This month’s Soulful Revolutionary is Andre Henry, a hope-dealing artist contending for social change with clarity and courage in the public square. Our conversation highlights the powerful pairing of resilience (an essential “collection of inner strengths” for preserving well-being amidst the violence which oppression enacts on the body), with revolution (courageously striving against the status quo for the world that could be). For Henry, both are necessary — and so much the better when practiced in communities of belonging that value both grace and growth. Woven throughout this episode is the depth and delight of a decade-long friendship, and it brings me so much joy to share a snapshot of our ongoing conversation with you.
Follow him on Instagram @theandrehenry and find his music, merch and more at his website.
More about Andre Henry...
Andre Henry is a creative truthteller, equipped with revolutionary insight, fierce vulnerability, and conscious, soulful, cinematic, pop anthems.
A songwriter since he was a boy, Andre was inspired by watching his father —a reggae musician and activist of Jamaican and Cuban roots—put rebellious chants of love and freedom to skanking rhythms on the guitar in their immigrant home in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Andre was studying theology when the killing of Philando Castile by the Minneapolis Police Department triggered an awakening that caused him to cut ties with his evangelical faith and begin speaking out against racial violence, declaring the good news that “it doesn’t have to be this way.” For several months, he lugged a 100-pound boulder around the Los Angeles area, to visually express how anti-Black racism burdens the Black psyche. His community organizing and writing for racial justice have made him a trusted global voice on nonviolent struggle for social progress. He recounts this journey into the racial justice movement in his bestselling memoir-manifesto All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep.
His work has been featured in The Nation, The New Yorker, New York’s Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., and Super Bowl LVI. A graduate of 1500 Sound Academy in Inglewood, California, he is based in Los Angeles. Whether he's marching the streets with local activists, writing his books, or performing his music, Andre is here to speak truth, spread joy, and shift culture through everything he creates.
