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Media Exposition Turns Teens on to Producing Positive Images of People of Color

Keynote Speaker Mel King Challenges Students to Use Media Skills to Solve Social Problems

by Frank Herron

Media Communications Technology High School in West Roxbury, Mass., held its annual Media Expo
festival on Friday Feb. 1.

The daylong festival featured student exhibitions and workshops run by media professionals. Among the topics covered were "Game Design," "Radio Production" and "Fashion Media."

Mel King (pictured), the keynote speaker and director of the South End Technology Center, kicked off the annual event.

Seizing on the Expo's theme of "Youth, Media and Our Future," King told the students that he stopped going to movie theaters in Boston when he was about their age – 15 or 16 – in the mid-1940s.

He recalled being sick of seeing the narrow-minded and hurtful "images of people who looked like me" on the movie screens, referring in part to the natives in the Tarzan movies.

It wasn't until he went to college in a segregated South Carolina – where he went to a black-owned movie house – that he saw portrayals that were were worth watching.

King recalled that he learned two things from that experience. First, he realized that whoever was in charge made a big difference in how blacks were portrayed.

"The images they presented...reflected the real story of the lives of that segment of the population."

Second, he learned that "the message was important," he said.

Times have changed, he acknowledged.

"Now, we all have images that look like the people in this room," he said, scanning the auditorium filled with a racially diverse student body that hailed largely from the Dorchester, Roslindale, Hyde Park and Mattapan areas of Boston.

Still, he said, there's plenty of work to do. One of the key questions he posed was, "Are we communicating ideas that will improve the quality of life?"

A longtime community activist and onetime candidate for mayor of Boston, King added a challenge, "Can you use your media skills to find a way to solve a problem?"

Frank Herron is the editor in chief of New England Ethnic News.

About the photographer: Kern G. Saint Dic was born in Haiti and lives in Dorchester. He is a senior at Media Communications Technical High School, where about 20 percent of the students are of Haitian heritage.

source: EthnicNewz.org

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