BLACK LAW (music/Hip Hop Education):

Black Law is a Hip Hop project created for junior high school students that expresses the relationship of the American judicial system and the Black citizen in song form. Songs like Fugitive Slave Law are written and performed from the perspectives of prominent figures of the time period like Henry Clay, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. The song Tennessee v Garner discusses the United States Supreme Court Case of the same name, which is still used to determine whether a police officer’s use of deadly force was constitutional. The writer and performer Jinho “Piper” Ferreira created the music in an educational context to simplify complicated concepts for young Hip Hop lovers. Piper and his wife, educator Dr. Dawn Williams Ferreira, created a curriculum for each song. The curriculum assists students in absorbing the academic material and guides them in creating their own artistic versions of the same information.