Lipscomb, American Baptist host artistic afternoon exploring Nashville civil rights history
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The Actor’s Bridge Ensemble and the Amun Ra Theatre will present a free reading of Ordinary Heroes, a new play based on the experiences of Nashvillians during the civil rights movement, on Saturday, Sept. 16, at a special event organized by Lipscomb University, American Baptist College, Fisk University and the Nashville Public Library.
“Celebrating Unsung Heroes,” 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., Sept. 16, on the American Baptist College campus, will celebrate the art, voices and history of Nashville’s civil rights movement with a reading from the play, photographs by Carlton Wilkinson and Harold Lowe, and a talk by Fisk professor Linda Wynn on the role of women in the movement.
The American Baptist College campus is located at 1800 Baptist World Center Drive, off of Whites Creek Pike.
Ordinary Heroes, written by Actor’s Bridge founder Vali Forrister and Amun Ra founder Jeff Obafemi Carr, is based on oral histories from the Nashville Public Library and interviews the writers held with eyewitnesses of the turbulent times in the 1960s. Carr, who recently appeared in the movie The Second Chance with Michael W. Smith, and Forrister, one of a group who founded Actor’s Bridge in 1996, began conducting interviews two years ago, thanks to a grant from the Metro Arts Commission.
The play combines monologues, narrative, poetry, music and dramatizations to present the experiences of ordinary foot soldiers in Nashville’s historic civil rights conflicts, said Forrister. The play is designed to “tell the stories behind the stories,” Carr said.
Ordinary Heroes will be staged with an inter-racial cast, and Forrister and Carr will both be present to answer questions about the work.
In February, Actor’s Bridge and Amun Ra will present a full staging of the play, sponsored by Lipscomb and Fisk universities, held in the historic Fisk Memorial Chapel.
Celebrating Unsung Heroes will also feature photographs by Wilkinson, the son of Nashville civil rights leader DeLois Wilkinson. His exhibition “On the Altars of Liberty,” features churches that played a prominent role in the movement. The Nashville Public Library will also display selections from its collection of photos by Harold Lowe, a former photographer with the Tennessean who documented the civil rights era.
The event is the first of two community gatherings to be held as part of a history class, called “Beloved Community, Then and Now,” held jointly at Lipscomb University and American Baptist College. Lipscomb and ABC students meet together to learn about Nashville’s role in the civil rights movement and the role religious leaders and faith communities played in the protests.
“Nashville was the ‘university of nonviolence’ and a significant player in the civil rights movement,” said Richard Goode, chair of Lipscomb’s Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, and co-creator of the class. “In many ways, the whole process of sit-ins as a mass movement was designed and implemented here. A group of Nashville students learned the theory in Nashville and then went on throughout the South to challenge Jim Crow segregation and violations of civil rights.”
Many of those student leaders who later showed up in history books originally walked the halls of American Baptist College where the class meetings will take place, said Janet Wolf, ABC’s Chair of Church Vocations and co-creator of the class with Goode. Offering this class is a chance for the college to “reclaim its history,” she said.
Speakers invited to the class include C.T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel and the Rev. James Lawson, all individuals involved in student protests here in Nashville who went on to become civil rights leaders throughout the Southeast and the nation.
For more information on the Sept. 16 event, contact Andrea Blackman, coordinator of the Civil Rights Oral History Project at the Nashville Public Library, at 862-5782.