{"id":100,"date":"2018-04-24T14:07:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T14:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/?page_id=100"},"modified":"2023-02-11T21:55:07","modified_gmt":"2023-02-11T21:55:07","slug":"shayla","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/shayla\/","title":{"rendered":"Deaths Spark Baltimore Man\u2019s Transformation to Activist"},"content":{"rendered":"<!--[if lt IE 9]><script>document.createElement('audio');<\/script><![endif]-->\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-100-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Shayla_Faulk_final.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Shayla_Faulk_final.mp3\">https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Shayla_Faulk_final.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p><strong>By Shayla Klein<\/strong><br \/>\nJC Faulk was six years old and living in Washington, DC, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was outside with my brother&#8230;and the city just blew up. It felt like a bomb had just went off. It wasn\u2019t quite like that, but it felt like it went from quiet to rattled, everything all at once.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Faulk said that what impacted him the most about that day was not the chaos outside, but his mother\u2019s reaction when he got home.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe was so hurt and I was really close to my mother. When I was a little boy, I felt like I was attached to her leg or something. She was crying and just distraught because King was dead and I found out why.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That was the day that he said he realized how real racism is in America.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_348\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-348\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-348\" src=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1-510x382.jpg 510w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1-1080x810.jpg 1080w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/Faulk1.jpg 1613w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 767px) 89vw, (max-width: 1000px) 54vw, (max-width: 1071px) 543px, 580px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-348\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Activist JC Faulk stands in front of a mural that features a quote from him. Photo by Shayla Klein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cI was a little boy and it didn\u2019t make sense to me, and I remember looking at my hand and seeing my skin color and knowing I could die or that someone would harm me just because of my skin color,\u201d Faulk said.<\/p>\n<p>In his early 20\u2019s, Faulk ran a computer company, though he felt like he should be doing more for social justice.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t know if it was hiding, but it certainly was not leaning into what I knew I should be doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually he started a nonprofit cross-cultural mentoring program. He was the executive director for 5 years. He stepped down from that and became a diversity and inclusion consultant for more than 25 years. While consulting, he felt like he wasn\u2019t doing as much as he wanted to.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think [consultants] get afraid of losing their check, so they don\u2019t push people as far as they need to push them. I think people need to be pushed all the way to the edge, and pushed over the edge,\u201d Faulk said.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_421\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-421\" style=\"width: 525px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-421 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/SHAYLAStory_illustration-768x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"525\" height=\"700\" srcset=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/SHAYLAStory_illustration-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/SHAYLAStory_illustration-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/SHAYLAStory_illustration-1080x1440.jpg 1080w, https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/04\/SHAYLAStory_illustration.jpg 1800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 525px) 100vw, 525px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-421\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Illustration by Gabriela Tylenda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>While consulting, Faulk\u2019s daughter was born and he became a single father.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy father died when I was five, so when my marriage wasn\u2019t working out, I left everything, but I wasn\u2019t gonna leave her.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He moved from Washington, DC, to Baltimore so that his daughter could attend high school at Baltimore School for the Arts. His daughter eventually left Baltimore to attend UCLA.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m in Baltimore, she went to LA, she\u2019s as far away as she can be, and she was gone. I had to do something with the energy,\u201d Faulk said.<\/p>\n<p>He began his activism work after the death of Freddie Gray. Gray died after being arrested and transported in a police van without a seatbelt. Gray\u2019s death outraged many Baltimore citizens and riots broke out in the city. Business were vandalized and burned during several days of unrest.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was standing in front of the CVS when it was burning feeling more like a tourist than anything else with my camera taking pictures, taking video footage of it and being up there shifted something dramatic in me,\u201d Faulk said.<\/p>\n<p>The city enforced a curfew at 10 o\u2019clock, and called in the National Guard.<br \/>\nThe first couple of nights, Faulk went home at the curfew time, but the third night, he met a young Miami University student who refused to leave at curfew. The student inspired him to stay out after curfew the next night.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI stayed every night after that until curfew ended and it shifted me out of that shell that I was in and back out into the world and my voice has been really loud \u2026 since then.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Following the unrest after Freddie Gray\u2019s death, Faulk started Circle of Voices, a company that facilitates workshops that create safe spaces where people who might never speak with one another can discuss their differences. One of his most recent workshops was held at a plantation in southern Maryland.<\/p>\n<p>Circles of Voices facilitated a workshop between descendants of slave owners and descendants of enslaved people. Through the discussion a white participant and a black participant discovered they were cousins.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne was a descendant of people that were enslaved, and one was a descendant of people that enslaved them. And it was just powerful,\u201d Faulk said.<\/p>\n<p>A successful workshop in Faulk\u2019s opinion is if \u201cpeople leave better than they came, and it happens every time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/an89wnNk9yA?rel=0\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Faulk said he has gotten to the point where he is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in and fight for those who don\u2019t have a strong voice and that discovering his power as an activist has helped him transform from the boy who felt helpless after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI do not claim that I can end racism. It\u2019s not gonna end in my lifetime; it\u2019s just not. But it will be nicked at where ever I am. It will be nicked at, and poked at, and punched around in whatever space that I am in so people can see stuff from a different perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Shayla Klein JC Faulk was six years old and living in Washington, DC, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. \u201cI was outside with my brother&#8230;and the city just blew up. It felt like a bomb had just went off. It wasn\u2019t quite like that, but it felt like it went from quiet to &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/shayla\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Deaths Spark Baltimore Man\u2019s Transformation to Activist&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":349,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"coauthors":[2],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":482,"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/100\/revisions\/482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baltimore2018.nextgenradio.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}