New York Amsterdam News: The New Black View: June 20, 1992

"Actress Lili Bernard, St. Aloysius 8th Graders Adopt Each Other"

by Karen Carrillo

You're Black, your Latin and you live in Harlem, where you daily see African-American and Latino children who think no one cares about them. But you also happen to be a TV, theater and film actress with access to both the children and other famous Blacks and Latinos.

It didn't take long for Lili Bernard to realize that she was in a unique position: she could start a program that would encourage prominent Blacks and Latinos to give back to Harlem by merely coming to speak to Harlem's school children, and she would be demonstrating to the kids that these famous members of our community still care about them.

Bernard began her weekly program with St. Aloysius School's eighth grade class after the students asked her for autographs at a Jan. 17 MLK, Jr. birthday celebration at Harlem Hospital.  She had been featured in a recently aired, "The Cosby Show," playing the part of a pregnant Mrs. Minifield, but the students recognized her instantly. The class was so excited to see this star in Harlem that their teacher, Sister Catherine, asked Bernard to be their guest speaker at their June graduation.

Lili Bernard was ready to do more than that. She meets once or twice with the class, inviting guest speakers like Deon Richmond and Merlin Santana, Kenny and Stanley respectively of "The Cosby Show, Deborah Gregory an Essence magazine journalist, and filmmakers, lawyers and law students, to name a few.

The students are provided information on the life and work of the guest speaker days before the visit, and they later prepare questions and papers on what the session with the speaker taught them.  The papers are grade by Lili and the students receive credit towards language arts for their work.

Recently, Bernard had NYU law students Franklin Ferguson and Matt Johnson act in a presentation of Richard Wesley's play, "The Past is the Past," about a neglectful father and an abandoned son who searches him out, for the entire school. The future lawyers met with Lili and the eighth grade class afterwards, going through a list of 23 questions that broke down the emotional aspect of the father-son relationship.

All of the students in the class are Latino or African-American, the girls dressed in white shirts, with red, blue and green plaid skirts, and boys in grey slacks, white shirts and black shoes. These 13 and 14 year olds, the kind often described as inarticulate or to be feared, showed that with the right kind of encouragement they are willing and able to demonstrate depth and intelligence.

Jesse Grant spoke about the difference between his generation and that of the law students. "We're more material than you were and we know we need to change that. We care; it's not like we don't care. But we want to do and be conscious of what's going on now. We're not so conscious of the past."

Some of the deep emotional problems between the character's were so relevant to the students' lives that not only were they easily able to determine the motivations behind the characters' actions, but their agreements and disagreements with the motivations caused heated discussions.

Lili has an easy flow with the students - she is able to gain responses from them even when they don't particularly want to speak, "When I first started, they were so skeptical.  They didn't trust me, because a lot of adults will make promises and not keep them."

"I tell them I'm going to do something, like make a copy of my "The Cosby Show" script and they're like, 'Yeh, yeah,' and then I do it and they're amazed."

She says that she encourages them towards career goals and positive self-esteem. She thinks they've been told that they "can't" too often; she lets them know they "can."

And the students respond. After class, Le'Markisha Hill, Myra Lattimore, Makeeba Graham and Shimalee Lambert introduced themselves individually to me and the law students. They wanted to thank us for coming to class - and caring.

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