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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yes, it is Juneteenth. Happy Juneteenth. In case you don't know, our newest federal holiday commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, the day in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that the last enslaved people were free. That was more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Here in New York, Lincoln Center is marking the occasion with its fifth annual Juneteenth celebration. This year's performance is called Oh Sankofa! It's directed by the poet and playwright Carl Hancock Rux, who's been a driving force behind this series from the beginning. The show brings together music, dance, storytelling, and a cast of characters from African and African American folklore like Anansi the Spider, Br'er Rabbit, and High John the Conqueror.

Some of you know them. They are figures who used wit and imagination to survive oppression and whose stories help carry memory and meaning across generations. Carl Hancock Rux is back with us to talk about this year's performance, the traditions it draws from, and how folklore can help us look back and move forward. Carl, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Carl Hancock Rux: Thank you so much. It's so great to be back here.

Brian Lehrer: This performance is built around folklore stories that helped enslaved Africans survive and resist, and that still shape Black culture today to some degree. What made you want to center this year's Juneteenth program on those stories?

Carl Hancock Rux: Well, many things. First, I was inspired by an anthology collected or edited by Charles Chesnutt in 1899 called The Conjure Woman. I think it's really the first collection of African American or African folklore that was collected and released in America. The book did really well. It was prominent. Then in 1935, there was Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, which also was a collection of ethnographic folklore that she'd collected in Florida and New Orleans.

It made me think so much about, even when we are oppressed, how we invent systems of self-emancipation. Even if we don't have the words for that, how we create our own superheroes or how we create our own mythology or how we create our own kind of religion or new religion or belief system in order to find ways to survive what we are existing in and trying to live through, and also how we find ways to get out of the situation we're in in order to move on.

Brian Lehrer: The title of the show or the series of pieces, Oh Sankofa! Tell everybody about Sankofa, where that word comes from, and what it represents in the context of this performance.

Carl Hancock Rux: There's a Sankofa bird, which is a symbol of Sankofa. Sankofa itself comes from an African, I should say, proverb that basically says it is okay to look back in order to move forward. It's really about history and memory and how those things work together. Both are fallible. Both history and memory are fallible, but they're also things that we need and that we use in order to understand who we are and where we are and what we're doing and how we're going to do it. I guess I was inspired by this beautiful statement that it's okay to look back in order to move forward because it grants permission to people. It grants permission to really look back and have a very close look at what we've experienced so that we can, again, move forward and get to another place.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any calls on this Juneteenth for Carl Hancock Rux on any of these characters? Obviously, you can't have, so you don't have to have seen the show. How about some of these characters, Anansi the Spider, Br'er Rabbit, or any of the others from the kinds of folklore traditions that he's talking and that he's producing this performance at Lincoln Center about? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Characters like that spider, that rabbit are tricksters, clever survivors who use wit to outsmart those in power. Might be one way to put it. Why do you think the trickster figure has had such staying power in Black storytelling?

Carl Hancock Rux: Because the trickster character challenges not only a system of oppression, but challenges the system for life that we're living in, the place in which we are. Folklore itself becomes a source of cultural grounding and a history with songs and games and ideologies. All of these things come together to, I think, help us look at ourselves and see where we can become our own tricksters, where we can also manipulate the system of oppression that we're in.

I think that's what they were doing. I think that's what these people were creating for themselves. Ways in which to understand that where they were and what they were experiencing was not only wrong but inhuman, and that they needed to pass down to all of their children and to all of their relatives and all of their people that they needed to be free or wanted to be free.

All of these trickster characters, by the way, in the stories, they're always on plantations. They're always figuring out ways to trick the master who owns the plantation. They're finding funny ways to do things, whether it is to escape or whether it is simply to confuse the master about who they are, how they're working, what they're really up to. They're funny characters. Most of these stories are told with a sense of humor, but also with a wonderful sense of spiritual enlightenment in a way.

Some of the strictures change form from human to animal, whether they become lizards or they become snakes. They're able to morph into something else in order to get away and to find places to hide. The analogy for me of morphing into something else in order to get away from where you are is incredibly profound. I think it can't be lost on anyone who's had to do that, because I think we've all had to do that in many ways.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call that I think is on topic from a history teacher. Rachel in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Carl Hancock Rux. Hello, Rachel.

Rachel: Hi, good morning. Hi. Good morning, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Rachel: Great. Hi. Yes, I'm a history teacher, and I teach an article by Lawrence Levine that he wrote in the 1977 book called Black Culture and Black Consciousness. It's always one of my students' favorite reads because it explores the trickster tales and locates them as a source of resistance, of vicarious triumph, of a didactic method for enslaved people to teach their children that the world is arbitrarily cruel, that people are greedy, that you have to rely on yourself.

