Tougaloo and Brown on the World Stage

For over half a century, the performing arts have been an important space for Tougaloo and Brown students to connect, play, think, move, and grow together. Early on in the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, students began utilizing plays and arts festivals to affirm Black life, explore Black history and culture, mobilize, and establish novel, more inclusive ways of being in the world. The importance of the arts is exemplified through two initiatives in the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership: the 1968–1969 Black Arts Festivals and the 2012–2022 Black Lavender Experience theater intensives.

Foundations

In the 1960s, many considered Tougaloo College “the cradle of the local Civil Rights Movement,” a more “safe haven” for activists, including those who organized the 1964 Mississippi Black voter registration drive known as Freedom Summer. 1 1 Julius Fleming, Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (New York University Press, 2022), 92; John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (University of Illinois Press, 1995), 225. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) designed the Freedom Summer project to strengthen local civil rights organizations and draw national attention to the violence Black voters encountered when trying to exercise their Constitutional rights. In conjunction with the voter registration drive, SNCC leaders organized Freedom Schools where volunteers taught reading, math, writing, Black history, civics, and drama to over two thousand Black children and adults at forty-one sites across the state. 2 2 George W. Chilcoat and Jerry A. Ligon, “Theatre as an Emancipatory Tool: Classroom Drama in the Mississippi Freedom Schools,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 30, no. 5 (1998): 515–543, 516. SNCC leaders approached Freedom Summer this way because they recognized that “[b]y themselves, protest and political action” would not end Jim Crow segregation. 3 3 “Theater Group to Preview,” 1964, Mississippi Free Press, August 1, 3–6. The Freedom Schools offered “[B]lack Mississippians an education that public schools would not supply; one that both provided intellectual stimulation and linked learning to participation in the movement to transform the South’s segregated society.” 4 4 Daniel Perlstein, “Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1990): 297–324, 297.

Theater programs developed at Tougaloo were an essential part of the curriculum. SNCC leaders believed that theater stimulated “critical thought necessary for effective participation in a democratic society,” and that documentary style plays in particular could fill the “educational and cultural voids” produced by anti-Black racism. 5 5 “Theater Group to Preview,” 1964, 6. In the months leading up to Freedom Summer, the Tougaloo College Drama Workshop birthed the Free Southern Theater, SNCC’s political theater arm. SNCC organizer Gilbert Moses directed the Workshop with co-founders Doris Derby and John O’Neal, with additional support from Tougaloo drama professor William “Bill” Hutchinson. 6 6 Free Southern Theater: A Documentary History of the South’s Radical Black Theater (Bobbs-Merrill, 1969); “William ‘Bill’ Hutchinson Obituary,” The Providence Journal, October 17, 2021. The ensemble researched and wrote original historical dramas that toured Freedom Schools, churches, and community centers across Mississippi and other Southern states. Inspired by what they saw, Freedom School students staged their own documentary dramas, which encouraged Black audiences to register to vote.

The liberatory, creative spirit at Tougaloo that produced the Free Southern Theater infused the undergraduate curriculum. For example, in 1968, the Afro-Caribbean lesbian writer Audre Lorde facilitated a poetry workshop on campus, culminating in the publication of an edited volume of student poetry called Pound. 7 7 Audre Lorde, ed., Pound, Tougaloo College Poetry Workshop, 2nd ed. (Hellcoal Press, 1969). In addition to the craft of writing, Lorde taught Tougaloo students to “[b]e who you are and act on your love,” powerful lessons that one student, Edgar Bishop, carried with him to Providence later that year when he joined the Brown-Tougaloo Exchange. 8 8 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Two Rivers,” Southern Cultures 26, no. 4 (2020): 140–145, 142.

When Black students arrived at Brown in the late 1960s, they encountered what Sheryl Brissett Chapman (Pembroke ‘71) described as a “very white, hostile world.” 9 9 Sheryl Brissett Chapman, “Interview with the Author,” October 4, 2023, in the author’s collection. Unlike at Tougaloo, African Americans constituted less than five percent of the Brown student body due to discriminatory admissions practices. There were few Black faculty, staff, or administrators, and fewer courses on the histories, intellectual traditions, and cultures of people of African descent. Many on campus viewed Black students with skepticism, dismissing them as “experiments” doomed to fail. Off campus, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, mass organizing to end poverty and racial discrimination, as well as the burgeoning movements for women’s and LGBTQ rights made every day feel charged.

