Initiative gives students a voice with hip-hop

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:39:27 +0000

Initiative gives students a voice with hip-hop Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/10/2025 - 09:39

Cody DeBos

Founded by a collaborative including CU �� scholars, the Lyripeutics Storytelling Project aims to empower Black and Brown youth through the medium of hip-hop

A Manual High School student sits behind a microphone, headphones on. Their world outside—which sometimes holds uncertainty, systemic barriers and institutional indifference but also encompasses the rich musical and cultural heritage of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood—fades away for a moment as a beat drops. As the student leans in, the cadence of hip-hop becomes an outlet to speak their truth.

For many Black and Brown youth in the greater Denver area, the Lyripeutics Storytelling Project is more than a way to express their creativity. It’s survival.

That’s why the artists and educators behind the project are battling to keep the space alive.

Shawn O'Neal (left), an assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies, and Kalonji Nzinga (right), an assistant professor of education, are co-directors of Lyripeutics.

“We’re trying to provide these platforms of learning that we think Black and Brown students in particular really resonate with,” says Kalonji Nzinga, a �� assistant professor of education and Lyripeutics co-director. “In a way, we’re just building upon the history of creating learning environments based in a cultural reference point, based in our ways of knowing.”

Through storytelling and music production, young people in the Lyripeutics program gain an opportunity to share stories of their unique cultural wealth. But while the program has been a source of empowerment for many, it also faces funding struggles and systemic resistance.

What is Lyripeutics?

Founded by a collective of CU �� scholars, artists, educators and community organizers, Lyripeutics’ mission is to empower Black and Brown youth through a medium many connect with—hip-hop. The program is embedded in schools in the greater Denver area and aims to offer alternative learning environments for students who find themselves overlooked in traditional education systems.

“We don’t all learn the same, yet we have this system of education that’s been around for hundreds of years and is really geared for only one very particular type of student,” says Shawn O’Neal, an assistant teaching professor in the CU �� Department of Ethnic Studies and Lyripeutics’ founding member and co-director.

“It’s just not working for us. For many students. It hasn’t worked,” he adds.

Rather than using the traditional education system’s philosophy of rigid structure and standardization, the Lyripeutics program operates through collaboration and an evolving process in which students, teachers and artists co-create learning spaces.

“A typical day can look quite different depending on whether we have a producer leading the session or a lecturer on hip-hop history, or an actual MC helping create space for youth to do storytelling,” O’Neal says.

Students can also create and produce their own music in the state-of-the-art hip-hop studio adjacent to the Manual High School library in Denver.

“We collaborate with other hip-hop artists across the Denver area to develop the programming and to do the instruction,” Nzinga says.

At its heart, the program is about creative expression.

“We’re even working with students on exercises like field recordings of their environments and recording their neighborhoods and creating tracks and experiences out of those,” O’Neal adds.

Building confidence, one verse at a time

Through storytelling and music production, young people in the Lyripeutics program gain an opportunity to share stories of their unique cultural wealth. (Photo: iStock)

Those behind the Lyripeutics program know education isn’t just about what happens in the classroom, but what happens when students see their own voices amplified in the real world.

Recently, one group of high school students visited the CU �� campus to play original tracks on the university’s radio station.

“The folks who run the radio station were just blown away,” says O’Neal. “It was an enriching experience for everyone involved.”

“We believe that doing work related to the social context, the cultural movement that is hip-hop, allows young people to really express their story from their perspective,” adds Nzinga.

For many of the youth involved, the program is much more than an extracurricular activity; for some, it’s the first time they’ve been given tools, encouragement and a platform to tell their stories, O’Neal says.

“When we get to engage with the students, it’s normally within a place of creativity and joy. We aren’t there for a lot of the day-to-day things I know they’re going through, but we see and hear the expression of their frustrations and the various roadblocks they’re up against through their music and their performance,” O’Neal says.

Fighting to keep the mic on

For all its successes, Lyripeutics faces a current reality: Programs focused on BIPOC youth, particularly those challenging traditional educational models, are under an intense microscope.

“We are at this moment receiving so much resistance from multiple levels,” Nzinga says. “From previous and future funding situations to different regulations at the state and district level—it’s extremely frustrating.”

Despite widespread recognition of the program’s impact, Nzinga and his colleagues cite an uphill battle to secure funding. While institutions like CU ��’s Renée Crown Wellness Institute have provided crucial support, securing consistent financial backing remains a struggle.

But the pushback isn’t just about money. Nzinga and O’Neal attribute much of the resistance to a larger national trend of rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, making it harder for programs like Lyripeutics to operate freely.