It delves into the stories of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Bear and Br'er Fox to show that enslaved people were not entirely powerless. They told these stories to themselves, sometimes within the earshot of their enslavers, to fantasize about revenge, about freedom. They're wonderful expositions. I tell my kids, "You guys know Bugs Bunny, right? This is the evolution of the trickster tales." Sometimes they're shocked by the violence and the humor, but it's just a magnificent method to teach about enslaved people when you don't have a lot of written records.

Brian Lehrer: You teach in high school?

Rachel: I do, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Rachel, thanks. That's great, Carl. How about that? A high school teacher carrying it on.

Carl Hancock Rux: Absolutely. She articulated everything that I think I was trying to. The trickster character is intelligent, actually smarter than its oppressor or their oppressor. The trickster character is cunning, conniving, knows ways and figures out ways to revolt, and also to incite a notion of revolution amongst the people that they're living with, who also need to learn from them how to survive or how to get out of the situation that they're in. Wonderful character.

Brian Lehrer: I see that the Juneteenth show today will bring together spirituals and fables and dance and humor and live music. Tell our listeners what exactly is going to happen at what space at Lincoln Center.

Carl Hancock Rux: The first part of the show starts at 6:00 PM, and it is really dedicated to folklore. We'll have the actress Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, the jazz musician Marvin-- Marvin-- Oh God, here I go. I'm losing my mind.

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Carl Hancock Rux: I'm going to get in trouble for this. Marvin Sewell. Thank you. The dancer Vinson Fraley and Chanon Judson and a choir. They're basically telling a story. Everything we just talked about it in terms of the Br'er Rabbit, Sankofa as a bird, the meaning of it, High John the Conqueror. They're telling a story. They're telling an African American fable.

The second part of the show, which happens at Damrosch Park, I've brought in Black Theatre United. They're creating a wonderful show that's about the history of Black music and how it was infused with all of our desires and hopes and dreams. I think they're finding ways in which you can re-listen to some of the songs that we know very well. Of course, they're using people like Lillias White, Capathia Jenkins, Norm Lewis. It's a star-studded show. It's going to be amazing, and then we'll be dancing that as well.

Brian Lehrer: Is it outdoors on the plaza or is it one of the theaters?

Carl Hancock Rux: The first part of the show, Act 1, is on the plaza at Hearst Plaza. Then the second part of the show is on the stage in Damrosch Park. The audience sits outside, and then there's that stage that all the performance--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's also an outside space for people who don't know Damrosch Park. Oh, I'll read a couple of nice texts here. One just says, "Carl Hancock Rux, your move to LA was a big loss to New York City. We miss seeing you perform. Welcome back." Someone else writes, "When I was a child, my father read Anansi stories to me and my sister at a conference decades later. I learned that a woman from the Caribbean and a man from West Africa had also been exposed to those stories. It confirmed for me that our culture has endured all of the attempts to erase it," writes Lisa in Harlem. You've been at the center of Lincoln Center's Juneteenth celebration from the beginning. I think this is year five. Has it evolved? Has it changed? Have you seen a shift in how audiences engage with Juneteenth since it became an official national holiday? Any of that?

Carl Hancock Rux: Absolutely. The first one that we did was during COVID. We had a very limited audience. There was a requirement, of course, for people to be vaccinated and to come masked, et cetera. It was a smaller audience. Last year, we had 2,000 people who came. We weren't even expecting that. It was unbelievable. We also did something that we hadn't done before, which is I created a procession across the entire campus of Lincoln Center with the audience leading them from Hearst Plaza to Damrosch Park while the gospel choir was singing, "If I walk right, heaven belongs to me."

There was this joyous experience about walking together, about singing together, about moving forward together. Slavery is not just a history. Juneteenth is not just a history that belongs to African American people or Black people. It is a history of America, and it belongs to everyone. I think it's a point that I'm constantly trying to articulate that we all have to have this conversation. We all have to be invested in it and understand it in order to really grasp what happened and never happen again.

Brian Lehrer: It's such a central point. It's not a Black holiday, Juneteenth. It's an American holiday.

Carl Hancock Rux: It is.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, the image of the Sankofa bird looking back while walking forward, such a powerful metaphor. I wonder in this particular year, what kind of reflection or reckoning you hope this performance invites at a moment when some people are pushing to erase or soften the history of slavery.

Carl Hancock Rux: Well, that's actually a huge point in the show. There is a line in the first act where the character says, "No erasure," and repeats that. "No erasure." We are living in a perilous moment. I think the themes that I'm trying to bring to this show are about remembrance like remembering me, who I am, who I was, who we were, what we are, remembering it accurately. Yes, no erasure. No erasure.

Brian Lehrer: That's going to be the last word. Two words. "No erasure" from Carl Hancock Rux, poet, playwright, recording artist, essayist, and radio journalist. He's curator today of Lincoln Center's fifth annual Juneteenth celebration, Oh Sankofa! Carl, thank you so much. Happy Juneteenth.

Carl Hancock Rux: Happy Juneteenth, Brian. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Stay tuned for All Of It.

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