Louisville teacher responds to backlash over Civil Rights music video featuring her students

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A Louisville teacher is responding to criticism about a Civil Rights-themed music video she helped her students create over the summer.

NyRee Clatyon-Taylor, a teacher at Wheatley Elementary School in the California neighborhood, hosted a summer program at the school and a local church to continue her "hip-hop based education" method.

Students from various schools spent the summer learning about Civil Rights and the issue of reparations. They took a trip to Alabama to visit historical markers and museums.

They wrote a rap song and shot a music video to accompany it, meant to be used as an education tool. The trip to Alabama, the song and video production were not funded with taxpayer dollars. Clayton-Taylor and her husband paid for it all.

The video shows the kids dressed as slaves, a student holding a prop gun and features scenes at those historical sites in Alabama.

"It is serious subject matter, but I just think we can't veil what's going to our students," Clayton-Taylor said.

The video release Sunday afternoon got the community talking. Some people were supportive of the video and its message about reparations, while others were very critical of the subject matter and how the kids were portrayed.

Many WDRB News viewers weighed in online or reached out with questions and concerns via email. Several of them were concerned about one of the young girl's in the video holding a gun.

On Thursday, Clayton-Taylor gathered with some of the students to discuss the response they've received and address the negativity.

student discussion — Students discuss criticism to their music video and negative comments.

"Well, the gun in the video is a prop that I bought from Hobby Lobby, and it was just to portray that Harriet Tubman had a gun," Clayton-Taylor said. "It's to stem a conversation."

When asked if she had any regrets or would re-think allowing the student to hold the prop gun, Clayton-Taylor stood her ground.

"I would still have her hold that," she said. "I would do everything exactly the way that we did it."

Clayton-Taylor welcomes questions and conversations, but she said some people just went too far by attacking the kids online and spreading racist stereotypes.

One comment read aloud said, "How hard was it to find black girls for this video who weren't pregnant and black boys who weren't juvenile delinquents in the system already?"

"The attacks were hurtful," Clayton-Taylor said. "They were hurtful to me, because they don't know my students."

She used the negative comments as a teaching moment, working through them with her students and discussing how they make them feel. It was a reflection on something that started as a lesson but has turned into something more.

"It is OK to disagree, but it's not OK when we're attacking each other, and we're saying hurtful things to each other," Clayton-Taylor said. "I just think that's just ridiculous. That's just not who I am as a person and who we should be as America."