Who knew a high school student’s speech might be a road to helping the community or even the country?
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For Caleb Brantley, nurturing his ability to give a persuasive and meaty speech has laid the ground work for changing minds about stereotypes and improving the lives of the underserved.
Brantley, a Blue Island resident who recently graduated from Eisenhower High School and will be attending Howard University, started taking speech as a sophomore but quit after a week, lacking confidence.
His head speech team coach, Mark Urban, convinced him to return, recognizing the potential that helped Brantley recently win the National Speech and Debate Association championship in Expository Speaking, which came with a $1,000 scholarship. His other awards include the WDDE-TV Most Valuable Producer scholarship and the Technology Scholarship and his school’s Student Council scholarship.
Brantley earned the first award for his speech “Thuganomics,” which focused on how people tend to categorize people as heroes and villains, and those who don’t agree with us tend to be categorized as the latter. His 5-minute speech also included a history of the word thug and can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAJAXB-99Jc.
“They are victims and agents of injustice and products and producers of violence,” said Brantley. “You have these people and mostly people of color in impoverished neighborhoods, low funding, housing market down for them, so of course there’s going to be a lot of crime. By that happening, you create a lot more crime, people will fend for themselves … people do what they have to do.
“The question is how can we improve lives to empower them to do better.”
Brantley said he sees speech as a possible path to the Oval Office, where he would hope to improve the world.
“Most of my topics were social and racial. … When I see these things on the news, it’s like I have to do something about it because I have this privilege as a Black person to talk about these issues,” Brantley said.
Where Brantley lacked self-confidence in the beginning, Urban stepped in.
“I think it was the promise that my coach made to me that by doing this event, you gain more of an insight to leadership skills, public speaking and even service to other people,” Brantley said. “He’s honestly been like another father figure to me, he has this way of taking people in and making them feel like family.”
Urban, who also is an English teacher at the school, said Brantley is “mature beyond his years,” with the passion that ordinarily comes from experience.
“He’s kind of an old soul. He’s really charismatic, he has a really dynamic sense of awareness,” said Urban, who has coached Brantley since he was a sophomore. “He just kind of takes everything by the horns and takes a leadership role and jumps in.”
That includes being able to look deep into problems, such as his Illinois High School Association Original Oratory speech on the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, for which he won second place.
“He’s a great exemplar of a leader, solving problems, reaching out and jumping into everything in any way he can,” Urban said.
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.