 We believe that singing is about the collection of voice, voice, and power, high-pattern, gesture, and attitude, power, high-pattern. So that means that we have the expectation for you to be with us. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. So even if you know that you are told that, you tell easily about your voice, voice, and power, then just put some bread around it and it won't have it. Then just bread around it. Make it do it, it do. You know? It's all about your attention. That's it. All right, so we're going to... We're going to teach a song. We're going to teach a song based on the Chinese proverb. So if you already know that you've built that dude, please sing with us, but we'll teach you to the rest. All right, y'all ready? So this song is made famous and was taught to us by Nisei Parkuna. And it's based on the Chinese proverb. And it's called the Chinese proverb. All right? So the words are... And I'm going to say them and I expect you to repeat after me. Where there's light in the soul, beauty in the person. And when there is beauty in the person, there's harmony in the home. And when there is harmony in the home, there is honor in the nation. And when there's honor in the nation, there's peace in the word, we're gonna go through it again, all right? Y'all, don't be out right, I promise it's gonna be all right. Where there's light in the soul, there's beauty in the person, and when there's beauty in the person, there's harmony in the home. And when there's harmony in the home, there's honor in the nation, there's peace in the word, all right? All right, let's start singing on this third time. When there's light in the soul, there is beauty in the person, when there is beauty in the person, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the nation, when there is harmony in the nation, there is peace in the person, there is beauty in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is harmony in the nation, when there is harmony in the nation, there is peace in the person. When there is harmony in the nation, when there is harmony in the nation, there is peace in the world. Okay, give yourselves a hand. I come here by plane, train, automobile, hitchhiking. We have saved our pennies. We put things together and made it happen. So I'm so glad that you guys are here to join in this wonderful, wonderful celebration, 50 years of Free Southern Theater. And for some of you who might be asking the question, well, who are you anyway, lady? My name is Stephanie McKee and I'm the Artistic Director of Juma Production. And while I was thinking of this convening, I received an email from Leslie Allen. She's the daughter of Sarah Allen, who was a former FST member. Leslie told me that she had some FST memorabilia and she wanted to send it as we were preparing for this convening and the celebration. It's funny because that package came just at a time when I was starting to get frustrated with the lack of resources and time, and then I found that package sitting on my desk when I walked in. And inside I found invitations, programs, notes, planning documents dating all the way back to 1969. I would also find a letter from Mr. John O'Neill. It was dated, it was sent to Sarah Allen for the FST funeral back in 1985. And as I read that letter, it felt like it had been sealed in a time capsule and had arrived on that day and said, don't open until this day. And inside that letter, John would say that the sign of the times clearly indicated that another movement, much like that of the 60s, is inevitable. That movement will need its own expression from art and culture. Those who set out to do work in that movement will need to know what we tried to do and how we fared. They will need to know about our failures as well as our successes. That knowledge will help them to be more effective in the work that they said for themselves. It is our job to make sure that the information is there for them to find and that enough people know how to tell them where to look in order to find it. It's like my mother used to tell me, the cook is not finished until the dishes are cleaned. Indeed, we have more work to do. It's in this spirit that we gather to examine an extraordinary chapter. By the founders and alumni of Free Southern Theater. We also hope to look at another chapter filled with a younger generation of artists, of cultural workers, of organizers that have been impacted by the work of Free Southern Theater. I think I speak for everyone when I say to you, Free Southern Theater alumni, that you have added to our works and to our lives. Thank you so much for being here. We still have work to do. We're going to have a good time while we're here, but we're going to do work. One of those things that's really important is about the documentation and the telling of our story. I was really struck by the title of the book, Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater. It's in that spirit that we'll be doing that documentation. There have been several ways I want to take time to kind of introduce you to a few things that you may have noticed or not have noticed when you came in. So out here, you notice some really beautiful, colorful banners that are hanging that have a timeline of the Free Southern Theater and also June Bug Productions. It's hanging right out here on this side. And we have some students that are here. They're part of the social innovation class. And so they took on the challenge. They asked us the question, what is the challenge that June Bug is facing right now? And I said, well, beyond money and resources and time. She said, yes, what else? So I told them one of the things was we were planning this convening. We wanted to look at documentation, but we wanted something that wasn't stale. We