Brother Blue is to story-telling what John Coltrane
is to jazz. Walking down the street in Cambridge, people of all
ages, sizes, and shapes light up when they see this griot covered in
butterflies, bells, balloons, ribbons, and a banner. Underneath the trappings
of a roaming town crier and his allegorical tales of the triumphant underdog
is a man fueled by a faith in the transformative power of story-telling & service.
The great-grand-son of a slave-owner and his slave, with degrees from Harvard
and Yale, Blue rose within the majority-dominated military, ministry, and
academia, and emerged as one of the original Afro-American street-hipster-rappers.
The official story-teller for Cambridge, Boston, and even the United Nations
Habitat Forum, he is often called the "father of modern story-telling," and devotes
most of his unrelenting energy to the public domain — street corners, parks,
subways, prisons, hospitals, and classrooms across the urban mosaic. (Text adapted
from Warren Lehrer's Portrait series.)
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