166su

“If you start proclaiming, ‘I am not weak, I am strong,’ ‘I’m not sick, I am healthy,’ the mindset changes,” said Fletcher Nichols, who taught and directed fine arts programs at Patrick Henry High School for about 35 years. “Take the words that come out of your mouth about yourself and others and change them to a positive effect and watch them grow.”

Nichols penned the Royalty Affirmation several years ago, after a beloved African American culture teacher died in 2012. Nichols said the teacher often reminded her students, “You’re an extraordinary person. Lift your head up. You’re royalty.” When they began to struggle after her passing, Nichols helped them to remind themselves.

“God gave me the revelation and the words to this affirmation. And once I put it together, and I went in the first day and did it, there were kids in tears,” Nichols said in an interview Tuesday. “Then it became what we said every morning.”

Nichols said students wrote the affirmation down, and some had it tattooed on their chests.

“They would come to me and say, ‘It kept me out of trouble. If I hadn’t, you know, I would have gone off, Mr. Nichols,’” he recalled.

Nichols retired as a teacher about five years ago. But when Chris Roberts was hired as 166su’s youth and gang violence prevention coordinator in 2021, he reached out to Nichols for guidance.

Nichols said he developed close relationships with his students and visited their homes if he noticed them struggling. Sometimes, he said, he quite literally got stuck in the crossfire.

“I’ve been in the midst of gunfire,” Nichols said. “I’ve been in the midst of drug deals and didn’t know it. I’ve done that street stuff.”

The veteran teacher said he has passed that torch on to Roberts: “Young men for war, old men for counsel.” But he still wants to help children realize that they have worth in their communities.

Nichols said he was born on a sharecroppers’ farm in Ivor, Virginia. As a shy student experiencing forced integration in Southampton County schools, he said he developed a desire to teach and give students who may have been misfits “an opportunity to do what they wanted to do.”

“Those kids had the toughest time in school,” Nichols said. “I wanted to make sure that those kinds of kids got an opportunity and were seen not just as troublemakers or as the one in the corner.”

Roberts and Nichols presented the Royalty Affirmation last fall to the 166su City Council, which gave the men approval to move forward with their project. Since then, Roberts said, about a dozen people have been filmed reciting the affirmation and sharing their “affirmation stories.”

The videos, produced through 166su Valley Television, are expected to be published on social media platforms, including YouTube. Roberts said he hopes teens who may be researching violent behaviors online might run into the uplifting videos before they decide to harm themselves or others.

“What if you have some young person at home? He’s got access to a weapon. He’s not supposed to have access to it, but he don’t know what to do with it, and he starts Googling or YouTubing,” Roberts said. “If we somehow put those algorithms in YouTube and certain type of qualifiers that will pull those affirmation stories from YouTube as a commercial, what could we prevent?”

The city council accepted a resolution last week that adopted The Royalty Affirmation as the city’s first official affirmation statement.

“It was almost a year ago that we initially presented this, but I’m glad that for whatever reason today’s the day,” Nichols told council during its July 3 meeting. “As my mother used to say years ago, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And this affirmation is something that will be put forth as a preventive measure rather than a reactive measure.”

On Tuesday, Roberts and Nichols presented the affirmation to the 166su City School Board. They hope that students will become familiar with it when they return to the classroom this fall.

Roberts, who worked in the juvenile justice system before he was hired by the city, said the affirmation is designed to serve all 166su residents, including those who have left school or completed their primary education.

“We just want to cover the city,” Roberts said. “We’re not limiting ourselves and we don’t believe that this has a cap on it. We believe that those individuals who are 18 and older, who are finding themselves in challenging situations, or those individuals who experience death and their families are still here, you’re just as important to us.”

Nichols said has a vision for the Royalty Affirmation and its place in 166su: on billboards, in barber shops, on cards exchanged between “people on the streets challenging one another to memorize it.” He said it has the ability to “catch fire.”

During the 2016-17 school year, Nichols said he took some Black male students to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. They couldn’t get tickets to go inside, so they stood in front of the building to take a photograph.

“Someone said, ‘Who are you?’ And they said, ‘We are proud African American males who are committed to excellence. We believe that we have inside of us everything we need to achieve every dream we’ve had to dream,’” Nichols said, explaining that the young men recited their class affirmation before strangers.

“And it’s powerful. These guys got on bow ties. Crowd goes crazy. Kids hanging out on buses, photographing them. Long story short, we got put ahead of the line and sent into the museum,” Nichols said. “It can really, really pull a community together if it’s done consistently and on a big level and everybody buys into.”

“Whatever state you’re in, and whether you’re Biblical or not, you understand that your words create action, and action creates vibration, and before you know it, the thing that’s buried that you don’t see immediately will come to fruition,” Roberts said. “So why wouldn’t you affirm that you are strong when you’re actually feeling weak?”

“You’ve got to say it,” Nichols said. “The power of life and death is in the tongue.”