wanted something that was fully participatory. And this is what the students created, this interactive sort of timeline. So they will find you and they will ask, they will say, hey, can you come and take a picture? You get a picture to keep with yourself and a picture to pin right up on this timeline about where you intersected and tell your story about how you were intersected. So we want you to do that at your leisure. You will see this here and you will also see it at the Ashi Cultural Arts Center up on the wall. So have a good time with it. Remember your story is just going to make you remember things that happened, right? But 50 years ago, it wasn't exactly yesterday, right? So there's another group of people that came. They are where I'm at. This is my documentation team. Can I have you come out? They're behind some places. Can you raise your hand? My documentation team right here. So we have Mr. Chenness Pettigrew. We have Jason Foster. We have Ethan Johnson. And we have Lizzie Cooper Davis. And then we have Melissa Cardona. This happens in a couple of ways. They will be, yes, documenting the entire thing. It is also being live streamed for today and on Sunday. Then they also may pull your cocktail and ask to do an interview. And so they're going to have a little interview station over there. If they pull your cocktail and ask you to come, if you feel like it, then we would love for you to share your story and your time with us. And then beyond that, Ms. Melissa Cardona will be taking some wonderful photographs. One is you put a face to the name so that you knew all the different ways that this is happening. And of course, if anybody is against that, then please let us know. And of course we'll honor what it is that you're feeling at that time. Are we good with that? Yes. Yes. So we got one more thing to show. Inside your packet, you will notice beyond all of this stuff that's happening in New Orleans because this weekend in New Orleans, let me just share with you, it's like a perfect storm of events all happening this particular weekend. So we've just taken the ability to just, took that opportunity to share with you some of the things that are happening in and around the place. There is a form, it's an intake form that's there that has some questions for you. We would like for you to fill that out. This is a way for us to kind of, for you to share your story in a different way. Has a list of questions? They're very brief questions. If you would be so kind as to fill that out, and I see already, Lizzie, can you hold it up? Someone was a wonderful person and filled it out already and turned it in. So let's just follow that model, if you will. Just fill that out. And Lizzie Cooper Davis is the person that you want to hand that to. Okay, if you have any questions, we have our interns that are out here. Matter of fact, if I get somebody to knock on that door really quickly, and have them come in, I want you to know that this weekend was really done and put together by a tremendous amount of volunteer support. I've got to put an emphasis on that. Volunteer support. And my two interns right here have been rock stars to that. So I just want to take time to acknowledge and to thank you so much for sharing your time and your energy. I'd love to bring to the stage my friend, my colleague, Ms. Tafara, Walter Muhammad. So, like Stephanie said, my name is Tafara, and I work at the Highlander Research Education Center in Newmark, Tennessee. I'm the lead of cultural programs there. So I have the distinct honor of driving my cane and helping to have a conversation with people that are equivalent of rock stars to me in my mind as a child that grew up in a black theater. So if I get a little bit frustrated, it's really because I've been on and I'm having a moment. So I would like to call these individuals to the stage. I would like to call Mr. John O'Neill, who had John O'Neill I was about five years old. And he doesn't remember. But he came to my home community and did a storyteller workshop with the kids in my neighborhood. And recently, Mr. John came up to me and he said, Yeah, you're from Little Rock. I know a man named Bill Ronson from Little Rock. Do you know him? I said, that's my father. So this is Mr. John O'Neill, one of the founders of the Presenter Theater. The next person that I would like to call to the stage is Dr. Doris Durby. I met Dr. Durby, but I have read her writing, so I'm very excited. The next person that I would like to call to the stage is Mr. Roscoe Orden. And it's Dr. Jenner Ward. So what's going to happen is we're going to have a conversation. This is less of a moderator panel and more of a conversation with our elders. Is that all right? Because we're going to have to pass this microphone. So we're just going to have a conversation with our elders. So just we know that you have the pyos in your booklet. And we know that we're a little bit behind the time, so we're going to try to make a dance to what we got. Y'all ready? So, Y'all ready? You want to say something before we start? So this is the first question that we have prepared. Why did the free service here arise at 2 o'clock? What happened? Talk about it. We were at 5 o'clock one morning in Jackson. The adult literacy, I turned to him to write a book that people, adults who did not know how to read, could read when they got to read it. We kind of failed in that job. But we had a great time trying it together. And we were in Gilbert, Moses, rest his soul. I had fallen into a friendship of a strange nature. We fought all the time, virtually everything. But it was a friendship. And one night we were sitting at the apartment we shared on... What street was that? The Maple Street. It was the Maple Street of our apartment. Yeah. And we