“We claim we want this type of programming for students that they need, yet we have to fight tooth and nail just to get a dollar, when we see so much money funneled into things that seem to be the antithesis of community building,” O’Neal observes.

“We believe that doing work related to the social context, the cultural movement that is hip-hop, allows young people to really express their story from their perspective.”

The most devastating consequence? Students who should be at the center of the conversation lose access to much-needed programming, and their voices are silenced—sometimes literally. Despite receiving parental consent, Lyripeutics has faced institutional roadblocks when trying to bring student voices into larger discussions about the program’s success.

“We would really prefer to have those students speaking for themselves,” O’Neal says, “But we’re not even at liberty to say many of the things we want to say.”

O’Neal and Nzinga also know Lyripeutics isn’t the only program fighting this battle. It’s part of a system of community-led education that refuses to be erased.

Nzinga says, “Our program isn’t the only one facing these types of pushback.”

“A lot of times these resistance movements try to separate us. They make us feel like we’re alone in doing this work, but we aren’t,” he adds.

When asked how outsiders can support the Lyripeutics program, Nzinga and O’Neal didn’t point to a single solution. They emphasized the importance of solidarity, awareness and amplifying voices.

“I think parents and community leaders voicing their opinions about any of the positive effects our programming has had would help,” O’Neal says.

The road ahead isn’t easy. Yet, despite the challenges, Lyripeutics will be there to keep a beat playing and a mic on for its students, ensuring the next generation of storytellers and leaders will have their voices heard.

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Founded by a collaborative including CU �� scholars, the Lyripeutics Storytelling Project aims to empower Black and Brown youth through the medium of hip-hop.

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Tales as old as time … yet we still love them

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:36:10 +0000

Tales as old as time … yet we still love them Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/04/2025 - 09:36

Rachel Sauer

With yet another Snow White adaptation currently in theaters, CU �� scholar Suzanne Magnanini reflects on the enduring appeal of fairy tales

Once upon a time—this time, in fact, and many of the ones that came before it—there was a story that never grew dull in its telling.

It possibly leaped the porous cultural and national borders of narrative, carried by caravans or ships or ethernet cables and planted in the ready imaginations of successive generations of story lovers—those who tell them and those who hear them.

Maybe it’s the story of a young person who ventures into the unknown, where they encounter magic and beasts of all sizes and a resolution specific to the tale’s time and place. Maybe there really even are fairies involved.

Suzanne Magnanini, a CU �� associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian, notes that fairy tales' malleability helps them remain fresh and relevant over centuries of retellings.

And we never seem to tire of hearing about them.

The recent theatrical release of Disney’s live-action Snow White—one of countless retellings of the tale over more than 400 years—highlights the place of honor that fairy tales occupy in cultures around the world and in the hearts of people hearing them for the first time or the thousandth.

One of the reasons they remain fresh through countless years and iterations is their malleability, says Suzanne Magnanini, a �� associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian. “The Italian author Italo Calvino, who also edited a seminal collection of Italian folktales, writes of fairy tales as being like a stone fruit, where you have that hard core center that is always the same—you’ll usually recognize a Sleeping Beauty story, for example—but the fruit can be radically different around that.”

Stories of time and place

As a researcher, Magnanini has published broadly on fairy tales, including her 2008 book Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Fairy Tales of Straparola and Basile. She began studying fairy tales while working on her PhD, finding in them a fascinating dovetailing between her interests in monstrosity and otherness.

“As a scholar, I take what’s called a social-historical approach,” she explains. “I’m really interested in all those little details that link a tale to a very precise place in time where it was told, and I’ve written about the ways in which fairy tales are used to elaborate on and think about scientific theories of reproduction that hadn’t really been nailed down at the time—questions that were still being circulated about whether humans could interbreed with animals, for example, and would that produce a monstrous child?

“You look at a some variations of Beauty and the Beast, like Giovan Francesco Straparola’s story of a pig king, where it’s a magical version of these questions, and maybe what’s actually happening is that fairy tales are a way to think through the anxieties and interests of the time.”

Fairy Tales at CU ��

The ATU Index is one of the search elements that Suzanne Magnanini and her students are including as they develop the database for Fairy Tales at CU ��. The project aims, in part, to improve access and searchability of the more than 2,000 fairy tale collections that are part of the Rare Books Collection at Norlin Library.

The project is a partnership between undergraduates and graduate students under the direction of Magnanini and Sean Babbs, instruction coordinator for the University Libraries' Rare and Distinctive Collections, as well as Hope Saska, CU Art Museum acting director and chief curator, who has trained students in visual-thinking strategies. The project is supported by Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the ASSETT Innovation Incubator, the President’s Teaching Scholars Program and the University Libraries.

