On Josiah Watts’ website, he describes himself in many ways. Some of these are creative identities: Actor. Writer. Director. Others are related to passions he has: Martial Artist. Activist. And others still are ethnic and geographic identities: Saltwater Geechee and Sapelo Island Descendant.

Josiah is someone who embraces complexity and refuses to let discomfort and difficulty keep him from engaging. Most recently, he has used his creativity in service of social justice advocacy on behalf of his relative Ahmaud Arbery, who was unjustly murdered in February 2020. His story is very important to Josiah’s, and thus our interview; if you’re unfamiliar with it, I recommend you read this article from The New York Times first.

I know Josiah through our shared connection to Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. Though I’ve known him most of my life, I now have a deeper understanding of the fire that ignites, what I would call, his creative activism.

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Take me to the roots of your creative identity. Let’s start there.

For as long as I can remember, I was always involved in something artistic.I used to go to this daycare at Demere Park; I think it was called Ms Mary’s Daycare. We used to do all these little plays. By the time I was in high school, I was acting in all these theatrical productions and musicals, if you believe it or not. I knew then, that’s what I was going to be. That was always what I was determined to do and be. 

My dad was from St. Simons [Island] and my mom was from Sapelo [Island]. We lived on St. Simons. I was always around folks like Tina McElroy, a writer. My mom too. She was very quiet, but when she spoke, you could hear her. She had this presence about her. I found out years later, she was in the drama club, the French club, she did all these amazing things. She was a big part of my love for the arts. 

I was the first person to go to a four year university, to go away to school. My brother was in the military and my sister did a nursing degree at the two year college, so it was a very odd thing for my family. I don’t think they fully understood. I think my mom did. My dad not as much. I went to the University of Georgia (UGA), where I was a theatre and communications major.

When I was in college, I was in the UGA-Oxford program in Oxford, England. One of the significant things I remember is that’s the first time in my life that I felt American. I’m a Black man, an African-American man. I just remember, I was with some fellow students and we were trying to figure out where we were. I asked someone for directions and they said, “Oh you’re American.” And it just kind of hit me, and I’m like, “Yeah, yes I am.” But then I think about my experiences and the experiences of a lot of African-American people in this country and they’re difficult. They’re complicated, even though we belong more than anything. 

Trying to identify what or who I am in all that is complicated. I’m like this broad spectrum of things. I’m an artist but I’m also someone who if he sees something wrong he will use whatever resources he has to try and make it right.

I discovered when I was younger the power of art. That you can have people that absolutely may not be able to stand one another but they all may like a movie, they all may like a play. There’s something in that art is a powerful vessel for being able to bring people together to have conversations that may even be uncomfortable. I’m always drawn back to that.

You encompass the complexity of identity in both your broad strokes and specific ones, such as being a Sapelo Island descendant. Tell me about your production, The Sapelo Project. What is its significance to you, and what was it like piecing the project together?

I was in the theatre program at Emory University, and they had this festival called Brave New Works where people could write or do new productions and submit them. This was back in 2012 when we had this property tax rise [on Sapelo] that was astronomical. 500 to 1000% rise, it was crazy. I was talking to some folks in the theatre department about it; when this festival opportunity came up, it hit me. What I recognized is that people just didn’t know about the struggles that were going on. Sapelo’s down on the coast; I was in Atlanta. I asked myself, “How can I make people care?” I’d been doing all these other things, like reaching out to newspapers, but then I was like, “I can write something.” That’s where the motivation for the project came from. 

The Sapelo Project is another way of educating people or giving people an opportunity to have insight into this culture that I grew up in, that I came from, that I was born of. I always would think about what those people before me went through, their struggles, their pains as well as the power of their strength and being able to still find ways to live and love one another when you have to exist in such a [racist] system or institution [as slavery]. For me, it is another way of opening the doors for the world to see there’s something happening here and you should care about it.

It was very difficult time; my mom wasn’t doing well and I was writing it while at the same time supporting her and being with her. That really helped to drive me even more. It made me recognize the importance of the story of Sapelo, understanding that it’s just a microcosm of the way the world is today. You have an island purchased by this ruling class of whites, of slaveowners, and then even when emancipation came—and you can question whether it was really emancipation—then you have Reconstruction, Black Codes, all these things. In McIntosh [County], they always teach there wasn’t violence, but there was. There was a measure of different things that happened in that time period.

