JAH KENTE INTERNATIONAL, INC. is pleased to introduce your organization to a classic poetic presentation of poems from the Harlem Renaissance entitled “Redemption Ritual: Inviting The Ancestors To Be Present”. Featuring notables as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Robert Hayden, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Sterling Allen Brown and James Weldon Johnson, these poems - complied as an anthology by Douglass McArthur Johnson (a.k.a. Sincere Thunder Namefree) - trace the history of the African American from pre-captivity to the present.
 

The Overall Course/ Program Objective: Students will learn how to use the elements of theatrical expression to create drama, as well as original dramas on stage. Students will learn how to acquire and use 21st century skills such as creativity, imagination, problem solving, media literacy, IT literacy, cross cultural learning and structure, by exercising key characteristics and habits of the mind, including but not limited to: compare and contrast, variety of expression, questioning, abstract and concrete thinking, applying prior and newly acquired knowledge, making predictions, creating new productions, designing, analyzing, word structure, collaborative actions, sequencing and imagery.

The anthology of poems presented primarily serve to exemplify the level of complexity, quality and range are related to core standards that require all students in any given grade band to engage. Additionally, they are suggestive critical thinking and higher level skilled based text that students should encounter in the text types required by the Standards. The choices should serve as useful guideposts in help select texts of similar complexity, quality, and range for desired classroom settings.

With both an adult and a youth cast, the presentation is also given as a one man performance by Founder and Curator, Rufus Tiefing Stevenson - a graduate of both Morehouse College and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (S.A.I.S.) the Johns Hopkins University, former Peace Corps Volunteer and U.S. State Department Official. Venues performed includes: The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, Metropolitan AME Church, the National Theatre -Helen Hayes Gallery Stage, Corcoran