The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an event that has held interest in the American public for five decades. Many stories about that tragedy were published and told, but few from the perspective of African-Americans in Dallas who experienced that day on November 22, 1963.
Playwrights Camika Spencer and Kyndal Robertson, both Dallas natives, were tasked to tackle that black perspective head-on, to examine the grief, fear and disappointment among a community in Dallas that had put so much hope in the political future in the nation’s 35th president.
The theatrical production, Black at the Assassination examines what Dallas looked like for blacks in the early 1960’s and the deep grief that resulted when this national tragedy took place in their own city. The play focuses mainly on the day of the assassination.
The dramatic depiction is the brainchild of TeCo Productions’ Founder and Executive Artistic Director Teresa Coleman-Wash.
“Kennedy was important and revered in the African-American community, but as far as I was able to determine, no story had been told about how black people in Dallas felt about the assassination,” Coleman-Wash said.
She went on to say, “There was a hush that lingered for years over the community devastated and traumatized almost as though this was something they could not talk about.”
But during readings staged to help develop the script, Coleman-Wash told theGrio that people were very moved to tell their stories. It was that feedback that began to shape the production into vignettes created from research and interviews of people who were either there that day, or old enough to recall the impact of the assassination on their lives.
1963 was a tumultuous year. It was a time of painful, sometimes violence-tainted demands for social change across the south. In May, Birmingham Alabama Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordered dogs and water cannon to be used on freedom riders. In June, NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home in Mississippi. In August, over 200-thousand people marched on Washington demanding jobs, equality and social change. In September four little girls, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins were slaughtered while attending Sunday school when a bomb ripped though Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Riots erupted leading to the deaths of two more black youths.
It took those bloody days in Birmingham to move JFK to take an assertive stand. As violent confrontations against freedom riders and activists in ’63 rose to a crescendo, the president challenged congress to end Jim Crow— once and for all– saying “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.” He noted that no white American would willingly trade places with those who endure daily humiliations because of their race. “Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
Many held out hope that President Kennedy would lead the nation in the right direction, noting that in October of 1962 when James Meredith braved threats against his life and riots to become the first black student enrolled in Ole Miss, President Kennedy sent 5,000 federal troops to quell the violence.
It was also noted that in October 1960 Dr. King along with about 300 students were arrested in Atlanta participating in a sit-in at Rich’s department store. The students were later released, but King was held on charges of parole violation. It turned out that King was paroled months earlier after driving with a suspended license. He was sentenced to six months of hard labor at Georgia State Prison at Reidsville for the violation, but then, presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, his brother and campaign manager, helped secure King’s release. That intervention was used as political capital to help Kennedy narrowly defeat Richard Nixon in the presidential election.
So there was a lot of hope riding on Kennedy’s presidency, especially in Dallas, a city that had the reputation of boycotting the national civil rights movement being led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Blacks in Dallas were under constant pressure to ignore and shun the national movement for civil rights. Whites had even gone so far as to produce public service announcements with white politicians telling black people to be “calm and patient.”
King, who visited the city twice, was said to have left disappointed in the lack of participation and interest in his rallies.
So there was a story to be told to the new generation of Dallas residents. And in true griot style, the play allowed art to intersect with history. Co-playwright Camika Spencer said “The play allowed us to put a face on the Dallas civil rights movement in a way that is not being taught. We learned as children of the ‘70’s the national role, but we were not made aware of how much of a part Dallas played in the overall struggle for civil rights.”
Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1957 making segregation illegal, the Dallas of the ‘60’s was the largest American city where segregation was still practiced. She told theGrio that in 1963, the KKK was still a powerful force in the city, and the political conversation about civil rights was controlled by whites.
Aptly, the play has an important classroom scene where elementary school students examined the significance of the president’s visit to Dallas. The classroom is a significant setting to depict a time when desegregation was at the core of the civil rights movement. “Why should I want to go to school with white people?” a student asks, “…they don’t want us and I don’t want them.” The vignette was important says Spencer, because as she put it, “Showed how children were processing segregation and their personal expectations at the time reflected how civil rights were being justified and suppressed.”
But the death of the president did effect change in Dallas. Spencer told theGrio that as she got deeper into researching the play, the information gathered grew her from the inside. “My identity was verified as a person of Dallas.” She went on to say, “With each interview and each story that was told to me, my love for my city grew even more.”
The play’s co-writer Kyndal Robertson told theGrio that the vignettes were true accounts of what happened in the classroom, at meetings and in church. The writing team sought out people who were present in that time, and they were amazed by their responses. “Nobody though to ask what black people felt in Dallas and at first they were slow to open up. But as we continued to talk and share experiences we heard from others, we would get amazing stories of historical accuracy.”
It was recounted in the interviews the somber and painful black church services that followed the assassination in Dallas. The play painstakingly recreates the mood in song and images described by theater-goers as “powerful and evocative.”
There was a scene in the play where a group of teachers gathering for a strike, pondered what action should be taken to speed desegregation of the schools. Should it be immediate open protests or a more patient approach to support school board candidates who would champion desegregation? The calm and patient approach had led to continued frustration and the feeling of powerlessness. The philosophy of patience and acceptance was supported and endorsed by the white establishment at the time. Whereas violent confrontation had the potential for the chaos and bloodshed that was being played out on the national stage, Dallas never experienced open insurrection or bloody confrontations in its struggle for desegregation.
Dallas forged its own path toward civil rights. Texas favorite son Lyndon B. Johnson became the next president in succession. He fought for and signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. And Ron Kirk became the first African-American mayor of Dallas in 1995.
He is quoted as saying, ”In my mind, I’m the fifth first black mayor of Dallas, because people don’t realize [former Mayor of Los Angeles] Tom Bradley, [former Mayor of Atlanta] Maynard Jackson, [former Mayor of San Francisco] Willie Brown, and [former Mayor of Kansas City and current Missouri congressman] Emmanuel Cleaver, all were either born in or within 30 miles of Dallas.”
And that’s an enduring legacy rooted in a civil rights movement that struck its own path.
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