Everyone’s heard of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. But what about Septima Clark, Jo Ann Robinson, or widow Susie McDonald, who was arrested on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus several months before Parks famously refused to give up her seat?
“They arrested her because she wouldn't get up for a white person on a bus. A 77-year old Black woman,” noted playwright Sharon Ponton.
Ponton's play, The Freedom Movement’s Leading Ladies, is an imagined conversation among women key to the Civil Rights Movement whose names aren’t as familiar, but should be, says NAACP Amherst chapter president Bev Jones, who attended segregated schools as a student and later taught elementary schoolers during integration.
“Now, in history books, everybody knows Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks,” said Jones, “but there are so many other people who had big parts, you know, in the Civil Rights Movement.”
Women such as Septima Clark, whose “citizen education” programs helped Black people pass literacy tests and register to vote; Jo Ann Robinson, whose quick organizing ignited the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycotts; and Fannie Lou Hamer, brutalized for registering to vote, who co-founded the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, and spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
“Everybody thinks about it being a man thing,” said Jones, “but women played a huge role in the Civil Rights Movement, and so many of them got left behind or not told about in history books and things of that nature.”
Ponton’s five-woman play, formatted as a 1960s-era radio show, includes Gloria Witt, a business woman and former congressional candidate who plays an NAACP leader who helped birth the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, for short.
“I am Ella Baker,” said Witt. “I live it every day. So it’s personal, it’s personal for me. ”
Witt sees lessons from the play and the campaign trail.
"I think the leading ladies movement and our moment in today’s history, it’s almost running parallel,” Witt said. “Now, we have a generation of children that don’t appreciate the fight and what the movement was for civil rights. And so, when you’re trying to register people to vote, and young people are telling me, ‘My vote does not matter,’ we have a problem. Too many young people don’t understand the educational piece yet, but we’re going to learn it, because, about three or four years from now, people aren’t going to get opportunities. They’re not going to go off to college with loans because the loans aren’t going to be there. They’re not going to be able to afford a house because the job that you end up with because you don’t have an education is going to keep you in poverty. This is what we’re talking about.”
Bev Jones, the NAACP chapter president, calls the show a ballot box reminder.
“We prayed-in, kneeled-in, walked-in, sat-in, we did the whole nine yards here in little Amherst County and Lynchburg,” said Jones, “and so voting was important, and we instilled it in our children who instilled it in their children and our families are still very strong voters, because, if not, you suffer the consequences, OK? Voting is No. 1.”
“We’ve got to make our history important in our regular lives, so that our children and our grandchildren know what happened and what was achieved, and not let it be lost,” Ponton said. “And I don’t know if my play can get somebody, motivate somebody, to do things like that. I just know I want people to live a full and happy life and that it shouldn't depend on whether you’re white or Black or brown or any other color. We all are here together, and all live together, and we all have to have the same rights. Period.”
Ponton’s play, which debuted earlier in spring, will have two encore performances: at Lynchburg’s Commerce Theater July 25, and at Second Stage Theater in Amherst Aug. 22.
“And if the men aren’t responding, raise up a bunch of women,” said Witt. “I’m going to raise up a bunch of women, my own leading ladies. To hell with the men! They can catch up later! ‘Cause we got work to do. We got work to do!”