Fairy Tales at CU �� will host a showcase of CU's fairy tale collection from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m. April 16 in Norlin Library M350B. Learn more here.

Though fairy tales may be spun in response to what’s happening in a specific time and place, they also often address concerns that aren’t specific to one location or culture but are broadly pondered across humanity. “Andrew Teverson has written that fairy tales are literature’s migrants because they can move across borders, they can move across boundaries and then make themselves at home and assimilate to a certain extent in different cultures,” Magnanini says.

For example, the Brothers Grimm heard a tale called “Sneewittchen” (Snow White) from folklorist Marie Hassenpflug, as well as from other sources, and included it as tale No. 53 in their seminal 1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales. However, says Magnanini, there was a similar tale called “The Young Slave” in Giambattista Basile’s 1634 work Pentamerone. In fact, Snow White is type 709 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), which catalogs and describes common motifs and themes in fairy tales and folklore around the world.

Not so happily ever after

The origins of many fairy tales can be traced as far back as ancient Greece, Rome and China, Magnanini says, which speaks to their ability not only to help people of particular times and places explore their anxieties and questions, but to address the feelings that have been central to the human condition almost since our species emerged from caves.

“When I think about fairy tales, I think about number of characteristics that make them really appealing across time and space,” Magnanini says. “If you think about it, the protagonists are almost always young people heading out into the world—much like our students are heading out—leaving home behind, having to make their way in world, facing challenges. That experience can be very transformational, so in a way these stories are all about metamorphosis and change.

“A lot of times that’s when you’re living your life in Technicolor and all the emotions are new. So, even if you’re no longer in that moment of life, fairy tales tap into experiences like the first falling in love, the first adventure from home. And they often end right after the wedding, so you don’t see someone having to do their taxes or being like, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve been in this relationship for 30 years and I’m bored.’ I think part of the reason we don’t get tired of fairy tales is because they capture this fleeting time in life.”

“If you think about it, the (fairy tale) protagonists are almost always young people heading out into the world—much like our students are heading out—leaving home behind, having to make their way in world, facing challenges," says CU �� scholar Suzanne Magnanini. (Photo: Disney Studios)

While fairy tales, particularly as they’ve been interpreted and simplified by Disney, are stereotyped as having “and they lived happily ever after” endings, fairy tales pre-Disney more commonly ended with justice served, Magnanini says. For example, the version of “Snow White” in the 1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales ends with the evil queen being forced to step into a pair of red-hot iron shoes and dance until she dies.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, it’s the happy ending that’s the appeal of fairy tales,’ but it’s important to remember the vast majority of fairy tales end with the deliverance of justice—something really unjust has happened, someone has been discriminated against, there’s some evil in the world, and justice is delivered,” Magnanini explains. “People who study the formal aspects of fairy tales always talk about how the ‘happy ending’ is found in justice.

“Disney Studios has a tendency to remove the ambiguity from these tales and remove most of the violence—simplifying them in a lot of ways. If you read the French version of Beauty and the Beast, Charles Perrault’s version, there were other siblings in there; there was a complex family structure with complex interactions and a lot of really heavy issues—the family must deal with economic disaster.”

In fact, the field of fairy tale scholarship addresses everything from feminist interpretations of the stories to the ways in which children use fairy tales to help navigate psychosexual rites of passage. Generations of authors have told and continue to retell these familiar stories through different lenses of gender, sexuality, geography, racial identity, economic status and many, many others.

“What makes these stories different, and what I think is a big part of the appeal of fairy tales, is the magic or the marvel,” Magnanini says. “For it to be a fairy tale, scholars would say there has to be magic in there—not just the presence of magic, but magic that facilitates the happy ending by allowing the protagonist to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of what they desire, maybe the marriage, the wealth, the happy ending. There’s something so satisfying about that, because it doesn’t happen in your quotidian day-to-day life. I mean, imagine if you met a talking deer.”

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With yet another Snow White adaptation currently in theaters, CU �� scholar Suzanne Magnanini reflects on the enduring appeal of fairy tales.

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That iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima? CU prof, then a Marine, saw it happen

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:30:00 +0000

That iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima? CU prof, then a Marine, saw it happen Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/21/2025 - 07:30

Bradley Worrell

CU �� distinguished professor and Marine veteran Richard Jessor reflects on what the planting of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945, meant for the country and for him personally

Eighty years later, Richard Jessor vividly recalls hitting the beach on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

“The island had been under severe bombardment from U.S. aircraft and our Navy ships offshore,” says Jessor. “Both types of bombardment had been going on for quite some time, and the sense was that Iwo Jima could be taken in three or four days because nothing could have survived such a massive bombardment from American forces.”

