By Kaia Shivers
When the City of Brotherly Love comes together to talk about love at this critical moment, Ark Republic listened.
We are here. In the middle of Black History Month. Half of the country demands justice, while the other attempts to seize power. This is exactly the moment when Philly-based, Love Now Media, doubles-down on its empathy-driven mission in a daylong dialogue-series titled, “BeLoved Stories.”
Invoking what was something like a spiritual framework of King, Love Now Media held a four-session live-stream to capture complex narratives around power, love and justice. The talks—interspersed between music and artistic performances—covered activism and intimacy to faith and politics.
Throughout the day, Jos Duncan-Asé, founder and conceiver of the Love Now Media brand, engages the crowd in affirming exercises and quick questions that challenge everyone to reframe their actions and thoughts around intimacy and affection. “Where can you receive more love?” She queries a crowd. We are thrown off, yet pleasantly surprised because in these dystopian times, who asks how we want to be loved? These powerful questions also extend to panelists.
In the event’s discussions, panelists express a range of methods and perspectives, but their ties to Philadelphia weave together like an Octavia Butler novel. Even in the chaos of the world outside, they knit tender expressions and definitions of belonging and acceptance. In the end, what was carved out were four acts of love.
Act 1: Love is an act of decolonization. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the “BeLoved Stories” event took place, sits on Lenni Lenape land, like the rest of the city. Indeed, generations of people have suffered here. But, this is where Keyssh Datts and Essence Gaines situate the nexus of their movement, DecolonizePhilly: a fight for land revolution.
“Decolonize Philly is an environmental justice organization that brings together community members from all over the city to save the earth and the community from injustices,” Datts tells Ark Republic after the organization’s cofounder spoke on activism and love in a Q&A with polymath, Andrea Walls.
In a city that bears the scars of bombing Black environmentalist group, MOVE, environmental justice is meted out by Datts and Gaines with an emphasis on humanizing the urban environment. Datts, a multimedia creator, explains: “When we talk about environmental justice, we mean the built environment and the ways in which infrastructure and the land impacts the community and how we socialize with each other.”
For the collective, affordable, high-quality housing, safe communities and compassionate immigration policy intersect land ownership and addressing climate change. “We focus on land, gardening, the community having their land back and food,” Gaines, a soon-to-be teacher, adds.
Still in their 20s, Datts and Gaines operate like seasoned organizers who’ve lived several lives mobilizing the people. In their panel talk, they compliment each other’s signature styles of activism, while giving grace as they discuss working through trauma and disappointment.
Ever since Datts could pull childhood memories, a strong sense of justice was present. Not only from the adversity they faced, but also witnessing classmates’ struggle. Feeling a strong sense of empathy for those in need, social advocacy became a natural calling.
At the core of Gaines is a love of learning and reading. Graduating with a degree in Black studies, it is implemented in educational programs for the youth. When the two come together it is a superpower.
A most recent work was their involvement in a coalition that successfully prevented the 76ers pro-ball team from building a sports complex in Chinatown, a historical enclave. Even though the comrades briefly smile at the win, there are other hard-fought initiatives entangled in their efforts like gun violence and police brutality or the conflict debilitating the Gaza Strip in Palestine. This is when they employ love.
“I believe in the idea of everlasting love, a love that exists outside of us, regardless of what it looks like,” puts forth Datts.
“Justice work has taught me to be persistent, be in the community with the people you wish to represent and recognize,” says Gaines who facilitates workshops and organizes events for DecolonizePhilly. Gaines furthers: “We cannot love properly if we continue to put our energy and effort into these colonial practices.”
Citing activist-scholar and writer, bell hooks, Gaines says she is more recently returning to the essay: Love as a Practice of Freedom, where love can be used as a tool for liberation.
In the works, is a relaunch for the grassroots organization according to Gaines, who says they are optimistic about the future plans they wish to accomplish.
Act 2: Love as rhythm and biscuits. Boom. Bap. Shuffle, click, flap. Khalil Munir slaps the cajon, a wooden, square drum designed by Afro-Peruvians during Spanish colonialism in South America. Between the bonk on wood, he sends coded messages of liberation on well-worn tap shoes.
Before he slapped ancient beats with hands and feet, he explained that the drum and tap were in conversation. It feels like an ancestral chant.
An artist, author and educator, Munir’s booming voice and expressive stories fill the second floor of the museum, but his beginnings are tiny. As a 1-pound, 4-ounce premature baby, the father of two who dotes on his 3-week-old infant, navigated loss and trauma to map his way to and through manhood.
For Munir, his first experience of love was “the smell of biscuits” at his “nana’s house.” Sustainable affection was the whiff of a Sunday morning feast that stuck to his soul like molasses on buttered cornbread. Still, his road to understanding the crown he wore is a journey of loving oneself.
