BEFORE THEY ARE hip-hop performers, educators, and poets, the Peace Poets are a family. “It’s been a development of a brotherhood,” Frank Antonio López (aka Frankie 4) says of the group’s formation. López and Abraham Velazquez Jr. (aka A-B-E) met when they were 3 years old. Enmanuel Candelario (aka The Last Emcee) was introduced to the pair in grade school and introduced to Frantz Jerome (aka Ram 3) in high school. Candelario would go on to meet Luke Nephew (aka Lu Aya) at Fordham University in New York.
Much of the Peace Poets’ foundational development occurred in Harlem at Brotherhood/Sister Sol, a leadership and educational organization for black and Latinx youth. It was there, López says, that the Peace Poets were “politicized through art.”
Through Brotherhood/Sister Sol, the five poets joined an after-school program called the Lyrical Circle. As part of the Lyrical Circle, they gathered every Friday to share raps and poems, finding “strength and vulnerability” in doing so. “We found an ability to advocate for ourselves and our communities through the word,” López says of the experience. “We started developing a kind of structure or place—a space that held our stories.”
They’ve been expanding the circle ever since, bringing their poetry and rap to more than 40 countries, finding “power in the word” but also, López adds, “the healing properties of being able to share community, share testimony, share space, and listen.
At the center of the Peace Poets’ work is something they refer to as the “movement music initiative,” an art form by which they compose songs in relationship with frontline organizers and directly affected communities. The songs are short, easy to share, and meant to make meetings, marches, and direct actions more inspiring and effective.
Movement music has carried the Peace Poets from the streets of Ferguson to the frontlines of Standing Rock to the U.S.-Mexico border wall. They’ve offered their presence and voices to Margarita Rosario, Iris Baez, Juanita Young, Constance Malcolm, and many other mothers whose children have died at the hands of the police.
In 2014, they wrote the song “I Can’t Breathe” for Eric Garner, who died on a sidewalk in Staten Island after being put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer. The song would come to be sung by tens of thousands of people participating in protests and marches across the nation and described in USA Today as “the anthem of the anti-police brutality movement.”
The Peace Poets have sung and spoken against environmental degradation, prison torture, eviction, and racism. They’ve been arrested participating in acts of civil disobedience and know that the spaces they enter are rarely, if ever, safe ones. “In violent spaces, when armed folks are there to respond to us taking direct action, the families we’re walking with—folks who have lost people to state violence, who have family members who are undocumented—they’re creating a sacred space,” Candelario says. “Our bodies may not be safe, but no one can touch our spirits.”
Last year, the Peace Poets received the War Resisters League Peace Award, a distinction given in the past to Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Pete Seeger, and many other practitioners of nonviolence. It was “a great honor,” Nephew says. “But we’re just doing the job that our families, our loved ones, our community taught us to do. We would have no idea how to do it if it wasn’t for our mothers, if it wasn’t for, specifically, our black, brown, queer, and trans friends and teachers who have loved us enough to embrace us and let us walk with them.”
In the end, some of their greatest teachers have been each other. “It’s an interesting dynamic,” Candelario says of the group’s relationship. “We hear so much from each other. It might be a poem that someone has shared around the kitchen table in tears. We hold that safe space, hold ritual in that way.”
For them, sharing their truths with each other includes recognizing, respecting, and nurturing each other’s faith.
“I identify as a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, [and] as someone who practices and is in the process of learning about Native spirituality,” Nephew says. “When our prophets speak—whether it’s a 13-year-old boy who was incarcerated in the Bronx and knows that people deserve to be loved, or it’s Buddha, or Jesus, or Muhammed, or one of our Indigenous aunties telling us a story—I’m more concerned with the love and wisdom and how it helps to guide us than I am with who said it.”
It’s this understanding of the interconnectedness of faith that allows them to hold space for so many different communities. It’s also what ultimately makes their message of solidarity and social justice so urgent. The Peace Poets know that the bridges must be built and built now.
“[We must] hone in on what is really sacred, which we have found to be life itself,” Candelario says. “That is why we can build with Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Native elders. Because that is what humanity has been called to do. We don’t have time to waste, and we need as many people to stand in that truth as possible.”
Christina Colón, a former Sojourners associate editor, is a teaching assistant at Boston University.
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