LaVone Griffin

LaVone Griffin Photo by Adam Hillberry

By Adam Hillberry

LaVone Griffin is the center director at the W. C. Reid Center for Creative Arts. For almost two years, he works daily to constructively and creatively challenge the children of our community.

“I have been doing therapeutic theater and I intend to do it until the day I die. I have kids who come into this center from kindergarten through college and I love to see the smiles on their faces when introducing them to something creative,” Griffin said. “It helps to know it transforms itself into their performance at school and with a feeling of accomplishment about themselves. To see these things there is no price.”



Last
year, the Reid Center received an award for cultural excellence from
the National League of Cities for their Cultural Renaissance Arts
Program. No other parks and recreation organization has ever been
honored like this before, according to Griffin.


“This parks and
recreation sits on the cusp of a great opportunity to set a presence
across this state in terms of its cultural arts program and the
approach we are taking. I am excited about the new director who has as
very deep love and desire to see a cultural arts program that we can be
proud of locally, regionally and nationally.”


Griffin has a
bachelors’s degree in drama therapy and a master’s degree in theater
arts. Theater is the primary vehicle of his life, Griffin says.


“It is the
vehicle I use to navigate myself to the evolution of people, children
and black people. The past 62 years of my existence has basically been
driven by love and ambition for theater. I realized a lot of things I
wanted to be I could be on stage,” Griffin said.


Griffin dedicated himself to drama after his tour of Vietnam.


“As I grew older
and was fortunate enough to make it through Vietnam, this outlet of
theater was always there. Once I got out of the service, I was
determined from that point on the theater would be my life and that’s
what I would do,” Griffin said.


Griffin was a
founding member of the Boston Black Repertoire Theater and the Heritage
Community Theater in his home of Columbia, South Carolina. He says he
didn’t have high aspirations to become a star.


“The theater was
a passion and whatever level I could do that on a consistent basis is
what I chose,” Griffin said. “It gave me a balance in my life that
allowed me to walk through the rest of my life comfortable with myself.”


Griffin began to
see how his knack for theater could affect the problems of our
children. “One day I read one article about kids in prison under the
age of 25. The next article I read was about the number of youth,
specifically African Americans, graduating from high school who could
not read,” Griffin said.

“The two
articles stirred something in me that maybe had a semblance of anger
and disappointment. The question became ‘Well, LaVone, how do you fit
into this picture?’”


The main motivation is the effect on the children, according to Griffin.


“What warms my
heart and what drives me is the ability to come into this facility and
jog and tease and tweak the lives of these children. My motivation is I
sit in a position to open up that door and say ‘step through this door
and explore yourself,’” Griffin said. “We have the basic elements for a
kid to find himself here. My job is to give that kid an opportunity to
see himself in more than one dimension.”


Griffin no longer likes to see his work as a job, but as a commitment to our society.


“I get up in the
morning knowing I’m going to build on a plan of society. So, going to
make my contribution to that overall project is not work to me. I
consider myself a humanitarian activist,” Griffin said.


The problem of educating and raising children lies within our system, according to Griffin.


“The number of
children who are coming out getting an education and finding a decent
job are dwindling. Overall, we have got so dogmatic in our approach to
things. The word rehabilitation is laying out somewhere dead,” Griffin
said. “We’re not using our resources in the best way.”


Griffin
currently sits as the president of the Carlton Club, a 70-year-old club
for African-American men to come together and talk “man style”,
according to Griffin. Griffin says the greatest impacts on this
community have been through the men of the Carlton Club.


Griffin remarked at how the elevation of women in our society exceeds that of men.


“We have been
faced with the greatest challenge there is: the constant elevation of
our women and the decline of our African-American men,” Griffin said.


“Some of the
most powerful women in my life have held the most powerful positions
that I’ve ever seen women hold since I’ve been alive. I love it. I have
a problem with where we are as men. In numbers, we are not being out
there. Men are in a flux.”