Playwright Blackmon Lowery. Photo credit: C. Stephen Hurst
WINSTON-SALEM – Lynda Blackmon Lowery‘s play, Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: my story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March, tells the remarkable history of the countless young people, including Blackmon Lowery, who bravely marched and demonstrated during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ’60s.
This important story, in the form of a moving play, was presented on Wednesday in a Readers’ Theatre format at the Benton Convention Center. A community choir, composed of some of the best singers in the Triad, wove powerful Freedom Songs throughout the dialogue.
Actress Tonya Pinkins. Photo credit: C. Stephen Hurst
The brilliant Tonya Pinkins read the part of Blackmon Lowery in the staged reading. Mabel P. Robinson Emerging Artist Award-winners DoMonique Warren, Nola Adepoju, Quaz Degraft and other actors did a fine job reading the other roles. And kudos to the American Sign Language interpreter, Tabitha Allen-Draft.
Born in 1950 in segregated Selma, Ala., Blackmon Lowery was in jail nine times before she was 15. Her mother had died when Blackmon Lowery was 7, because a blood transfusion did not reach her in time at the Black hospital, and she was denied help at the white hospital.
Blackmon Lowery was left to care, with her father, for her younger siblings. She wrote that she knew segregation was bad for her and bad for other people. “I knew that just because things are one way, it doesn’t mean they have to stay that way.”
After hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak when she was 13, Blackmon Lowery resolved to change the way Black people are treated in America and to pave the way for a better future for all people. She trained for a year to be a non-violent protester.
“We would march, get arrested, and go to jail,” Blackmon Lowery wrote. “The Selma Movement was a kids’ movement. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were making history.” Young people were recruited for the movement, because they didn’t have families to support or jobs to lose. All they had to lose were their lives. Sad to say, some did, and others came close.
In the play, Blackmon Lowery described the tight-knit neighborhood in which she grew up.
“Our community was our whole world,” Blackmon Lowery wrote. “The Ku Klux Klan would ride through the Black neighborhoods, hiding their faces.”
The whole play is a truly wonderful, funny and maddening tale of the struggle that Black people and their allies have had to make for the basic rights to vote and to be in America.
Blackmon Lowery told of being tear-gassed, shocked with cattle prods and beaten by billy clubs – inhuman treatment by the police who should have been protecting them. After Bloody Sunday, she struggled with PTSD.
Photo credit: C. Stephen Hurst
While all of this turbulence and violence were happening, Freedom songs were emerging and re-emerging, songs like “Up Above My Head” made famous by the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe. We heard “This Little Light of Mine,” “Oh, Freedom Over Me,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” and more. Most times, the audience joined in and sang along.
The famous march from Selma to Montgomery faced many roadblocks. Initial marches were canceled or declared unlawful. Finally, after a 50-mile hike, nights spent sleeping on the ground, and harassment all along the way, 25,000 marchers descended on Montgomery on March 25, 1965. In August of that same year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.
Blackmon Lowery’s play was based on a book by the same name, and I just bought the audio version on Audible, so I can listen to it in more depth – although I know I’ll miss the choir.
Full Cast. Photo credit: C. Stephen Hurst
Produced by the N.C. Black Repertory, which also produces the International Black Theatre Festival biennially, there was only one performance of Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom at this year’s Festival. That’s too bad. See it however you can read or listen to the book. Everybody should see it; it is such an important part of American history that should not be forgotten.
Besides Turning 15, the International Black Theatre Festival is presenting the heritage, the history, and the newest of the American and African theatre experience with more than 120 theatrical performances, an international colloquium, a free film festival, and more.
For more information, visit www.ncblackrep.org, or 336-723-2266.
The International Black Theatre Festival runs through August 3.
