cover art by Maryann Callery
“Part drama, part documentary, part
civics lesson, THE HAUNTING OF JIM CROW will leave you wanting to know much more
about its subjects: civil rights pioneer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall, the long-lived Dixiecrat icon Sen. Strom Thurmond and the mixed-race
daughter Thurmond never publicly acknowledged, Essie Mae Washington-Williams.
Playwright Allan Havis has foregrounded these three characters in this
ambitious panorama of American racial politics during the 1950s….
With President Eisenhower sitting on the fence, attorney Marshall fought to
win, then to implement state-by-state, the decision that dismantled, at least
for a time, segregation in public schools. Behind the scenes, Thurmond was
lobbying justices Hugo Black and Earl Warren to vote the other way, while
meeting in his Capitol Hill office with the teenage Essie Mae Washington sweet
and heartbreaking in her ladylike gentility, her restraint and unspoken need).
Havis frames the whole with a narration by a contemporary Los Angeles
teacher, Leza, who was a student of Washington-Williams. Because the secret
daughter revealed her identity after Thurmond's death in 2002, Leza wants
desperately to know how Essie Mae was able to maintain her silence for so long.
Leza is far fiercer than her teacher ever was. So the play manages to dramatize
many current tensions in the continuing and far-from-resolved dynamics of race
in the United States.
….THE HAUNTING OF JIM CROW is one of those town-gown collaborations
we see all too rarely in…theater. Because it presents a multifaceted view of
history–and shows in clear terms that class divisions, real estate values and
the rollback of affirmative action have created a new form of segregation in the
public schools–the play has strong educational value.”
Anne Marie Welsh, Union-Tribune (San Diego)
originally produced on radio by K P B S, San Diego
5 M, 3 F
I S B N: 0-88145-278-5, $12.95