The first three waves of Marines landed on the beach without taking enemy fire.

Richard Jessor, a CU �� distinguished professor emeritus of behavioral science, was a 20-year-old Marine fighting World War II on Iwo Jima in February 1945.

“By the time we in the fourth wave hit the beach, the Japanese—who were concealed, waiting for us—pulled their artillery out of the caves and had every inch of the beach registered, so when our tractor hit the beach, we were under severe fire,” recalls Jessor, then a 20-year-old Marine. “Our tractor got stuck at the beach edge and could not move us up, so we jumped out of the tractor into the water.

“As I hit the beach, I looked over and there was a Marine lying on his back, a bubble of blood coming out of his mouth. He died there, and that was my first exposure to combat.”

Jessor was hit in the back by shrapnel during the first day ashore but was able to continue fighting. After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled back from the front line and told they could write one letter.

He wrote a letter to his parents, thanking them for everything they had done for him. He also said his goodbyes, “because I didn’t think anyone was going to get off the island alive,” he says, explaining, “there was carnage all of the time, every day, and you felt every day that it was going to be your last day.

“We were constantly being fired upon by the Japanese, who would come to the openings of their caves and fire, and then withdraw, so we didn’t see the enemy, and that was a huge source of frustration,” he adds. As it turned out, the Japanese had heavily fortified the island and had a dense network of tunnels from which they could launch attacks.

The flag raised atop Mount Suribachi

Back on the line the morning of the fifth day, Jessor looked at the opposite end of the island to see something in the distance atop Mount Suribachi, the dominant geographical feature on Iwo Jima.

“As I looked, I suddenly saw the American flag flying. I couldn’t see anything else that was that far away, but I saw the flag flying and I started shouting, ‘The flag is up! The flag is up!’” he says. “The other Marines around me began turning around to look. Seeing that made us realize that our rear was now being covered, because we had been under attack from behind as well as in front.

“For me, it was a moment of being able to say to myself, ‘Maybe I will get out of this alive,’” he adds. “In that sense, it was transformative for me, and I remember it well.”

Richard Jessor (second from right) and his buddies taking a break behind the line while serving in World War II. (Photo: Richard Jessor)

The flag raising lifted the spirits of the Marines on the island, and later it did the same for a war-weary American public at home, when the image of Marines raising the flag was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Rosenthal won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for photography, and the photo is one of the most recognizable images of World War II.

Jessor says the photo symbolized the Marines’ perseverance in the face of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and it helped shape the public’s sentiment that victory in the Pacific was at hand. However, it also may have inadvertently created a false impression among the public, he says.

“Some people may think that when the flag went up the island was secure—and that was absolutely not the case,” Jessor explains. “When the flag went up, on day five, we still had 31 more days of fighting—and most of the casualties took place after the flag raising. Close to 7,000 Marines were killed in the 36-day battle.”

Meanwhile, as the Marines advanced, they sometimes came across the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers, whom they searched for souvenirs. Marines were particularly interested in Japanese “good luck flags,” which bore well wishes from friends and family and which were often tied around soldier’s waist.

“One morning, when I looked out my foxhole, I saw a dead Japanese soldier. I walked over to him to see whether he had a flag under his shirt, and as I bent over, I saw he had letters in his shirt pocket,” presumably from his family, he says. “Well, I had letters from family in my pocket—and suddenly I was struck by the fact that in so many ways we shared the same humanity. I couldn’t blame him any more than I could blame myself for being in the same situation. It gave me pause about how stupid it was to be engaged in this kind of activity (war).”

An epiphany amidst combat

Jessor called that moment an epiphany. He made two vows then and there: that he would never go to war again and that he would go on to do something meaningful with his life.

First, though, he had to get off the island alive.

His next challenge came a few days later, when he was ordered to take a Japanese soldier captured at the front lines under his guard to the beach, where interpreters could question the prisoner about the placement of weapons facing the Marines.

Richard Jessor (holding the Japanese "good luck flag") and buddies from the 4th Marine Division during the battle of Iwo Jima. (Photo: Richard Jessor)

“As I said, there was a great deal of frustration that we could not see the enemy we were fighting, so I anticipated there could be some attempts on my prisoner as I started walking him back through the rear lines,” Jessor recalls. “As we got through the rear of the lines, where our artillery was, a Marine jumped up, running toward me and my prisoner, saying, ‘I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch.’