Have things really changed that much? That is always a question that I think of when I think of the project itself. Sapelo went from slavery to Coffin to Reynolds and now state ownership. All that works together. The project itself was birthed out of trying to articulate to the world the history and the struggles of this place.

Your writing is very personal and poignant. It is celebratory and mournful. How does the process of writing and producing projects like The Sapelo Project sit with you? Is it a burden, a solace?

All of that. I come from a long line of very strong people; they had to be. They didn’t have a choice. A really good friend of mine says that we had the right ancestors. Who can get through those things. For me, writing is a mixture of all those things. Finding the balance between helping people to recognize the humanity in people but at the same time recognizing the evil that can exist in us as well and that’s a part of it. It’s a mix of it all. 

Sometimes I write and I just feel angry. Angry that this institution existed and angry that inequities and discrimination and inequality—how can these things still exist? How can people not see these things? I understand that a lot of people don’t want to see. It’s a hard discussion but I always say, can you imagine how hard it was for the people living it? 

I find power and solace in understanding and learning more about who I am and where I came from. At the same time, it’s painful to think that people lived under this evil institution of slavery and never saw freedom, never saw their homes again. I write about that in Sapelo where people were stripped away from their land and their people to never see their home or freedom again. Whenever I go home and I look out over the water, I imagine what that must have been like.

A part of all this is feeling that I owe them something. There are things they could not do that I can; what are the choices I will make to finish making things right?

In response to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, you’ve been a part of a number of efforts to raise awareness and confront the institutional injustices that allowed his death to happen. One of those efforts was hosting an arts exhibition; why an arts exhibition?

For a while now, we’ve had these students come down to Sapelo with the NOBIS Project. NOBIS is a socially cultural educational organization out of Savannah. They have this program where they engage schools and they bring them down to the coast and learn about the Gullah-Geechee culture.

About a week and a half or so before Ahmaud was murdered, lynched in so many ways, the group had come down. When it happened, I started posting about it and pushing for action. A group of us organized into what’s now become the 2:23 Foundation. I was in constant communication with the executive director of NOBIS and a teacher at The Brooklyn School in New York City. She said her students wanted to find a way that they could play a role. She felt it was important because, even though they were in New York, they wanted to do something and help other people their age understand what happened. That’s how the artistic part came about: it was a catalyst from those students.

The students formed this IRunWithMaud committee and supported us. We did a virtual town hall that was actually attended by thousands of people. We had problems with Zoom! And it was the students who did the interviews with the panel of people we brought on. 

After that, we continued those conversations about what’s next and came up with this idea of these artistic submissions. Artistic ways of talking about social justice and what happened to Ahmaud, putting the conversation at the forefront. With young people, it reaches more when the younger people are involved. It was pretty incredible. The artwork said so much.

Why do you find conversations around race and social justice, like the ones sparked by the town hall and arts exhibition, so important but so difficult to have?

We live in these spaces down South where there are certain things that just won’t be permitted. Think about the fact that when Ahmaud was murdered, no leader in schools said a word about it. It was crickets. Nobody said anything. It wasn’t until the story hit The New York Times and gained momentum that people started talking about it. No one seemed brave enough to even talk about the issue. 

We live in this space, in these counties where people just are stuck. They don’t want to accept that there is something wrong here. It all ties together: poverty and racism and all these inequities, they’re all intertangled, but nobody wants to have that conversation.

We’re talking about journalistic places where most of the papers are all about families. They’re privately owned and those are the major conduits of news. They can make the decisions of what is run. You have to look at representation. Our local papers don’t have a lot of representation on their staff. If you don’t have representation, you don’t have enough people who can even relate to it.

These are movements you cannot deny. We were able to mobilize something. You can’t deny 80,000 people wanting to know something. There’s too much pressure. Then we got the community behind us. We sent out a post saying, “Email your commissioners [about Ahmaud Arbery’s case],” and they were getting thousands of phone calls. Finally the authorities had to say “Okay we’ll have a conversation.” That’s what this has been like. 

I want to believe it has to get better. The conversations will happen. It’s just tough. I tell people, someone can run an enterprise, an organization, a school, they can be a wonderful family person and still be racist. The two can be independently verifiable. That’s the problem with trying to change. 

