New Jersey Orators has an annual membership of about 500 students who pursue excellence through speech competitions and a desire to learn more about authors, speakers and their places in history. They strive for language mastery in several categories of public speaking-poetry, prose, original speeches and extemporaneous oratory. Students participate in one-hour after-school meetings in a training program spanning 40 weeks coinciding with the school year. Young orators are exposed to plays, lectures and speeches of some of our great leaders and thinkers. I chose a speech Ralph Bunche gave at Fisk University in 1949: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted.”Ī present-day model is New Jersey Orators, which seeks to improve public speaking skills among children between the ages of seven and 18 and increase self-confidence, academic excellence and leadership skills. We recited the speeches of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and poems by Langston Hughes and Phyllis Wheatley. We also learned a lot about our history, literature and heritage.

When I was young, we had oratorical contests in school where you learned how to speak with clear enunciation and good diction.

My suggestions today are “old-school” because what I have in mind is for us to re-create some of the activities that children have benefited from in past generations.

Among the approaches that can be applied to divert children and teens from the Prison Pipeline, there are two activities I’d like to draw your attention to. Young people get on the prison track for a variety of reasons-they fall in with the wrong crowd, they have few positive adult influences in their lives, they are not engaged in positive activities. This is one of a series of Child Watch® Columns on dismantling America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline.

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