The UTD Mercury

Media Credit: Yu, Yang From left, 'Freedom Sings' performers Jonell Mosser and Ashley Cleveland sang about the history of the First Amendment for UTD's Sept. 11, 2001 commemoration.

UTD marked the five-year anniversary of Sept. 11 with "Freedom Sings," a multimedia concert that covered decades of music and freedoms relating to the First Amendment.

About 400 people attended the concert - staged in the main gym of the Activity Center - featuring seven Nashville-based performers and an array of music, images and history lessons.

The event was co-sponsored by the UTD Alumni Fund Student Grant Program, The UTD Mercury, Student Union and Student Union & Activities Advisory Board. "Freedom Sings" is an educational initiative of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

"We hope people know what the five freedoms (from the First Amendment) are, and we want people to think about those freedoms and appreciate them," said Executive Director of the First Amendment Center Gene Policinski.

First Amendment freedoms are the freedom of speech, press, religion, peaceful assembly and petitioning of the government.

"We don't have a message particularly political or philosophical," Policinski said.

"The show is not liberal or conservative. It's not Democratic or Republican. It just presents the things that are important in our country."

Policinski said "Freedom Sings" aims to encourage people to take a closer look at the First Amendment and realize that the freedoms belong to everyone - whether expressed in print, protest or song.

Policinski, who was a founding editor of USA Today and Sports Weekly, co-narrated the concert.

The program consisted of a variety of pictures, history, poems, readings and songs related to American freedoms, including the right to express an opposing opinion.

The artists performed songs from the 1960s and '70s that supported and protested the Vietnam War, as well as the more recent Black Eyed Peas song "Where is the Love," which spoke out against the Iraq War.

Other topics included a hate crime during the civil rights movement and the clash between protestors and National Guard troops on the campus of Kent State University in May 1970.

After listening to American history and freedoms through the sounds of drums, piano, tambourines and guitars, the performers and audience observed a moment of silence in memory of Sept. 11, 2001.

The show ended with a sing-a-long to the American song "This Land is Your Land."

"The [First Amendment] rights belong to every American," Policinski said.

"They don't just belong to liberals or conservatives, or to the politically active or inactive, they are everybody's rights."

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