BORDC is proud to announce its November 2014 Patriot Award Winner, Kymone Freeman. Kymone’s identifications range from poet all the way to director of the National Black LUV Festival held in DC, which is the largest annual AIDS mobilization in the nation.
Among this range of work he is also a well known activists, playwright, and founder and co-owner of We Act Radio.
We Act Radio is situated on Martin Luther King Jr. Ave, and the aim of the radio fits nicely with the name of street. Kymone has been quoted by The Washington Post as saying he believes the media coming from the station focuses on the messages of Martin Luther King Jr. prior to 1965. He goes on to say “we [We Act Radio] deal with the uncomfortable, we have a relentless love affair with the truth.” The radio station is constantly advocating for action against injustice. As Kymone says in a short video about the station “do something, that is our motto here.”
Kymone’s most notorious play is Prison Poetry, which follows the lives of three men from three different generations when they share the same jail cell for a night. Their differences are exposed through confrontation and their similarities are revealed through poetry. Prison Poetry has premiered at the Historic Lincoln Theatre and Source Theatre during the Hip Hop Theatre Festival, THEARC Theatre, Oak Hill Juvenile Detention Facility, and several college campuses. He also has a screenplay, Nineveh, which has been produced as a short film with the intention of being produced as a full length feature. The film is about a conflict over water in a futuristic drama that shows a post-oil depleted world.
Among Kymone’s accomplishments, he has been involved in many cooperative projects with the BORDC, including organizing the anti-NSA bike, the NSA mix tape music project and the Stop Watching Us rally, which he MC’d for BORDC.
At the rally, Kymone was quoted by the Popular Resistance blog as saying: “Drones is a form of surveillance. Racial profiling is a form of surveillance. Stop-and-frisk is a form of surveillance. We all black today!” The rally was far from a white-centric movement, as Kymone demonstrated in this quote. While whistleblower Edward Snowden was praised throughout the day by Kymone, he really used the rally to promote the racial significance in mass surveillance.
Kymone’s words from the video about We Act Radio are applicable to all he does: “We’re here to be the small radical voice against what we consider to be less than the truth.” This is what Kymone pushes his radio station to be, and what he pushes everyone that listens to his messages, no matter what form they are in, to do.