How Activist Bryonn Bain Uses Performance Art to Advocate for Justice Reform
Can a book be a mixtape? Can a person? In the case of Bryonn Bain, the answer is a resounding yes.
Bain's fourth tome, "Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtape," certainly captures the right vibe, from the cover image of a hand-labeled cassette tape, to the tracklist-style table of contents, to the way the author uses each chapter to pass the mic to people he admires. "Rebel Speak" features the voices of high-profile artists and activists alongside those of formerly incarcerated men and women to highlight the big issues of justice in society. Bain says, "I'm learning from other people, and I want to share all these lessons that I'm learning from what I think are the most important visionaries on justice in the country."
Hip-hop musicians typically use mixtapes to promote themselves, but that's not Bain's goal.
Rather, Bain — who in addition to being an author is a lawyer, professor, hip-hop and spoken word performer, actor and artist — is using his creative projects to call attention to something that means more to him: justice reform.
Bain first spent time in prisons by choice, when he was in his teens and 20s. His older cousins were part of a hip-hop group called the Fu-Schnickens, and the younger cousins had the opportunity to perform in prisons in upstate New York during the holidays. He says, "People in prisons are some of the easiest people in the world to forget about, but we went back every holiday season for 10 years."
Others may forget about the nearly two million Americans living behind bars, but Bain works tirelessly on their behalf. As a Black man, he is very aware that while Black people make up only 13% of the U.S. population, 38% of the Americans in prison or jail are Black. When he answers the phone to talk about his new book, he has just boarded a bus leaving Victorville Federal Prison, where he taught a course on trauma and healing-informed advocacy. As director of the UCLA Prison Education Program and the newly launched Center for Justice at UCLA, he visits prisons regularly.
Bain launched the Center for Justice last June in partnership with Claudia Peña, his co-faculty director, a professor of gender studies at UCLA School of Law, and Rosie Rios, managing director of the Prison Education Program. The Center for Justice expands on the work of the Prison Education Program and has a much larger mission. It is intended to serve as a multidisciplinary hub, housing other programs, organizations, initiatives, faculty, staff and administrators who are doing local, national and global work for justice.
Bain says, "We have a dozen community partners, grassroots organizations, working with us to make sure that the work that we're doing around justice that's happening in silos across the campus and across communities, that we break out of those silos and organize ourselves to work collectively, so we can be more effective in reimagining and implementing justice, starting with the dismantling of the prison industrial complex and working to end racialized mass incarceration." One of the Center's projects will create opportunities for the women at Victorville Federal Prison to earn a bachelor's degree while incarcerated.
Mentors Who Blend Art and Activism
As Bain talks about his work, a picture of this mixtape of a man emerges more clearly, along with a list of stellar mentors he credits with making him the man he is today.
As an undergrad at Columbia, he used to sneak into classes taught by Kellis Parker, the first Black law professor at Columbia Law School, who taught his music industry contracts class with a trombone. Bain recalls, "He taught about democracy using jazz principles, because he grew up in a in the family with Maceo Parker who played with James Brown. So I had mentors who were linking art and activism, who were linking politics, law and creative approaches to expression and to living."
At Harvard Law School, he met a woman who mentored him for the rest of her life. He says, "Lani Guinier was a leading voting rights expert in the world, and the first Black woman to be a law professor at Harvard Law School, but she also brought theater into her classes, so we could look at creative ways to approach making legislation and solving problems of injustice."
While at Harvard, Bain experienced injustice firsthand when he was racially profiled and wrongfully arrested by the New York Police Department. He wrote about the experience for an assignment in Guinier's class, and she recommended that he submit the piece for publication. It appeared in the Village Voice under the title "Walking While Black," and its popularity led to Bain's appearance on 60 Minutes.
Another mentor of Bain's is Harry Belafonte, the singer, activist and actor, who helped him understand how art and activism can be powerful tools together — and that he didn't have to choose one or the other. Bain says, "I've had amazing guides and angels give me an indication of what's possible, and I've just tried to do my best to follow in that path, and to take it to a different level, the level that this generation with our possibilities, our technology, our moment, makes necessary, given the urgent demands that we see in our midst."
Stories That Bring Power Back to Communities
With the encouragement of his mentors, Bain continues to ask himself and others big questions, like, "How do we tell stories that bring power back to communities who've been denied access to power? How do we center voices that have been marginalized?" Driven to answer them in his work, he says, "'Rebel Speak' is about centering credible messages — folks who have the lived experience, who are system impacted or formerly incarcerated, who can talk about the problems, because they're close to them. And because of that, they're closer to the solutions."
As Angela Davis, scholar and activist, writes in the book's forward, "In the hip-hop mixtape, the choice of songs is based not only on individual rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and spoken meanings but also, and perhaps even more so, on the way they resonate with every other piece in the assemblage; echoes of each of these conversations are to be discovered in the others." That layered connectivity comes up in every aspect of Bain's work.
Similarly, his one-man show, "Lyrics from Lockdown," most recently performed at the Skirball Cultural Center June 2, draws the audience into a very intimate experience of prison by connecting Bain's own journey with the reality of many other real-life incidents that may not have gotten as much attention. Accompanied by a live band and a multimedia production, he uses spoken word and hip-hop to tell true stories, including his own, his family's, and that of Nanon Williams, who was accused of murder at 17 and put on Death Row in Texas. Nanon has now been wrongfully incarcerated for 30 years, and "Lyrics from Lockdown" includes letters from his long correspondence with Bain, who continues to work for his release.
Bain wrote "Lyrics from Lockdown" more than ten years ago and has performed it at theaters, schools and prisons around the world. He says, "It's changed every time. Even back in 2011 we were still kind of workshopping it." As global consciousness around policing and incarceration has grown, he has received many requests to bring the show back, and the contents continue to evolve. He explains, "The whole world has a different relationship with the concept of a 'lockdown' since the global pandemic, and the issues of police abuse and racialized mass incarceration are on everyone's mind now more than ever before — since movements sparked by the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings exploded in the public eye."
The recent performance, a joint presentation of the Skirball and Los Angeles Philharmonic, offers yet another example of Bain's skill for connecting different communities and giving them opportunities to learn from each other. In the lobby, visitors explored an exhibit of art created by women incarcerated in California federal prison, curated by For Freedoms, an artist-led organization focused on civic engagement. The room was lined with tables with representatives from other justice reform organizations, including A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a national organization based in Los Angeles that provides housing and services for formerly incarcerated people. The show itself was livestreamed to several carceral facilities that are part of the UCLA Prison Education Program. Ticket proceeds benefited the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and after the Bain's standing ovation, Huerta joined him on stage, along with Peña, his co-director at the Center for Justice, and Alberto Lule, a formerly incarcerated artist who now works with the Underground Scholars Initiative to replace the "school to prison pipeline" with the "prison to school pipeline." The cross-organizational conversation on the power of art and activism hinted at the kind of productive collaboration the Center for Justice at UCLA is designed to support.
As Bain looks to the future, he has no plans to narrow his focus. The Center for Justice is just getting started, and he's been in conversations about creating a cinematic version of "Lyrics from Lockdown." He says, "I'm gonna continue to write books, continue to work in music and release music, hip-hop, spoken word and film." Bain hopes that at the very least his audiences, across many avenues, take away one crucial message in the form of an equation created by the Center for NuLeadership on Human Justice and Healing in central Brooklyn: "Human Rights + Human Development = Human Justice." Instead of the term "criminal justice," Bain and other activists refer to "human justice." He explains, "It's this idea that you cannot get to 'justice' if you start with 'criminal.'"