Chapman knew something had to change so that she and the approximately eighty other Black students at Brown could survive. That change started when she connected with two other Black students, James Borders (Brown ’71) and Edgar Bishop (Tougaloo ’71). The three would produce some of the first Black cultural events on campus and initiate an artistic exchange between the two schools that celebrated and affirmed Black histories and cultures, nurtured students, demanded radical social change, and enriched both institutions.

The Black Arts Festivals

Black students needed creative, intellectual spaces that valued Black people and Black culture and where they could work to end anti-Black racism. In the fall of 1968, Chapman, Bishop, and Borders met with Ramona Wilkins (Brown ‘72), Zylpha Pryor (Brown ‘72), and other students to plan a series of artistic events. Throughout the planning process, Brown theater professor James Barnhill provided invaluable support.

The first Black Arts Festival occurred later that year, and was quickly followed by a second festival in March 1969. The festivals featured Pan-Africanist programming that included modern dance, South African folk tales, soul music, R&B, and African jazz. Opportunities to learn about Black history and organize politically were interspersed among the live performances. Just as important as the headliners were the soul food banquets, African fashion shows, and panel discussions with local and national Black leaders such as the poet Haki Madhubuti (then known as Don L. Lee), the jazz pianist Horace Silver, and the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, Hosea Williams. 10 10 Jane Trowbridge, “2nd Annual Black Arts Festival,” Brown Daily Herald, March 14, 1969, 1–3.

Buoyed by their success, students soon began staging plays by leading Black theater figures including Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, and Ben Caldwell, and writing their own plays about pressing contemporary issues. 11 11 Mike Kenny, “Black Theater Workshop: An Ambitious New Expression,” Brown Daily Herald, November 10, 1969, 2. “The ground was shifting,” Chapman explained. 12 12 Sheryl Brissett Chapman, “Interview with the Author,” 2023. Black students were determined to “create new political awareness,” build “the foundation for a new society of Black people,” and “expose the evils overt and covert of [America’s] sick society.” 13 13 Kenny, “Black Theater Workshop,” 2.

Drawing upon their collective knowledge of Black history, culture, and organizing, they used theater to create space for individual and collective growth, saving students’ lives, and changing Brown University. By 1974, their efforts had given birth to a host of new student organizations, including the Afro Dancers and Drummers, Sound Awareness (music ensemble), Nommo (writers group), and the Rites and Reason Theatre. George Houston Bass, who joined Brown in 1971 as the first faculty member to direct Rites and Reason, was crucial in fostering and sustaining a new and more welcoming atmosphere.

The Black Lavender Experience

Over the next four decades, both campuses, and the nation, transformed. The fields of theater and Black Studies, including scholarship on African American performance, expanded significantly. By the early 2000s, Civil Rights organizing had receded at Tougaloo, as had the arts, and the College had gained recognition as a training ground for future Black doctors and teachers. At Brown, student organizing led to the creation of the Department of Africana Studies and the installation of Rites and Reason as a site for the development of Black performance within the department. Yet, the percentage of African American students at Brown remained low.

Seeking to innovate teaching and learning through the Brown-Tougaloo Exchange during a 2011–2012 Brown-Tougaloo planning meeting, Karen Allen Baxter, then senior managing director of the Rites and Reason Theatre, suggested that Tougaloo students and faculty join Black Lavender. This storied Africana Studies course on Black LGBTQ theater was taught by Brown professor Elmo Terry-Morgan (Brown ’74), then the Artistic Director of Rites and Reason. Black Lavender focused on what Terry-Morgan described as “histories, experiences, thoughts, and issues” of LGBTQ folks of African descent through the lens of performance. 14 14 Elmo Terry-Morgan, The Black Lavender Experience (Brown University, 2015), syllabus, in the author’s collection. Coursework included opportunities to read, see, and create live theater, as well as a weeklong performance event called the Black Lavender Experience (BLX), which showcased student works alongside presentations by Black LGBTQ artists and scholars. 15 15 Rebecca Hardin-Thrift, a Tougaloo English professor, agreed with the decision to create the Black Lavender Experience. See Elmo Terry-Morgan, “Interview with the Author,” July 27, 2024, in the author’s collection.

