Introduced by Tyler Perry with a lengthy speech, Ledisi gave one of the best performances of the night at the 2025 BET Awards, stunning the crowd in a red gown as she sang “BLCKWMN” the second single from her latest album The Crown, as the Perry-directed music video played behind her.
The director started his speech by telling a story about his then 3-year-old son following his footsteps on the beach and segued into a commentary on the Trump administration’s assault on the Department of Education. “They are removing our books from libraries, they’re removing our stories and our history, they are removing our names from government buildings,” he began. “It’s as if someone wants to erase our footprints because what we need to understand is that if our children don’t know our history, they won’t know our power. But the truth of the matter is, it’s impossible to erase our footprints because we left them on water.”
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He continued, “What I mean by that is we’ve been snatched from our homeland, brought across the ocean, and left footprints all the way to America. When they tried to silence a king named King to keep his voice down, it still echoes through generations to generations to generations because you cannot erase our footprints. They literally took the jewels out of the crowns in our crowns in Africa, put them in their own crowns, in their museums, trying to erase our history.”
Finally, he told the crowd that he wanted to be there personally to introduce Ledisi because he loved her song so much. “I wanted to be here today to introduce this next song because when I heard it, it’s an homage to to every black woman and every strong black woman, every black woman who’s vulnerable, every black woman who’s weak, every black woman who’s powerful — this song spoke to me.”
You can watch Ledisi’s performance below.
