Nearly 1,500 people gathered in San Francisco's Nourse Theater on Monday night for the 17th annual "Bringing the Noise for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," a celebration of the civil rights leader that takes place on his eponymous holiday on the third Monday of January.
This year, the "poetic conversation with MLK," which is organized by the nonprofit Youth Speaks, included an Instagram campaign designed to broaden that conversation's reach.
See also: Digital Storytelling Drives Social Change in Off/Page Project
Off/Page Project, the organization's partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, launched the campaign as a way to start a dialogue among both those at the event and those unable to attend. The idea is to use "social media as a way to make calls out to young people across the country about issues that are most affecting them, and their lives, their community," José Vadi, Off/Page's project director, told Mashable.
Upon arrival at the theater, audience members received a blank card with a prompt: "What hurts you or your community more than fists?" and encouraged attendees to respond on Twitter with an image and the hashtag #MLKSpokes. (Spokes is on Youth Speaks' youth advisory board.) Below, you can find a few of the responses, but many more are cropping up on Instagram following Monday's performances.
A discussion around violence as experienced by young people in their communities makes sense not only in the context of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but also in the social media language that they use every day, according to Vadi.
"In a day and age when kids aren’t necessarily getting hosed down or bitten by police dogs like in the Civil Rights Movement, there’s still daily struggles that a lot of our young people encounter that are violent, and that are invisible, and that are not necessarily discussed in the mainstream media, let alone actually visualized," he said.
In short, it's a medium that has potential beyond status updates, selfies or viral videos.



"We want [young people] to get involved and to participate and, in the end, to raise their own voice," Vadi said. "If there’s any way to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s to be able to speak freely on these issues."
As audience members and performers alike contribute to the discussion on Instagram (between performances, of course), the evening's D.J., Dion Decibels, played excerpts from three of King's speeches. After each, poets performed pieces inspired by those words — the products of months of writing workshops with Youth Speaks leaders. "Stakes is high," Decibels' t-shirt proclaimed as he spun.
One such speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," was given by King in 1967, a year before he was killed, in which he publicly opposed the war. "And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools," he admonished at the time.
Obasi Davis, the 2013 Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, Calif., responded in a poem contemplating Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dauntless pursuit of love and forgiveness, especially in the face of cruelty and discrimination. "I'm having trouble finding the Martin in me," he said, reflecting on the monumental challenge King's legacy offers.


As the evening came to a close, the emcee, poet Danez Smith, sent audience members on their way with a challenge of his own. "You ain't gotta go home — but you do gotta start a revolution," he declared.
If the words of these young poets are any indication, the stakes are still high nearly 46 years after King was assassinated. A uprising starts with speaking out about the problems we face — in our homes, around our communities and even on social media.
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