invited Darcy over for dinner. Darcy, we knew to be visual artists. And we've been talking about theater. Because what we felt like theater was the art form that included everything. All the arts. And so we thought it would be a good place to hang a whole bunch of hats. About 3 o'clock in the morning we've been talking about theater. And Darcy said, well, that's amazing to pass this sum of stuff. If theater means anything, anywhere, it should certainly mean something here. Why don't we start a theater? Silence fell into the room. Gilbert did this all the time when he was sitting down. And I did too. So we were sitting there shaking. The shaking stopped for each other. We ended up living in doors. There was no answer but to say, I guess you're right. So, Papa, can Dr. Darry talk a little bit about the initial vision around the theater? I was very active in theater circles in terms of going to all of the art form. Theater performances and very much involved with black artists. I thought my mission was to make sure both to identify and to create a place, whatever it was, and documentation for the black arts and black history. Because growing up in predominantly white elementary and junior high school, I didn't feel that it was available. So I was around with dancers, artists, theater people. So when I went to Mississippi and we were doing the literacy project, we were supposed to be developing programed instruction materials for adults to learn how to read, especially to pass literacy texts that were required to pass in order to register to vote and to vote. And so this was an adult literacy project based back to the college for one year. So I was also working with Hope O'Snick and Jackson and just trying to be where it would be available to whatever was needed. But John and Gilbert and I seem to have a lot in common in terms of the arts and goals, all of us being interested in furthering the education. We saw the Free Southern Theater as a vehicle to promote education and as John said, an umbrella. And the umbrella has a place where we were able to incorporate all of the arts with music, dance, visual, and the field. And we were talking about how the theater could be a vehicle to travel around and take a message and involve participation in the movement and in areas of critical thinking and creative expression because it was such a blackout of information in Mississippi. The TV station was controlled, the newspapers controlled, the films were controlled. You didn't see any, you just saw so little that was relevant to black people and our being able to accomplish things. So we thought that the theater, a theater that would be able to travel around and work in connection with civil rights movement would be a perfect fit. And I always happen behind here and a do-it-yourself person, got that from my parents and my grandparents. If it's not there, then, and you want it, make sure that it gets there. That's what we do. If it's not here, let's see how we can dream up a way for it to actually exist. So what had to happen in order for the theater to even manifest? How did it move from the conversation in the living room at dinner? Well, Tulu was a perfect place because Tulu College was a haven for civil rights workers, for students who were organizing and participating in demonstrations, etc. It was a small black college that had, the administration was in full support of the movement and you had professors there and particularly Bill Hutchinson who was the head of the drama department was very interested in talking about it and supporting us. And students who they imagined was like, oh wow, this is a great idea. We want to participate. And Kofo and Snake, they were behind us. Anything that we could do to expand the horizons and be there to promote the civil rights movement and the struggle, it just all came together. And Tulu College was so supportive of the whole idea and the project. The students were just fantastic. The faculty were so fantastic. The administration gave us resources in the school. That's how we were able to pull it off. Jerry was a student. Yeah, it definitely was a senior. Jerry might talk about it from the perspective of the students. You're taking my questions. I was 20 years old, senior of mathematics major who had great interest in writing and visual arts. And Bill Hutchinson who's a convention that didn't ask me to participate in some rather special conversations about the perspectives that was being shaped for FSD. And I agree to do that. Now if you're finally looking at just piece of paper, I don't trust my library so I wrote it all down. And I guess the question was, is this really a feasible project that really could help us to do critical thinking about the condition our condition was in in Mississippi at that time. You know, very segregated and closed society as Darius has said. So at all meetings I reviewed these initial drafts of the proposal with Bill and Darius, Gilbert and John. And what struck me was that I had been doing things with drama for some time, but I had never thought of drama as a weapon. I think that never occurred to me. So this was a rather new idea. And then behind that amazement was my usual skepticism where I said, well, isn't the bloody drama that we're all a part of enough? You know, I mean we had people taking very risky ventures, making great sacrifices, coming back to campus, bloody advantage. And the local people of the civil rights movement and the mega narrative, but the little people in Mississippi were doing things and they had to stay there. Other people would come and go, they had to stay there. That was a part of what as a student I felt I admired the SNCC workers tremendously. And of course we had to all overcome what I call the paralysis of profound