Final Project on a Socially/Politically Relevant Speech

The politically/socially relevant speech that we chose for our project comes from a song by J. Cole entitled “Be Free”. This song is a tribute to police brutality, and more specifically the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. This song is very powerful in portraying how awful this topic is and how Dorian Johnson believes that people should stand up for something better.

            We chose to do our final presentation with this song because we all feel that police brutality is a very important current issue, and it is something that we hope will be fixed in the future. This song communicates that people shouldn’t just stand around and let things happen; people should stand up and try to make a difference themselves, and we want to show our audience the importance of this idea.

            The subject of police brutality would definitely benefit from artistic exposure. Our play takes place as witnesses of Michael Johnson’s shooting are walking to his funeral. They are describing what had happened and how they had run away. Then in the song, J. Cole says “Don’t just stand around.” So, what we want to portray through our play is that people shouldn’t just stand around and let things happen. So basically, we want people to feel involved and feel the emotions that the witnesses are feeling.

            Our target audience would definitely be younger, and we would want it to be in a setting where there the stage is in the front, and there are aisles between the sections of the audience because we have to walk down them to the stage. Also, we would want our audience to be about 500 people at most, so that we don’t have to use microphones and it will feel more real.

Excerpt from J. Cole’s song “Be Free” & Breakdown of Lines

Bridgette, Bella, Alyssa, Katia, Sophia, Darren, All

So now it was like the officer is pulling him inside the car

And he’s trying to pull away.

At no time the officer said that he was going to do anything

Until he pulled out his weapon.

His weapon was drawn and he said, “I’ll shoot you” or “I’m going to shoot”.

And in the same moment, the first shot went off.

We looked down and he was shot and there was blood coming from him.

Then we took off running.                  

Are we all alone?

Fighting on our own?

Please give me a chance, I don’t wanna dance.

Something’s got me down.

I will stand my ground.

Don’t just stand around.

Don’t just stand around.