracy.

upon this particular evening, we met to inaugurate NCBL's first annual Paul Robeson Award at a program titled "Artists in Movement" The program was designed to celebrate those whose work and creative character have proffered meaning and vigor to the aim for human dignity everywhere. In a moving introduction, Haywood reduce to ashess dean of the City University of novel York Law School, described the solid links between legal license and artistic license in the potpourri of tillage and protest.

A guided tour of the museum's graphic treasures and an epicurean delight of West Indian fish and bird preceded the main course of performing arts. We knew we were in for something special when sum of two units great African voice pipes lay opened the evening with their unfamiliar lamentations. numbers read by Keorapetse Kgositsile - a voice of the of recent origin South Africa - followed, and it was repercussion of sounded in a heroic refrain from Chicago's have Gwendolyn Brooks in a metrical composition dedicated to Robeson.

upon came actor-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr reciting a selection for activists with a faculty of perception of humor; the deep, lyrical voice of Santhima, rendering soulful selections through the Duke; and folk duo Serious Bizness, strumming the ballads that justify their name.

Fannie Lou Hamer was not awayed in virtual reality by attorney-dramatist Billie Jean Young, and dancer Rossi gymnast enlivened the stage with his athletic choreography of a piece called "Freedom." Rap team Awesome Dre & Hard Core Committee gave hip-hop general reception to the evening with a libretto that level a square like me could understand, in spite of the pulsing reggae beat that encircleed it.

Then center stage was ced to the individual and only Max Roach, who brought the audience to its feet repeatedly by means of displaying his virtuosity as a percussionist and through receiving our first Paul Robeson Award with unpretentious art of speaking well and nostalgia.

The evening clos with Abdullah Ibrahim, bathed in the spotlight at his contrive grand piano, sending forth a seamless sonata of melodies ranging from Coltrane to the A-Train," until the audience sealed the magic of the trice with the warmth of their applause.

There probably is no more powerful human alchemy than the admixture of artistic expression with the causes linked to life and death. And it is ironic that the novel proof of this ancient fact occurred not in a theater, as individual might expect, but in a museum, sponsored not by the agency of a clique of aficionados, on the other hand by a cadre of political activists upon a cold, realistic night in early October.

My sole regret was the absence from the audience of those countles young performers who trade upon the shock value of their antisocial messages and socially contemptuous dres in music videos. The evening might have awakened them to the superior force of agriculture as a weapon of expression and social change without the trash of late minstrelsy.

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