In the fall of 2012, Brown broadcast BLX performances to Tougaloo via then-new live streaming technology. The weeklong program featured performances of the Mississippi-born playwright Renita Martin’s Lo She Comes, Sharon Bridgforth’s experimental jazz poem dyke/warrior-prayers, and Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwime’s play about homophobia in Uganda, A Missionary Position. After, faculty and students from both institutions met via live stream to discuss and reflect upon the work. As the session began, Karen Allen Baxter read an email from Tougaloo stating that the BLX live stream was one of the first public LGBTQ events on their campus in recent history. 16 16 Elmo Terry-Morgan, “The Evolution of Black Lavender: Keynote Address,” video, 2012, in the author’s collection.

Over the next ten years, the BLX theater intensive continued to explore questions of gender, sexuality, race, belonging, and performance on both campuses. In the spring of 2013, Tougaloo staged Martin’s Lo She Comes, which tells the story of a devoted sister seeking justice following the death of her brother, who was gay. A contingent from Brown traveled to Mississippi to see the show. In subsequent years, Tougaloo and Brown students met in Providence to study with emerging and established Black LGBTQ artists from Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the African Diaspora, including Ugandan-American playwright Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwime; cultural critic and music scholar Greg Tate; playwrights Shirlene Holmes, Christina Anderson, Lenelle Moise, Sharon Bridgforth, Djola Branner, and Chisa Hutchinson; artist/scholar E. Patrick Johnson, one of the founders of the field of Black Queer Studies in the US; trans scholar/artist/activists Azure D. Osborne-Lee and Travis Alabanza; filmmaker Yoruba Richen; and performers Daniel Alexander Jones and Stacyann Chin. 17 17 The Black Lavender Experience: Theatre and Conversations Sparked by Queer Artists, 10th annual BLX program, Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre, Brown University, 2018, in the author’s collection. The inclusion of these influential artists, scholars, and activists from Africa and the Diaspora ensured that conversations about Blackness, race, gender, and sexuality remained vibrant on campus, extending beyond the boundaries of the United States.

The BLX theater intensive has not been without its challenges. Organizing events requires open and ongoing communication about goals, expectations, personnel, logistics, timelines, resources, and other needs. At times, participants struggled to be on the same page. The COVID-19 pandemic further disrupted the collaboration. For ten years, however, a cohort of dedicated artists, educators, students, and activists found powerful ways to engage in pressing dialogues about Blackness, gender, and sexuality in ways that continue to reverberate today. For Black LGBTQ students who had few, if any, positive examples of Black LGBTQ people, BLX saved lives. Sharon Bridgforth, a BLX featured artist and longtime collaborator, affirmed that the BLX intensive taught participants and audiences that “people have fought and died” for the right to live openly and to express their full humanity. 18 18 Sharon Bridgforth, “Interview with the author,” July 30, 2024, in the author’s collection. This life-affirming, intergenerational site nurtured LGBTQ folks of African descent and their allies, engaging them and their audiences in individual and collective study to further the struggle for freedom and equality.

The Journey

When the first Brown-Tougaloo students gathered in Providence in the late 1960s to initiate Black arts and culture programs at Brown, they could not have imagined the twists and turns of the journey. The Black Arts Festivals and BLX theater intensives represent just two examples from the decades-long collaboration. Yet they affirm that every day, whether on theater stages or standing on the stage of life, participants in the Brown-Tougaloo Exchange have used performance to fight for a more just and more equitable world where we all can know and express our full humanity. 19 19 Thank you to Allison Levy and Kenvi Phillips for the opportunity to contribute to this volume, and to Cosette Bruhns Alonso for expert editorial support. Thanks also to Christopher West in the John Hay Special Collections, Paul Rochford in Brown’s Media Services, and Kathy Moyer in Africana Studies for helping me locate material for this article. Thanks especially to Sheryl Brissett Chapman, James Borders, Zylpha Pryor-Bell, Elmo Terry-Morgan, Karen Allen Baxter, Alonzo Jones, Renita Martin, Sharon Bridgforth, Françoise Hamlin, and all of the Brown and Tougaloo students, faculty, and staff members who shared their artistry and their genius over the years.