I worked in a school where there were significant discriminatory issues. All the people I worked with were wonderful people, but none of the people stood up for me. That’s what makes change so difficult to happen. People who aren’t black, who aren’t African-American need to be willing to stand up and be uncomfortable. That’s difficult because what do they have to gain, except doing the right thing and building a better world?

How have you seen the arts contribute to building that better world?

I think about the power of artists throughout history and the impact that those stories have had. Somebody had to write Selma and make that into a film. Someone had to write about Tunis Campbell’s story for us to understand what was going on in McIntosh. Somebody had to write about Igbo Landing, somebody had to write about the Weeping Time. If those people didn’t write or produce these works, tell these stories, would people even know? There’s still so many people who don’t. They aren’t part of the regular educational curriculum. 

I’ve been watching The Underground Railroad; my friend IronE Singleton is in that. The series is powerful. There’s power in the words, and in watching this. Some people aren’t going to read a book but they’ll watch a film or go to a museum to see a work of art to understand stories. 

I’m actually working on this project with NOBIS with the Davenport Museum and it’s about creating these characters that depict how these extravagant beautiful places in Savannah were even built. When you talk about the importance of art and the importance of becoming a better people, they’re all one in the same. We walk the streets and roads of these different places and yet don’t know the stories of how they came to be. Most of the brick and cobblestone roads in Savannah were laid by black and brown hands. The architecture and all these things were created from enslaved and free labor. Art is important in the sense of not only telling those stories but telling all these stories, whether it’s understanding of the Holocaust, an understanding of historically what has happened in our country and in other countries. The arts are a powerful conduit of understanding the world. 

Without art, we lose something. We can lose empathy. That’s part of the problem with the country now, we’ve lost empathy. If you’ve never been pulled over by the police, just try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and say, “What would that feel like if I was pulled over and I really never should have been pulled over? What would it feel like if the officer already had a gun out approaching my vehicle and I don’t know what’s going on?” I think about Ahmaud. We have etched and told a part of his story that I don’t think would have ever been told. I think this whole thing could have turned into just another blurb. 

Is there anything you’d say to encourage a young person of color interested in the arts, activism, or both?

I once had to look in the mirror at myself and say, “Have I consistently been driving towards who I believe I’m supposed to be?” You can be an activist and artist. You can be a teacher and an activist. You can be more than one thing, because you have different chapters in your life.

I would say if anything, you should let your conscience and your heart guide you. Hope that you have the support of your family behind you. Do what needs doing to make it happen. When I got that theatre degree, everyone asked, “What are you gonna do with that? You need to get a job!” So I got a job. I’d write a little bit and get another job and write a little more. You make it happen. I tell people who are in college, get the experiences. Go out and try those different things. If you think you can do it, why not? 

You pour so much of yourself into what you create, at the risk of nobody caring. How do you handle this intense risk that comes with being so invested?

I do it regardless. I would care even if it was just five people seeing, watching, understanding. Some things, you just have to keep going. You control what you can with what you have and hope that people understand it or begin to engage. 

We come from these small southern towns that are stubbornly holding on to what they’re familiar with. Any change kind of scares them. They don’t want it. I look at even the idea that Ahmaud didn’t belong in that neighborhood. This idea of access. Who says where someone belongs or where they should be based on what they look like, what they make, everything else? That has to change. 

It didn’t matter to me what other people said, the pushback, people who are racist in their leanings and beliefs: we have to keep going. Because one day we’ll be gone and what will we leave behind? We have to have the tough conversations, the uncomfortable conversations, to talk about what we need to do to make things better.

As artists, we have an obligation to help people to not only see things in the world but to think about them. I’m not here to make a decision for people, to mold their decision about what happened to Ahmaud, but I need them to know. I would hope they come to the right conclusion themselves, but that’s not a guarantee. As an artist and tying in that social activism, I think we’re obligated to try because at the end of the day, no matter what color you are, no one wants that to happen to their child, to someone they love. No one would want that. That should be what binds us.

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Follow and support Josiah’s artistic journey…

• See more about Josiah on his website
• Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
• Stay updated about The Sapelo Project through the website and Facebook. Publication and future performances in the works!

Remember, caring is always a risk but the cost of building a better world with and for one another is always worth it.

Tune in next month for another Chat with a Creative! Follow the blog or subscribe to Katie’s newsletter to receive an update as soon as it’s posted.