Discovering the women who drove the civil rights era

 

Cate Alston and Kyra Davis perform in a rehearsal last month for WAM Theatre’s upcoming production of “Cadillac Crew.” David Dashiell photo/courtesy WAM Theatre

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

LENOX, Mass.

It’s late spring or early summer 1963, and four women are talking in the office of a local civil rights group in Virginia.

Today they’re riding high with excitement. They have been preparing for this for months and years: Rosa Parks is planning to speak at a local convocation, a gathering of hundreds of people.
Eight years after the Montgomery bus boycott focused international attention on Parks, she is traveling and speaking across the country. She has been working with the NAACP for 20 years. She has served as a branch secretary and as an investigator — documenting brutality, gathering testimony, organizing legal defenses.

The events of the day will propel these four friends to face new risks — and to consider deeply the meaning of freedom and protest and friendship. Award-winning playwright Tori Sampson tells their story as WAM Theatre performs her play, “Cadillac Crew,” directed by taneisha duggan, with Cate Alston as Abby, MaConnia Chesser as Dee, Kyra Davis as Rachel and Alicia M.P. Nelson as Sarah.

They begin in makeshift and welcoming room, as Sampson imagines it, with mugs around a coffee pot, and papers on the desks with jotted notes, and signs recognizing confidence and a woman’s right to pleasure and imagination and choice in her own body — “Sexual violence IS violence,” and “My body is not your commodity,” and “Sex is always consensual.”

These are tumultuous times, two months before the March on Washington. As the play reveals in sounds and glimpses, the civil rights movement is gaining momentum, but the work of being an activist for freedom carries potentially life-threatening risks.

In this Virginia town, the public schools are reopening. They had closed when desegregation became law, and protests against integration are loud in the streets.

These are the years of the Freedom Riders and sit-ins at movie theaters and lunch counters, when registering to vote can get a woman beaten.

And here in their office, these four women are confident, duggan said. In this room, they are in a safe space — in their own space. They have made it a place where they can make their ideas visible, where they’re free to protest and rant, banter, sing, and tell their dreams out loud.
“Within this room, they can talk freely,” she said, “and we get to see them with that audacity.”
And they are friends. They hold each other up.

 

Generations in change
Chesser said she sees Dee as the eldest of the four — the mother of the group. She is caring for her family, thinking about her daughter and what world her daughter will live in, what choices she will have.

“The power resides in numbers,” Dee says in the play. “Make no mistake, it isn’t the purpose that people are latching on to. It’s the movement. The masses. We have to show up to every front line standing together. That’s the key to all this.”

She’s a woman from the South, Chesser said. She brings a strength and stability and laughter into the group that holds them together. And in her interactions with these women, she sometimes thinks through her life in new ways. In that time, women were not supposed to lead, especially in the church and in her community.

And yet that morning she has walked her daughter to her first day in an integrated school. Dee fights for her daughter in a new generation, Chesser said.
I say, “Debra, you stay in your place, you stay outta trouble.”

… (she) say, “Mama, I belong wherever I walk.”
“I grew up in a generation who were told we could have it all,” duggan said, “and Abby and women like her are the progenitors for that generation. They led the way.”

In 1963, Abby is 22, just graduated from Hampton College. She wants meaningful work and the independence to make the life she imagines, Alston said. She wants family, love, ambition and the resources to create her own business. She wants to create her own line of makeup, to help women feel beautiful.

“When I agreed to bestow my talents here after I graduated,” she tells Rachel, “it was predicated upon your promise of more agency — a chance to flex and climb.”
“How’s it going, job training the teenagers?” Rachel answers. “You created that program, and now you’re bored by it?”

 

Shifting expectations
Abby wants it all, Alston said, and there are no models for her, in her time and place, in the 1960s. She’s not following any rules. She’s young, full of energy, laughing. And at the same time, she knows the dangers of the work they are doing.

She is afraid, and with reason. A few days before, she and her friends might have heard Dorothy Height on New York radio as she gathered the work of 24 women’s activist groups, investigating violence against women freedom activists and demonstrators in the prisons of the South.
And with such odds against them from white Southerners opposed to integration, Abby and her friends will face tension within the movement as well. They have worked to bring Parks as the first woman to speak at convocation in their town, and she is set to speak about her decades of anti-rape activism. The event will become a catalyst when Black men within their own group want to her deny her the chance to speak.

Maybe some of the leading men in their community are frightened that Rachel and her friends in the civil rights group’s office could take the movement to places they can’t control, duggan suggested.

Rachel, who leads the office with advanced degrees from Fisk and Howard, is a force to be reckoned with. She is brilliant, active and passionate and experienced -- and she has made this day happen. At 26, she’s done this work for years, duggan said, and she knows what she’s doing. She knows that events like the one they’re planning create the power to make change.
“The steam behind these open convocations is unmatched,” Abby says in the play. “Last one alone brought close to 800 attendees. Kings are made on that stage.”

But her push for change can meet opposition within the movement as well as without.
“Leadership is dandy when Rosa chants about the evil white man forcing himself into the Black woman’s body,” Abby says. “Soon as she lays facts about how the same attacks happen within our community, that’s when they have issues.”

Rising to this new challenge, she and her colleagues will rethink how to get where they need to go and make a move beyond their office door.

Abby has college friends from Hampton driving through the South, in one of the “Cadillac crews” on their way from Florida. Two white women and two Black women share every car, she says, “stopping in the most segregated cities, equipping willing women with integration practices. That not revolutionary enough for you?”

The play takes its name from a real historical movement, Sampson and WAM explain, that almost no one has recorded.

 

Connections across boundaries
The nationally known activist Dorothy Height organized a network of women activists, Black and white, who traveled together and met together across the South. Height had long been active in the civil rights movement and on women’s rights, and in the summer of 1963 she was leading a national YWCA program for integration and desegregation. Six years earlier, she had become the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women, a position she would hold for 40 years, working with civil rights leaders from John Lewis, the future congressman, to Martin Luther King Jr.

Height brought women together to make connections. Many of them were middle-aged, middle class, trying to build bridges. They would meet in living rooms to talk about community programs, to share parks and open pools. And even while the media and much of the country denied their existence, they risked their work, their families and sometimes their lives.

And Sampson asks through the play: Who were they? Who recorded even their names?
The theme recurs of voices heard and not heard, and duggan imagines what Rosa Parks might have said that day at the convocation -- and what all four women could say if they had the chance to stand on that stage.

They could have had a rich debate about intersectionality — the overlapping challenges and strengths of being a woman and Black, she suggested. They could have played on infinite and fluid experiences of race and gender, imagining a world where they could live without fear and love who they love, and teach their children.

They touch on that world as they show their determination to carry on their work to build it together. Though they approach from different perspectives and with different strategies, the futures they envision are closely interwoven.

In activism, people come from all directions, duggan and Chesser and Alston agreed. There are people who loudly call for change, people who negotiate, people who work behind the scenes, people who build alliances, people who lead in the light.

Rachel and Abby and Sarah and Dee are each finding their own answers to how to do the work and how to move forward collectively, as they share their experiences on the road and claim their own lives.

Abby recalls her friends in that earlier Cadillac crew, and their excitement in the world:
Henrietta and Livvy. Henrietta and Olivia Nobles. … Good dancer too. Real good. Could pick her laugh from a crowd, it was so unapologetic. Henrietta Shire is … she liked to talk about birds … wanted to travel the world just to see new ones. She’s from Philadelphia. Has a brother who’s deaf so she knows, … knew sign language. See. She taught me to say my name.
Abby signs her name in the air.

Two names right there.