fear. You don't know the paralysis of profound fear in 2013. The shutdown of the government was kindergarten compared to what we had to go through. So wasn't this emotional cause of empathy drama enough? Obviously not. I had tremendous admiration for Doris as a person because she was brilliant and brave. And I often laughed at John's philosophical pronouncements. That's why that literacy book didn't get written because no one would have been able to read it. And through the other institution we had on campus which was a social science forum sponsored by Dr. Ernst Barinski, I had met Gilbert. And I liked Gilbert because he was so bad and bold and spoke up, said what was on his mind. So my admiration for these people in addition to other interests led me to say yes. Tougaloo should give as much support to this enterprise as possible. The college had a strong tradition going back to 1869 of supporting forms of resistance of being a thorn in the side of white supremacist Mississippi. And everyone there learned sooner or later that we had to resist gross injustice. It was the right space then for developing and implementing social evils. State-supported terrorism. I'm going to come back to that at some point. State-supported terrorism. You think that's new? You shouldn't have been born in Mississippi. And our entitlement that was had a brilliant wall between us and them, our entitlement through constitutional rights, our nation has been set up to serve indigenous peoples a nation of hypocrites. So cultivating non-academic audiences, people who didn't attend Tougaloo College, but who had genuine interest in their freedom to bring theater to them was very, very important. It was a capital idea, but more than that it was a moral thing to do. Thank you very much, Dr. Warren. I would like to direct this question first to Mr. Orman. What kinds of conversation about culture and the civil rights movement arose as a result of the work of the Free Southern Theater, do you think? If that makes sense, let me read it again. What kind of conversations about culture and the civil rights movement arose as a result of the Free Southern Theater's work? And anybody can answer. Well, Free Southern Theater I became introduced to or aware of as a young 21-year-old acting professional in New York City. I was actually performing in production with the renowned activist theater creator and songwriter Oscar Brown Jr., who was one of my mentors, friends, and advisors, and colleagues. I was actually on stage with him in New York at the Gramercy Arts Theater doing a production called The Worlds of Oscar Brown Jr. He came into the dressing room one day with a village voice article about this troupe of young theater activists who were touring plays, revolutionary plays about the issues of the civil rights throughout the Deep South in Mississippi and Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee. And he brought that to my attention because in his mind that's where I need to be. That's what he said. He said, Rosto, this is where you need to be. And after reading the article, I agreed with him. I said, wow, because by then I had been somewhat involved in not just following the movement, but I was at the march on Washington and was a part of that whole feeling of change that was happening in this country. So I set up an appointment with one of the founders of the Free Southern Theater who was visiting New York at the time, Mr. John O'Neill. And in the course of that meeting, through John's indescribable philosophical musings, I was completely sold on the idea of what an incredible life changing experience this would be. And also what an important contribution I would be making if I could bring my gifts and talents to this company. And he convinced me of that, you know, on one meeting. So within a few months I was on a plane hitting south. And I will mention that one really amazingly serendipitous occurrence during my trip was we were changing planes in Atlanta. And while waiting at the gate for my connecting flight to New Orleans, which is where the theater had moved by then, I noticed a commotion of, you know, some rumblings. And I saw this group of maybe five or six black men coming towards the gate. And this was a time and a place where there were very few of us blacks in the airports traveling and flying around the country. And I was actually the only one until I saw this group coming. And there was a commotion among all these white passengers who were obviously alarmed by the fact that one of those men was Martin Luther King Jr. himself, who came to the gate and upon seeing me he came right to me with his hand extended. Now, you could imagine the shock and delight and amazement to know that Dr. King himself was giving me this benediction to come south. He came and shook my hand and in the most magnanimous way was embracing the fact that I was heading, you know, to this troop of young performers. And I kind of saw it as a real benediction and an encouragement for what was to come. Of course, the other passengers there were in total shock and consternation that this man who, most of us today don't realize the fact that the majority of white America did not believe in Dr. King's dream at that time. He was truly a revolutionary figure at that time in history. But for those of us who had become among his followers, he was a tremendous force. So that's the story of how I got here to New Orleans and became a member of the early incarnation of the Free Southern Theater. Would you like to also address some of the same questions, Dr. Derby? I know. You wanted to restate the question, you could. The question was about conversation. Yes, ma'am. Well, we certainly had a lot of conversations about how we were going to support the theater financially.