This collection brings together stories where theater, music, visual arts, and literature are utilized as creative tools for cultural expression and connection across Minnesota’s Black communities.
From Penumbra Theatre and the Givens Collection of African American Literature to music halls, art galleries, and literary centers on both sides of the Mississippi River, Black Minnesotans have created and occupied spaces where they take center stage.
Rather than creating art for art’s sake, the stories in this collection highlight artists who use these mediums to share their experiences, cultivate community, and reflect on what it means to be Black in Minnesota.
November 6, 2015 - MPR’s Marianne Combs profiles a group of six Black women Minnesota writers Carolyn Holbrook, Lori Young-Williams, Andrea Jenkins, Shannon Gibney, Tish Jones, and Mary Moore Easter. They gathered at the The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis for a reading series called “More Than a Single Story.”
July 14, 2016 - People in our community are expressing their feelings about the death of Philando Castile in many ways. 15 local poets gathered at the Penumbra Theater in St. Paul for a community reading. It was part of Black Poets Speak Out, a poetry-driven protest that began after the death of Michael Brown in 2014.
April 4, 2018 - MPR’s Marianne Combs reports on Dead King Mother, a composition created by local composer Davu Seru, who calls piece a "blues for chamber ensemble." The subject matter is a 1968 incident in which Clarence Underwood, a Minneapolis Black man, who upon hearing the news of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, told his wife, "My King is dead." He vowed to kill the first white man he found. Underwood went on to murder John F. Murray, a white man in neighborhood.