Ahmaud Arbery honored in musical

(News4usOnline) – A lot can take place in five years. Five years ago, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd set the world on fire with global protests, marches and other forms of demonstrations that condemned the killings of the three African American victims. 

In two of those incidents, Taylor and Floyd were slain by law enforcement personnel. In the case of Arbery, the Georgia Black man who was hunted down for sport and shot to death by three white men, this was a matter of a hate crime being committed just because he had a different skin color than his killers. 

The result of those trifecta murders was the birth of many diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and funding for initiatives that bled into equality. Well, five years after this huge diversity push, there has been a harsh rebuttal with new nationwide implemented policies from the current administration to do away with DEI. 

While federal reforms have been taken off the table in regards to police departments in the performance of their official duties, there is no remedy for a private citizen to take another person’s life, much less for committing crimes of killing with hate. 

The Arbery murder, which did not receive nearly as much media attention as the other high-profile murders, has continued to resonate. So much so that playwright Alexander Lloyd Blake, with the chorale ensemble group, Tonality, has decided to turn that pain into a musical production. 

That production, billed as “Running From, Running To: A Musical Reflection on Ahmaud Arbery,” gets a Southern California welcome when it hits the stage on May 24 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts. 

“It’s an enlistment work,” Blake said. “So, it’s a choir and instrument ensemble, and [it] just have different movements on the story of Ahmaud and really trying to highlight different perspectives and speak about his humanity, and about the ugliness that happens, but also kind of how all of us have a role in the way that we separate each other and see each other.”

The program of the show is aptly titled, “Put Your Guns Down,” with committed works dedicated to social justice. This includes a piece called “Seven Words of the Unarmed,” which pays homage to Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and Amadou Diallo. 

For Blake, Arbery was a lot more than a victim of a chilling hate crime. He was a lot more than what the obituary page said about him. He was a living, breathing human being with hopes and aspirations, goals abruptly taken from him by hate and a bullet.  

While the larger part of society has vague information about who Arbery was as a person, Blake, through “Running From, Running To: A Musical Reflection on Amaud Arbery,” wants to bring to life the dead man’s passion and dreams. 

“I don’t think the piece is limited to the act of violence that killed Ahmaud – as though that is all that anyone will know about him,” Blake said. “We are more than the worst moments that happened to us. These moments allow us to look to ourselves. The ugliest thing we just watched — we are not far removed from that. But with an artistic work, we can create space for a larger part of humanity.”

The three men (Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan) charged with killing Arbery received their justice in the form of life sentences. But it won’t bring Arbery back. 

The attack on Arbery was a societal setback and was yet a stark reminder of the country’s ugly past when Black people were tortured and lynched, and treated as noncitizens by whites during a myriad of times throughout the history of America. 

That includes during the Civil Rights period, the Jim Crow era, Reconstruction, and certainly during slavery, and again once the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, giving slaves their freedom.  

Blake believes that music can be the great equalizer to get people, regardless of background, to hear one another and to serve as a bridge to cultural differences. 

“Before George Floyd’s murder and the global attention raised toward equality and representation, I would have said that classical music was turning a blind eye,” said Blake. “I would say especially in choral music; the music that attempted to touch these issues were done specifically in sporadic performances and were not geared towards efforts of sustained change in the genre.” 

“It is a lot harder to argue about someone’s experience than to ‘take sides’ on the facts of a situation, which rarely changes minds and hearts. Creating musical spaces where people can come together and hear each other is a great place to start,” he added.