Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2019 - 19

Jackie Taylor
USITT 2019 KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

"You can do it. No matter whatever the hell it is,
you can do it."
Jackie Taylor: I say... I say, let the
church say, "Amen."
Audience: Amen.
Jackie Taylor: Oh no, no, no, no,
no, no, no. That ain't going to work,
y'all. I said, let the church say, "Amen."
Audience, louder: Amen!
Jackie Taylor: All right, all right.
That's a little better, that's a little better. First of all, I want to thank USITT.
Lord have mercy. This is a big organization. When they asked me to come,
I looked them up. I said, "Oh, this is
good. I like this."
So, I'm going to start off with a
little story. My story is about growing
up in Cabrini in Chicago. Some people
called it one of the worst housing projects in the world and one of the poorest
[areas] in the world. I heard that on TV,
that we were very poor. I realized they
were talking about where I lived, and
I said, "Ma, they called us poor." She
says, "So damn what? Just 'cause they
say it don't mean it's true." She said,
"We just don't have no money, but we
ain't poor."
When we first moved into Cabrini, it was a shock because it was big:
19-story buildings, 2,000 kids playing in the playground, and me and my
little brother; we were six and seven.
He was six, I was seven, and we went
outside for the first time to play in the
playground. We had never seen a playground before, and there's about 2,000
kids out there. And we thought, "Wow!
This is the greatest thing in the world."
And we went into the playground,
and the kids say, "Oh look, newbies.
Let's go kick they ass." And me and
my little brother's like, "Oh! What! We
just moved here!" We started running,

'cause there's a lot of them damn kids.
And we ran up, we ran, we got to our
building, we got to our apartment, and
my mother had locked the door. We
knocked, knocked, "Ma, Ma, Ma! Let us
in! Let us in!"
And she had the latch on the door,
and she opened it up, and she said,
"What you want?"
I said, "Ma, all these kids out here.
They're going to kill us. They said...
they said they going to beat us up. They
said..."
She said, "Handle it." Click.
So, I start that story off by letting
you know the title of my speech today.
The title is, "You can do it. No matter
whatever the hell it is. You can do it."
And, I say that because it's true. No
matter who we are, no matter how
much money we have or we don't have,
no matter the problems that we all have
to face in our lives-and Lord knows
they got a lot of problems-you can do
it. A prime example is my building of
the Black Ensemble Theater. We built
the Black Ensemble Theater Cultural
Center in 2011. It seems like yesterday.
I started out in film, and my first
movie was called Cooley High. Anybody ever heard of Cooley High before?
(Audience applause.) Oh! Yay! Well,
I've played the fine boy's-Lawrence
Hilton Jacobs-I played his girlfriend.
(He could really kiss by the way; it was
nice.)
That propelled me into an international Hollywood career. I thought all
the films were going to be as positive,
with a positive message like Cooley
High: Where "violence is ignorant" and
"Dream your dreams. You can be whatever you want to be."

I was very naïve, and I thought,
"this is where I'm going. I'm going
into this kind of field, and I'm going to
make a difference." Make a difference
because I came from a neighborhood
where you couldn't go past four blocks
without being called "a little nigger" at
nine years old. Or, you couldn't go four
blocks the other way without being
called something even worse. Or, you
couldn't go past four blocks the other
way without getting beat up, no matter
if you were nine, 10, seven, it just didn't
matter.
So, I thought, "Man, I'm in an industry where I'm gonna make a difference." And I thought my next film was
going to be something very positive
and uplifting cause that's what I just
came from.
And they told me, "Uh, no, we don't
do those kinds of films."
They said, "Shut up." "Don't ask for
that." "Read your scripts." And, "People
don't believe that the kind of black people that you say exists; they believe that
you all are all on welfare, you all are all
gang bangers and coke dealers and so
forth and so on."
I said, "But, that's not the reality.
That's not even the reality in the neighborhood that I grew up in. Yes, there
are some people like that, but we're not
all like that. And you're painting a picture to the world that we are, and that's
wrong."
And they said, "Shut up. We don't
want to hear that. We not about creating reality. We about making money."
And at that time, to be a little African American young lady in the film
industry with what they called a cattle
call contract, you were making what
SUMMER 2019

THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

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Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2019

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