Allan Appel Photo
The “I Have a Dream” speech rang out of the Stetson Library as a new local 10-year-old talent and a new black history program were launched.
The speaker this time wasn’t the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. It was Damian Henderson. In addition to reciting the famous speech, Hennderson dramatically captured King as a child as well as a freshman home from that first year at Morehouse College, when he was disturbed at all the talk of race in his native Atlanta.
The new program was an amateur youth drama group called Artistik Xpressions that’s. Its founding director is Sharece Sellem, who works at Davis Street 21st Century Magnet School, which Henderson attends. (The program is spearate from the school.)
Damian delivered his monologues with confidence at an event at Stetson Wednesday. He provided the quiet revelation that before King was the MLK of the iconic speech, he was first a regular kid disturbed that one day the mother of his white friend forbid her son to play with him.
In Damian’s evocation, King was also once a teenager who put his suitcase down at home and called out, a little miffed that his parents were not at home to greet him.
Thirty kids and their parents gathered at Stetson to see Damian preview the MLK section of a larger work titled “Feelings & Footprints,” and to get an early start on the celebrations of the Martin Luther King holiday.
“Feelings & Footprints” is a dramatic tour through African-American history written by Sellem. It will be playing at the other branches and at schools later this month and throughout February’s Black History Month.
An A student and all-around athlete, Damian had never acted until he took Sellem’s class at Davis. His naturalness and memorization ability were so outstanding, he caught her attention even though his role was not a major one in the school play.
Click on the play arrow to check out Damian channeling the young MLK.
Allan Appel Photo
The text was written by Sellem (pictured with Damian). The Georgia accent, complete with long “ah”, is all Damian, which he practiced in vocal and other acting exercises.
After the performance, Damian was asked by a reporter what the experience of acting was like for him.
“When I go up there to act, Damian Henderson, it’s like I don’t even know him,” the young man said.
His mom, Nicole Robinson ‚said she liked the history lessons her son got out of the experience as well. “It was his first time seeing what segregation was like,” she said.
“‘Mom,you really couldn’t eat with white people?’” Robinson remembered her son asking him. “He really had no clue as to how it was. The [acting] activity made it real for him.”
It also made him come down with a serious case of the acting bug.
During December, while rehearsals for the show were under way, through a contact of Sellem’s Damian was cast as an extra in a wedding scene in Boys of Summer, an independent film shot in New Jersey to be released later this year.
On Sunday he has a casting call in New York. But first, after he gave his MLK blazer to his mom to hold, the two of them were off to basketball practice.
The one-hour show will be performed Feb. 10 at the Mitchell Library in Westville at 6:30. It will be performed on Feb. 16 at the Wilson Branch; Feb. 17 back at Stetson; Feb. 18 at the Fair Haven Library; and Feb. 19 at the main branch. All performance are at 2 p.m.
Thank you a lot Allan,
This is a quality story. please cover as much your can find! Kids NEED to know and feel special all the time, but in this cases other kids need to know that they can do it too.