“I had to point my rifle at his head and say, ‘I have orders to shoot anybody who touches my prisoner,’ and so he stopped and finally backed off. And the same thing happened a second time before I got the prisoner to the beach and turned him over to command headquarters,” he says.

“As I’ve ruminated these 80 years, I’m not sure whether I would have shot that fellow Marine if he had not desisted from his threat, and it worries me that I might have done that.”

Finally, the objective is achieved

After 36 days, the Marines secured Iwo Jima. A short time later, U.S. aircraft were able to use its runway, which—combined with the island’s proximity to the Japanese mainland—made it a strategic military objective.

“Capturing Iwo Jima had immediate consequences for the approach to Japan,” Jessor says. “What was happening was that our bombers were leaving from Saipan or Tinian, and some of those bombers would get hit over Japan and not be able to make it back, so they would have to ditch in the sea, and many were lost. So, the fact Iwo Jima had a landing strip on it was important for that reason, as well as serving as a base for the projected attack on Tokyo.”

But the victory came at a tremendous cost to the Marines.

“We were destroyed. As I said, almost 7,000 Marines were killed on that island,” Jessor says. The scale of the loss was on display when Jessor and fellow Marines retraced their steps to the landing beach, which was arrayed with crosses where Marines were temporarily buried after falling in combat.

The Marines were shipped back to their training grounds in Maui for their next mission—the planned invasion of Japan.

They spent their days practicing landing craft invasions. At night, Jessor says he and a few of his fellow Iwo Jima veterans would gather in their tent to relive details of the battle, which he believes had a cathartic effect.

Jessor also recalls being on Maui when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“When the bomb dropped, we all thought it was a great thing,” he recalls. “We were saying to each other, ‘No more war! We get to go home!’”

Among Richard Jessor's mementos from Iwo Jima are a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. (Photo: Glenn Asakawa/CU ��)

However, in retrospect, as the scale of the death and destruction in those cities became known, Jessor says he reevaluated his opinion about that fateful decision. At the same time, Jessor says he developed a deep disdain for politicians who were so easily willing to put American troops in combat.

“They talk about it like it’s a game,” he says. “They haven’t the slightest sense of what combat is like and what it does to people and the destruction it causes. Even for the many people who survive the experience, their lives are changed forever.”

After the war

After he was discharged, Jessor made good on his promise to himself to make a difference for the better. After earning his doctorate, in 1951 he accepted a position as an assistant professor of psychology at CU ��.

During his ensuing 70 years at CU ��, he co-founded and later directed the Institute of Behavioral Science (its building was recently renamed in his honor); wrote an influential report in January 1970 critiquing the lack of diversity on campus and making suggestions for positive changes; wrote a report in the 1960s that took the CU Board of Regents to task for being unresponsive to students and faculty, which earned him the ire of former Regent Joe Coors; and wrote 10 books. He retired as a distinguished professor in 2021, which makes him the university’s longest-serving professor.

Like many World War II veterans, Jessor rarely spoke of his experiences during the war, even to close friends and his own family. That changed for him after he saw the World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, which opens with a scene of American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, France, under intense fire from German soldiers.

“As a trained clinical psychologist, I didn’t want to share my experiences with others, so I didn’t talk much about having been a Marine,” he says. “And then one day, my wife, Jane, and I were in Aspen. It was raining, so we couldn’t go hiking, so instead we went to the movies and saw Saving Private Ryan.

“The Steven Spielberg-directed movie was the real thing,” he says. “When the invasion scenes start at the beginning, I was sobbing, and the tears were running down my face. And while that was happening, I’m saying to myself, ‘You’re a psychologist and you didn’t know that you still had this inside you?’ And obviously, I didn’t.

“The movie brought it all back to me, and so I began talking about it from that point on.”

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

Jessor had hoped to return to Iwo Jima last year. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans offered to cover all expenses for him and his wife to attend a Pacific war theater travel lecture tour series it offers to patrons, which was to include a visit to Iwo Jima. However, the island is open to visitors only one day a year, and volcanic activity on the island at the time resulted in the tour being cancelled. Noting his age—he is 100—Jessor says he’s unsure he will ever have the opportunity to return to the island, despite his strong desire to do so.

Reflecting on the past

These days, Jessor keeps some mementos on his work desk to remind him of his time on Iwo Jima: a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. The jar of sand was given to him by a friend who visited the island in 2002.

“Sometimes I’m barely aware they are there, and then other times I’ll look over and see the grenade or the vial of sand and it all comes back to me. It’s a reminder that I value a great deal,” he says.

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

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CU �� distinguished professor and Marine veteran Richard Jessor reflects on what the planting of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945, meant for the country and for him personally.

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