I had a new experience yesterday. A few of my poems were set to music by composer Daniel Bernard Roumain as part of the 2026 MLK Convocation Teach-In. I have no musical talents, so I enjoyed hearing his improvisation as I read...I especially loved how he played when I read the piece about Prudence and Reuben CrandallGood Morning. It is a pleasure to be part of the 2026 MLK Teach-In as part of the 2026 Martin Luther King, Jr. Convocation. My name is Bryan Ripley Crandall, Professor of English Education and Director of the Connecticut Writing Project. I’m honored to be accompanied by composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, the current artist-in-residence at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts. Welcome to everyone…such celebrations and sharing remain important to the ongoing fight for justice, civil rights, historical accuracy, and our humanity.
Today, I’m reading five poems, the first which paves the beginning for 19-year old me…a college sophomore first waking up to global narratives. The other four are tributes to writers, teachers, and thinkers, that have influenced me throughout the years
Wigmore Place - 1992
~b.r.crandall
I didn’t know we were young,
dancing to Blues Traveler on cobbled brick roads
and overlooking London lights
from Primrose.
I didn’t mind hash-wagging
or pint-pumping in pubs
or smelling sweat in clubs
as IRA bombs welcomed
counterstories to colonial rules
(while plays written by William,
became intellectual spears
meant to shake me up).
Give the lion the pen,
and read more about the hunt.
I didn’t know about civil wars in
Liberia, Sudan, Congo, or Somalia,
or the ways scattered blood
lies and flows in the shadows
of sovereign rule
and history.
What I knew was Literature of Exile,
Carole Boyce Davies,
afternoon tea with Beryl Gilroy…
and their diaspora of dreams -
the power
in teaching Caliban
a new language
to fight back.
In the 18th century, a woman kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in Boston, gained international literary fame when she became the first Black individual to publish a book of poetry, one that focuses on morality and religion, which remains central to what many of us do at Fairfield University today. In 1772, Phyllis Wheatly poetically wrote to William, Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, linking the colonist’s fight for freedom from Great Britain to the freedom desired by those kidnapped from Africa and brought to the colonies to serve traditions of Whiteness and the disease of exploiting human beings in the name of its own emancipations…the democratic ideals we’re still striving for today.
To the Right Honourable Phyllis Wheatley
b.r.crandall
Tatum calls them lineages, textual, & I reflect on them this ‘morn,
books I’ve read, that bring me life, that make me adorn
with rainy times, these days without much the sun’s ray,
for reflection and where education has had some sway
into the being I am, as history both sprouts and mourns
with the partial truths, as the powerful loves to destroy as it burns.
The lion celebrates the hunter, we’ve learned, it’s something to behold,
although there’s more to such stories, how such chapters unfold,
as we find ourselves sending prayers, familiar ones, back to the skies,
to fight the colonialism - their racism, oppression, it just never dies.
I’ve lived a life in libraries, as words are what I’ve desir’d,
all while they ban them, their ignorance remains, it’s never expir’d,
yet poetry & verse have always offered more light,
to guide dreams so more of us can sleep throughout the night.
Yet, here we are again, with violence, once more another strain
to destroy democracy, freedom, in their narrative – oh, how they complain,
using politics & finances to continue the upper hand,
defying statues of liberty & opportunities promised for this land.
Perhaps their tune is accurate, with their unpatriotic, horrific song,
of snakes draped in yellow, slithering darkness on what Spring may sprung,
treading upon others, as always with their evil, to defy all we know is good…
Gulf of America, such cruelty, what they want to enforce others to be understood,
their supremacy, still eugenics, with a hatred for global fate,
that denies cultural beauty, denies most a seat.
It’s their nature to jail, kill, lie, and molest,
to defy equitable rights, although obsessed with the breast,
milking the masses for money, whichever way they are mov’d,
remaining immoral, criminal, unethical, (how could they be belov’d?).
leaving most of us kneeling… all we can do is pray,
for time, once again, to choose reason, to have a little more sway,
and to realize a majority has always yearned to breathe (way past due)…
to fulfill its promise, e pluribus unum;. A reminder: we must renew.
Here we are again, pendulum, we’ve seen this all before,
white hoods, lynchings, exterminations, all which most deplore,
to counter their cruelty & venom – love is what we must find to give,
joy is for all life, its beauty, a fight so that others can simply live.
I reflect today, a thinker with no desire for any fame,
rereading Wheatley, remembering her name
thankful for Carol Boyce Davies, her teachings and intellectual fane
of global history, diaspora…the relevancy remains. It’s quite plain.
Read. Learn. Question. Everything. Where our minds should abode,
The word & the world, Freire. Literacy. Together. To find good & God.
In the late 19th century, Paul Laurence Dunbar carried forth Black traditions set by Phyllis Wheatley, writing poetry, novels, and essays. Perhaps his most famous poem is “We Wear the Mask,” which I used in a rendezvous in the next poem.
