SHEroes, a girl division of the Bay Area based youth cultural and education repertory group named Young, Gifted, and Black, gave an emotional performance of their poetry last Friday, to an entertained audience here at Skyline.

YGB has over a hundred members, mostly high school students, who teach African-American history through poetry, but some are as young as 12 years old. YGB has performed for a variety of venues including schools and churches, to celebrate black history.

A crowd of 70 people diverse in both ethnicity and professions gathered in the main theater at Skyline for the performance in honor of Black History Month.

The SHEroes graced the stage full of energy as they displayed their talent. Their charming faces, innocent behavior and dynamic movements had convinced the crowd from the beginning of their performance they were not only brilliant, but worth the wait, and it was a wait due to poetry group not making it to the theater on time because of traffic.

Hodari B. Davis, son of educator Laroilyn Davis, is the artistic director of YGB. Davis, who collaborates with YGB members on writing, explained the importance of black history from the groups perspective.

“Something important for us is that black history is world history,” Davis said. “It’s not the history of the civil right movement. It’s not that I have a Dream speech. And Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that we all know happened in January. In February, it’s about acknowledging the contribution that black people, not just African-American people, but black people all over the world have made to…world and global history.”

The SHEroes girls intelligently showed their ability in reciting the well-written historic poetry. As Davis mentioned, they educated the entire crowd about black history. They are not preaching. What they do is recite poetry, so they can promise that the crowd will not easily get bored.

The poetry had good flow from beginning to the end; it is rich and full of emotional words that described the various situations involving black people throughout history to present day. One poem written by one member about Trayvon Martin had the audience captivated and silent, while others were touching, moving many who were in the audience to tears.

Though some of the poetry emotionally described the darkest points in black history such as slavery, there was a switch to the encouragement for everyone to be happy with the life they get.

“I am the greatest in this land. When you say I can, I know, I can be all that I can be black and beautiful as I can see.”

It was obvious to the audience that the performers put forth a lot of effort and preparation into their performance. Carrie Davis, one of the performers and daughter of Hodari B. Davis, tells about her preparations.

“We have like three different groups, so the youngest group practice twice a week and the older groups practice once or twice a week. ” Carrie Davis said. “We practice as much as we can, but minimum twice a week.”

The crowd was engaged the entirety of their performance. They clapped their hands as if creating harmony for rhythmic flow. Their performance not only targeted African-Americans but rather to every member of the audience.

Carina Anttila-Suarez, biography professor at Skyline, anticipated the SHEroes performance, and encouraged her students to attend.

“I want my students to be exposed to all subjects.” Anttila-Suarez said.

Phyllis Taylor, Coordinator of ASTEP, as well as the coordinator of that event, had been preparing for the performance since November of last year after hearing that the group performed at the Umoja (a Kiswahili word meaning unity) conference. When Skyline decided to incorporate spoken word poetry into their African-American heritage celebration, the well known group was asked to come to Skyline.

Naoko Yumato, an international student from Japan, is currently taking an English class and came to see the performance because of her professors encouragement to go to the event.

“It’s good to get involved in this event for my English class. Since we’re learning African-American (history) for my next essay in class, it’s really worthy to come here. I don’t understand some words, but I still can feel their pains,” Yumato said.

The gifted girls amazed the crowd, and their curiosity increased, of how these girls could perform so beautifully. The girls politely, patiently and precisely answered all the questions from the curious crowd before leaving from the stage.

Student Leo Chan, who is majoring in engineering, enjoyed the girls performance.

“I came here because my professor encouraged me. But now I know that
it’s worth more than an extra credit. It is so inspirational,” Chan said.