A Review
By Wanda Sabir
The film, “River City Drumbeat,” captures Edward “Nardie” White’s thirty year run as leader of the dynamic Louisville, Kentucky, River City Drum Corps and chronicles his passing of the baton to former student Albert Shumake. It is a beautiful story of a legacy using art to build character. River City shows how community is what matters in a child’s life. The drum is the heart, it is a mother’s love, the first voice, the most important voice a child hears or perhaps feels. White’s program builds men and women as it provides space for parents to grow into their roles. The music is awesome, we dance as we cheer and cry and marvel at these young leaders groomed to step into responsibility with ease and joy. Art is what will save us. It keeps us human. Listen on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show to Albert Shumake talk about how River City Drum Corps saved his life, literally.
“River City Drumbeat” opens at the Roxie Virtual Cinema this weekend, August 7-21. Too seldom are success stories, feel good stories about our youth on newspaper front pages, yet, despite absent local and national acclaim, this is that story. RCDC founder, former Boys and Girls Club director, Edward “Nardie” White has made a significant impact on Louisville youth, their parents and the community that holds them. With Shumake as the new director, Mr. White can finally retire and be the artist he’s wanted to be all along– not that these young lives he’s molded are not his largest and most important work.
The young drummers learn discipline as they also celebrate African heritage. They recite important values in their pledge and learn the importance of community as the interconnections in human life are illustrated in the drum corps.
Winning is not the goal, Mr. White teaches the youngsters. There are tangible awards directly connected to hard work and practice: excellence. There is also the added value of peers who literally have each other’s backs as the older students, like Imani V. Keith, teach the classes and share what they have learned with the young ones coming up.
The co-directors, Marlon Johnson in Miami and Anne Flatte in San Francisco, are introduced to each other by Owley Brown, producer, who was raised in Louisville and understands the power of music to change lives. Mr. White noticed Albert Shumake and said “he is not going to be an athlete” and steered young Albert into art. White’s wife “Iya” Zambia Nkrumah, whom we meet through reputation and in archived footage, mentored Albert too and watched over him. She saved him from the typical racialized academic tracks Black children are stuck. She told him he was college material when his teachers and administrators did not see his potential.
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Mr. White who wanted to be an artist was encouraged to play sports. There was no one to run interference for him. We meet, Ed Hamilton, a famous Louisville artist who apprenticed Shumake. Hamilton’s work forms a central aspect of the film, which pivots on rivers and bridges and broken promises– a statue of Abraham Lincoln seated on the shore overlooking the Ohio river as a solo piano plays what could be an interlude to a lifetime to come if nothing changes.
These children, who are nurtured by their peers and guided by first Mr. White and now Mr. Shumake, learn they have choices. Education is key. Jailen Leavell, class valedictorian, reflects on Tupac Shukur’s poem the “The Rose that Grew from Concrete.” If you know the poem, the question is—why should any child/flower have to struggle this hard for a fair shot at life?
In historic Black communities like the West End neighborhood where RCDC was born, there were not many couples like White and Nkrumah, who establish an institution to serve Black kids using art to develop “a blueprint for success in life.” RCDC is similar philosophically to the work of Katherine Dunham in East St. Louis, Illinois, Ms. Ruth Beckford here in Oakland, Deborah Vaughn, Dimensions Dance Theatre in Oakland, Dr. Albirda Rose, Village Dancers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
RCDC serves youth 5-18 and is based on the Nguzo Saba or 7 Principals of Kwanzaa. Children from all ethnicities and religious backgrounds are accepted; the majority are Black kids. Unfortunately, Mr. White and his late wife, were not able to save all their children over the past 30 years and we learn of some of those casualties in the war that is waged in American communities daily, a war the citizens involved and felled, did not start even if often the finger pulling the trigger and bodies falling under its impact look the same.
The film OPENS AUGUST 7-21, 2020 for a Two Week Virtual Engagement at Roxie Virtual Cinema