Charles Barrett Adams is feeling cautiously optimistic. Adams, like many other people of color around the world, has been following the latest developments surrounding a renewed push for racial equality. “I think there are new opportunities to change things, and I hope we don't get complacent,” Adams says.
He's also incredibly busy as of late in his professional life. “We're getting calls from all kinds of folks,” he says. Adams is one of the founders of Lion's Story, a nonprofit that strives to challenge systemic social injustices by teaching skills that promote racial literacy. “Racial literacy is the ability to read, recast and resolve racially stressful moments,” Adams explains. The organization's name comes from a West African proverb that says the lion's story will never be known, as long as the hunter is the one who tells it. “We all have stories to tell,” Adams says.
His story begins in New York State. Adams was born in Ithaca and spent the first 10 years of his life in Brooklyn before he and his mother relocated to California. “I like to tell people, pre-Internet, I moved across the country to Los Angeles, which is like another world,” he says. After his graduation from high school, he moved back to the East Coast to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Later, during his professional career, he ping-ponged back and forth between New York City, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia—eventually with a family in tow.
Adams' connection to the Lehigh Valley runs through Northampton County; he purchased a home from an aunt in Bethlehem Township in 2002. He moved his family—wife, Ebony Adams, and their now 14-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter—there in 2014. Although they left and moved to Philadelphia four years later, the home remains in Adams' family. “It's a hub for our family,” he says.
Adams, the only child of a white father and a Black mother, says there's a common thread that links all of the places he's called home over the years—a feeling of not fitting in on some level, or of not feeling welcome in certain environments. It wasn't a constant, round-the-clock reality for him—yet it was there, Adams says, and it would rear its head in different ways. He speaks about the “low level, yet consistent side-eye” he got from police officers in New York City. He did feel safe spending time in his predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, he says: “That was comfortable.” But uneasiness would sometimes set in when he had to venture out to other parts of the city, where there were fewer people of color. He explains it like this: “Even when no one said a word, sometimes I would wonder, ‘Am I supposed to be here?'”
Sometimes though, words were said—and much worse. When asked to recall one of the racially charged incidents from his youth, Adams describes a memory from his high school days in California, when he was riding in a car that was pulled over by LAPD officers. His friend was driving; another friend was a passenger along with Adams—three young, Black men carpooling together. Adams says police mistakenly believed the car was stolen. He recalls in vivid detail being ordered out of the car and onto the ground at gunpoint by multiple police officers. “I remember where I was,” Adams say. “I remember what street I was on. I remember what I was wearing. I remember what I felt. I was scared as can be.” The whole thing, Adams says, was a clerical error—the car belonged to the mother of one of the other boys. “That experience didn't have to be like that,” Adams says. “It could have been sorted out in five minutes.” Even now, years later, Adams gets emotional when retelling the story; it's still a very real moment in time for him. And it's because he understands the power of memories like those that Adams has made storytelling such a big part of the work he does now.
Adams worked in education for many years, starting with a job teaching seventh-grade social studies at a middle school in Brooklyn. The curriculum spanned everything from the origin stories of Indigenous peoples to the Reconstruction era that followed the American Civil War. In many ways, it was a daunting task—how does a man of color teach students of color from old, outdated history textbooks that don't always paint a complete, well-rounded picture of the Black, Brown and Native Americans of decades or even centuries ago? Perhaps that teacher starts by planting a seed in those young minds.
“I think I did a good job of introducing the questions,” Adams says. “The best thing is when a student comes back later and is schooling you. It's like, ‘OK, the training wheels are off!'”
Adams was working at a public college preparatory boarding school in Washington, D.C., when he met Dr. Howard Stevenson, a nationally recognized clinical psychologist and researcher on negotiating racial conflicts. He also reconnected with Dr. Brian Peterson, a fellow University of Pennsylvania alumnus and director of the school's Makuu Black Cultural Center. Over the next seven years, the men stayed in touch via text messages, emails and sit-down chats. They bonded over shared experiences as professional men and fathers and continued to build upon a mutual vision of creating an organization that would be dedicated to the work of racial literacy. Lion's Story is the realization of that vision.
Training sessions can take many forms but are all built around storytelling. Participants are encouraged to share their own experiences with racially charged situations; administrators like Adams will do the same. Adams says he gets as much out of it as the audience does. “Every time we do a training or get a new client, part of me heals.” There might also be journaling, role-playing or work in small and large group settings. Regardless of the roadmap, the destination remains the same: showing participants how to change their own racially insecure and stress-burdened thoughts, emotions and behaviors. What it's not about is making anyone feel uncomfortable or guilty. “Our work is focused on healing and rooted in research,” Adams says.
The program's success stories run the gamut from major, such as a company changing its hiring practices and talent pool, to minor, such as a participant deciding to make an effort to patronize more minority-owned businesses, but both are equally important to the overall mission. “There's a lane for everybody to be in,” says Adams. He's encouraged by a report from the New York Times that says, as of June of this year, up to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others. That would make Black Lives Matter possibly the largest social justice movement in the country's history.
Adams thinks social media has proved to be an effective tool in shining a spotlight on injustice; even the pandemic has, in a roundabout way, given more exposure to the cause, because more people are at home, turning on the news and scrolling through their Facebook and Instagram feeds to see what's going on the world.
It's for all of these reasons that Adams is feeling cautiously optimistic. “It feels good. I'm glad,” he says. “But it's not done. What conversations are we going to have now? What are we going to do next?”
