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The Courage to Create Carlton Mackey What if the most creative people in the world would never call themselves artists? In this inspiring TheoEd Talk, artist, author, and Black Men Smile® founder Carlton Mackey offers a new definition of creativity: the courageous response to limitations. Carlton tells the story of his grandmother, Miss Pearl of Blackshear, Georgia. She was a domestic worker and head cook with a sixth-grade education who raised him after his mother’s death and could “take and put” anything into something delicious. Through her, he came to see creativity as a sacred force at work in mothers, grandmothers, teachers, and people with their backs against the wall. Drawing on Genesis, where God’s first act is to create, and Howard Thurman’s wisdom, Carlton shares how the 2014 killing of Michael Brown led to an idea that woke him up at 4 a.m. That idea became Black Men Smile, a movement amplifying the revolutionary power of Black joy. TheoEd Orlando 2026 theoed#talk-carltonmackey

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