“This isn’t gonna matter,” says a tall boy with big hair, as he leads his group of high school classmates to sit, wide-legged, in the back of the cafeteria. Chairs are arranged in rows, and a big screen in front projects images of the American South in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. Water fountains labeled Colored onlyand Whites only; the Ku Klux Klan in robes and coned hats around a burning pyre; beautifully dressed and pressed people, black and white, protesting together; coiffed white women shouting profanities at a young black girl, faces mangled; a black man hanging from a tree, lynched; the Washington Monument.
The last image is our cue. Audrey Martells begins to walk from the back towards the stage, singing, “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain….” Soon the song would be passed to me across the room to continue.
We are at New Heights Academy, in New York City’s Harlem. The four of us, two black performers and two white, take in our audience of boys, almost men, and girls on the cusp of womanhood. Our playwright sits amidst them, running the slides and keeping track of time. One student enters late, her lips painted springtime pink, four cellophane birthday balloons tied to her wrist and floating overhead. She chooses to sit in the back row, alone.
We mingle around them as we prepare to perform our second consecutive show of “March On!” It is a staged documentary telling the story of August 28, 1963, when 250,000 people of all colors gathered together on the Mall in Washington, DC — against the seemingly impossible odds of that era, the mandate of segregation, the heat, the distances traveled, the threat of violence. Yet everyone stood peacefully, demanding Jobs! Justice! Equality! for Black people.
The documentary is told through the narratives of three real people who marched that day: two 20-somethings named Ellen Frankel and Carl Berry, and a teenager named Don Kelley. We speak their words, interwoven with stories and facts of the civil rights movement.
This theatre piece was created by Blackberry Productions to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. It has been performed at Frederick Douglas High School; from the pulpit at The First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem; on the stage at York College in Jamaica Queens; at The Marion Anderson Theatre at CUNY’s Aron Davis Hall. We have brought the piece to community organizations of the elderly, many who marched themselves; to disabled and mentally challenged men and women; to public elementary and high schools.
The goal? To begin new conversations. Where are we today, racially speaking, and from where have we come? Do we speak openly about fear and otherness? What goes into making actual change, the elusive goal for which millions have risked their lives in the past? Where are we on our racial track towards equality in America in classrooms, on trains, in police departments, in the White House, in education in the South and in the North, in the Tea Party and within liberal circles? Is there equality in this country today?
At New Heights Academy in the fluorescent light, I am very aware of being the only white woman in the room. Most of the students in this audience are either immigrants or first-generation from the Dominican Republic. I am self-conscious. I stand out, representing something to them, or maybe I represent nothing. I am clear that inside my own self there is conflict; on this day in 2015, it is not quiet inside my head.
Perhaps the boy with big hair, head looking down as he spoke to his crew, is right to say that it isn’t gonna matter. One 45-minute piece of theatre — how will it matter? It may be easier if it doesn’t.
Regardless, I ask a teacher to move them up front.
When we began rehearsals for March On!, we talked about the courage it took for each attendee of the 1963 march to get to DC. They came from the Deep South, from the West, the East, the North, from communities small and large. The one commitment that every attendee made was non-violence. They had to know that violence might happen towards them, that it probably would — but each and every person who attended simply would not fight back, no matter the rage and pain inside of them, or the hate and fear coming at them.
My fellow performers and I talked about our own courage: Would we have gone? Would we go today? Would we be so resolute in the face of all at risk? Did our belief in the need for change outweigh our fear of being hurt?
Daniel Carlton, the playwright, took on the project after his friend and Blackberry Production colleague Stephanie Berry, who conceived and directed this piece, asked him to join her. “[I was] interested in how History takes the story away from the people,” he said. “It becomes told in the perspective of the scholars and the journalists, rarely told in the perspective of the people who were there.”
So Stephanie and Daniel found a group of people who went to the march and interviewed them. The play begins in the voice of a white journalist on the job, witnessing the thousands of folks calmly taking over the DC lawns, early on the morning of August 28. Our characters’ narratives threaded between civil rights stories and the words of Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Gloria Richardson, Bull Connor. “The young girl Claudette Colvin from Birmingham, Alabama, who sat in the front of the bus a year before Rosa Parks,” said Stephanie. “I felt bad her story was never told!”
“I also wanted to acknowledge the people whose sacrifices, made for justice, inspired the civil rights movement,” she added. She related the story of the Chicago woman Mamie Till. Her 14-year-old son Emmett had gone to visit family in Money, Mississippi, and was brutally murdered for supposedly “whistling” at a white woman from whom he bought candy. Mamie Till never gave up for a second. She was determined and fought to make sure her son’s body came home. She made the long trip down South and endured being spit at, threatened. And she brought Emmett back, against impossibility. She insisted on having an open casket funeral in Chicago, so, as Stephanie said, “America could see the ugly face of racism!”
Music — in particular, freedom songs and hymns — were integral to the show. “Everyone has heard at least one of them,” said Stephanie. “They are in our bodies somewhere, bringing all kinds of music together.” Daniel talked about Matt Jones a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights activist and freedom singer, who wrote hundreds of songs every time he went to jail. He would have his fellow prisoners sing them together.