Rendezvousing with Dunbar
~brc
We wear our lives fleshed with hope,
going for walks…writing…any way to cope,
with these inevitable truths that want to have their say,
to ground us to earth, to have their own way.
Yet we look ahead, focus that telescope,
balancing our acts as we walk the tightrope,
the umbilical chord, an inevitable life-cycle trope…
of complex simplicity, and simple complexity
We wear our lives.
to find more meaning - a slippery slope
that summons idiots and fools (i’m such a dope).
When the rain comes, I’m merely paper-mache,
destined for disappearance and shadowed epistolary
a forgotten scripted in an unopened envelope…
I am wearing this life.
I moved to Connecticut in 2011, but only learned about Canterbury, Connecticut, home to Prudence Crandall, Quaker and abolitionist who bravely established the first school for African American young women in 1833. She was chased out of the State by mobs, who used New England “Black Laws” to keep freed slaves from being educated. I also learned about her brother, Reuben, also an abolitionist, who was tried by the U.S. government for “seditious libel” - anti-slavery literature. He was a physician brought to Washington D.C. to defend his beliefs in freedom for all people. He won his case and ironically the man who brought charges agains Reuben Crandall, was Frances Scott Key…the slave owner and anti-human rights lawyer who also penned the National Anthem we still sing today in schools, in celebration of the 4th of July, and at sporing events.
Singing Off Key
~brc
For me, it was the cats -
the way they were dismembered and thrown
at beautiful girls learning to sound-out letters:
long tails, whiskered heads, and little fog feet…
their K, K, K draped across desks & fences -
the heart of your sister’s school.
I’m not one to carry a tune,
(although I sing in the shower).
There is no ballpark anthem for me.
I don’t have the genetics to belch
like Roseanne at a bar of gun enthusiasts.
Besides, Whitney sang it better,
and they’re no longer drinking Bud, anyway…
too focused on making America great again.
I need Sojourner’s Truth
and the questions Douglass had for the 4th of July.
And I find genealogy curious, Reuben,
wondering about your jail cell —
if you wrote letters prudently
while the tuberculosis made you cough
(before you found a way to Jamaica
for the sun and your last breath)
in search of liberty and freedom
while he was penning his poem
gleaming with twilight,
red glare, & injustice.
Oh, yes. I can see
15 stars & stripes
draped around his 1836 gag rules
(the lock-him-up mobs
he set out to make you
a pendulum swinging
from rope)
The bombs should have burst
over the homes they built
by exploiting human flesh -
But he lost the trial.
And the flag
is still here.
As our the names.
It’s ew
For me, the legacy of Martin Luther King is the ongoing mission to make the world a better place…to know not only U.S. history, but the history of the world and to bring in the question the brutality of those who abuse power, who deny justice and ignore laws, who create genocides and fuel hatred. Perhaps this is why an MLK Teach-In is extremely important at this moment on February 7, 2026. Writer Peter Balakian, a Professor of Humanities at Colgate University, documented the cruelty of the Armenian genocide. In his poem, “After the Survivors are Gone” he wrote, “Let us remember the child naked, waiting to be shot on a. bright day with tulips blooming around the ditch.” Poet Nikki Grimes challenges writers to take a golden shovel, and to dig a line from the work of another poem, to be the first words of a new poem that explores something on your mind, which I did here.
As I Try to Teach
b.r.crandall
Let me go there, I tell a room full of bushy-eyed undergrads. Right now, all of
us together. These kids returning from spring break, sandy beaches where they
remember stories of IPods no longer working and laptops that didn’t allow
the midterm assignment to be turned in on time. Yes, I say, I want to focus on the
child who lost parents to war, brothers of famine who spent childhood
naked, hungry, in fear of bombs bursting in air, homes burned, pervasive
waiting for hope to be defined, to bring meaning to life, the opportunity
to open a book & receive an education…to be given an explanation…to
be granted a human chance to breathe and feel free. Here is not there. I took a
shot at helping them exit a cave (they pay so much money after all). It was
on a Monday. They were tan and excited about global opportunities, beaches,
a time to drink and have fun with friends in designer bikinis…their futures
bright with promising careers that trusts buy them. I tell them about the
day a student shared the laceration on the back of his head, one received
with love from a war-torn nation while defending his mother and sister…
tulips in red offered by barbaric soldiers where colonial history continues the
blooming of territorial blood…first come the militaries, then the missionaries,
around and around and around it goes, these stories, these truths of the world,
the you wouldn’t believe what happened in Belize, Cancun, Aruba last week. Yes, we dig the
ditch amongst ourselves, surviving with our destinations, instagram, & wallets.
Thank you….it’s been my fortune to be able to share the power of ideas in memory, and with respect, for Martin Luther King, Jr.