His parents, like many in the 1980s, were swallowed by inner city blues and ill circumstances. Rather than going home to his mother after coming into this world, his grandmother welcomed a fragile grandson into her sanctuary. On days when high notes went low, life was no crystal stair. Shifted from one relative’s home to the next, stability became a dream.
At 11, Munir was grazed by a bullet when in too-close proximity to a shooting. It was the next summer that his life changed.
At 12, Munir enrolled into the Freedom Theater, a Philly institution that served as a performative and educational center for the community. Although the theater hosted a number of events, its heartbeat was in programs for the youth.
As he plays back his years at the Freedom Theater, he recounts the secret password that all entering into the performance space had to say at the doorway: “I respect myself.” The response from the other side of the door was, “You are beautiful.”
The moment is so powerful, Duncan-Asé begins a call and response echoing Munir’s affirmation. The crowd is all teeth and heart palpitations as we fall into the feel-good of that special time.
“I learned to love myself,” says Munir in contemplation of those days. “There is justice in that.”
Act 3: Love as a pedagogy of the oppressed. Cradling two sheets of paper in one arm, while commanding a microphone in the other, Lanaa Dantzler reads poems she wrote as an elementary student at the Jubilee School.
Before the creative writing high schooler recites, she admits it has been ten years since she read this work, yet her words dance. The crowd smiles and whispers as we watch the 17-year-old filmmaker walk back in time to her 7-year-old self. At first, speaking in measured moments then in an immaculately choreographed jazz solo. In these lines, Dantzler praises the beauty and power of women and girls. The short pieces give us a glimpse of her brilliance.
Her former principal, Karen Falcon, also watches in the audience. Actually, it was she who decided to archive Danztler’s prose all those years ago, and brought the literary works to the live conversation. As the third conversation, Falcon and Dantzler chronicle the influence of a healthy, nourishing relationship between student and teacher.
Falcon has dedicated almost five decades to educating elementary students in West Philadelphia. Her career started as a reading program. So strong was the response from the community’s children and their parents, she opened a one-grade operation then grew from there. Today, the Jubilee School has operated as a highly regarded elementary school that produced future thinkers and innovators like Dantzler.
Dantzler has already worked on three award-winning films. In 2023, she wrote, directed, and starred in her debut short film, “Five Angry Black Girls,” a production about a group of Black teenage girls in detention who learn the power of banding together to challenge stereotypes and systemic issues. She is also a published writer and author.
“I just step back and allow them to explore, you will be amazed” says Falcon when talking about her approach as a teacher. She is known for a teaching style of collaborative, engaged learning that embraces the heritage of each student. Yet, this is beyond coloring books and happy face stickers. The Jubilee School has received praise for its role in appealing to the State of Pennsylvania to recognize the house of activist group MOVE, as a historical marker.
In June 2017, the students led a campaign then submitted an application to officially mark the site where the 1985 bombing of MOVE members and their children took place. The request was approved. This was around the time that Dantzler attended.
It was also during this time that Dantzler and her classmates launched the Jubilee House Publishing, a publishing company distributing the works of students. Holding to her experience and the seeds of activism developed as a young girl, Dantzler, as a teen, produced a short documentary about the publishing company where she officially became an author.
In artist fashion, she says on the mic that her younger self would critique the teenager of today as she finishes her recitation. The participants only see the seeds of love dripping from her existence.
Act 4: No Ordinary Love. What happens when a template for “black boys loving black boys” is absent? For Rep. Malcom Kenyatta (D), he and his husband, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta take every day as an opportunity to create their own path to love. “There is no right way to be in a partnership with someone other than the way that works for you,” says Rep. Kenyatta.
As a Democrat, even in a swing state such as Pennsylvania, the political terrain is fraught with difficulties. In fact, it’s sort of like a slaughterhouse these past days. At the present moment, love is on the brain for Rep. Kenyatta. Marrying his spouse in 2022 in a whirlwind, cross-country romance, the other Kenyatta, who is a professor at Temple, discovers subtle ways to be in union. A scholar focusing on urban change from Afrofuturist queer perspectives, on some days, to maintain his equilibrium, he remains still, or as he says, “mediocre.”
What is in the folds of the fourth endearing conversation, where their hands remain locked and at times, they breathe in sync, is the pressure of creating what has yet to be created before. As the first openly LGBTQ+ couple of color to have a spouse in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the Kenyatta house treks unfamiliar terrain. Consequently, love is front as well as center. “I didn’t run for office because of hate, I ran because of love. I loved someone enough to fight for them,” emphasized the third-generation Philadelphian.
On the days when politics and life get icky, they have one simple formula—tap into the love they conjured in order to talk out the toughest situations.
By the finale, the crowd, which increased throughout the day, packed their love notes to use for those days when they need to be reminded of what King so aptly said about power, love and justice:
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Ark Republic served as community media partners for this project.
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