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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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On Cultural Work
The
Free Southern Theater Institute a Venue for
Truth-Telling
By Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
Thursday, January 15, 2009—7:00-8:30 p.m.
Studio
at Colton
The first meeting of
“From Community to Stage: Introduction to Community
Arts,” an intensive theater course offered by
The Free Southern Theater Institute, was a moment of
reckoning, an exposure of facts and memories from the
past as a basis for making decisions about a future. It
was a Shambhala moment. Such moments ought to be
cherished, because they enable historians to weave
explanatory narratives from threads of thought.
That the discussion
occurred in post-Katrina New Orleans does matter.
Cultural tensions, both positive and negative, were
pervasive in the Crescent City two hundred years before
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the breaking of the
levees. It must be admitted that this city, whether it
is recovering or reinventing itself after 2005, is beset
with enormous amounts of post-Katrina stress among the
privileged, the elected politicians, the officers of
order and law, the clergy, the wealthy, the homeless,
and the working class, and the elderly inching by on
fixed incomes.
Our ability to deal with
physical illness is limited, but our ability to treat
overt and subtle mental distress is minimal and wanting.
Most often the fact that psychic or psychological
problems are and have been an integral part of New
Orleans’s cultures is denied or ignored. The reason is
not far to seek. Our tourism industry has the goal of
nurturing lucrative fantasies about one of the most
carnivalesque urban communities in the United States.
Except among genuine community organizers, who are
labeled radical, reverse-racist, dangerous, retrograde
and crazy, “Truth” is out to lunch.
The Free Southern Theater Institute recognizes
community theater is one venue for truth-telling, for
organizing, for renewing commitments, for dramatic
investigating and broadcasting human problems that are
beyond resolution. Thus, the FST Institute has begun
communal exploration of the histories of the Free
Southern Theater (1963-1980) and
Junebug
Productions (1980-2009) as they are combined in the
presence of John O’Neal, a primal, catalytic force in
both enterprises.
The
Institute is an educational enterprise. Its 2009
Registration Form specifies that
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[t]hrough
case studies, readings, videos and group
discussions, students will learn about
community-based arts practices and how the
arts are used in organizing. They will also
learn about the history of the Free Southern
Theater and the Black Arts movement in the
south (sic). Students will also work with
guest artists to create original writing and
choreography that will be shared in a public
performance on April 16 and 17 at the Studio
at Colton.
Students can
get a good capsule history of Free Southern
Theater and Junebug Productions at
www.junebugproductions.org, but they
need to read
The Free Southern Theater by the Free
Southern Theater (1969), edited by
Tom Dent, Gilbert Moses, and Richard
Schechner. Required reading should include
James E. Smethurst’s
The Black Arts Movement: Literary
Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
(2005) for its coverage of FST, BLKARTSOUTH,
and the Southern Black Cultural Alliance (SBCA)
and Kim Lacy Rogers’s
Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New
Orleans Civil Rights Movement (1993)
for its insights about Tom Dent’s formative
role within the development of FST after
1965, his championing of FST’s attack on the
provinciality of New Orleans and the morally
corrupt ethos of multiracial America.
They need to
know W.E.B. DuBois’s 1926 essay “Criteria of
Negro Art” in order to digest his memorable
statement: “I do not care a damn for any art
that is not used for propaganda. But I do
care when propaganda is confined to one side
while the other is stripped and silent.”
They should want to know about the death of
FST and its funeral in “A Valediction
without Mourning for the Free Southern
Theater 1963-1980,” the 1985 conference John
O’Neal coordinated to mark the end of an
important phase in black theater history.
They ought
to penetrate history with a ruthlessly
critical intelligence, so that they can
emerge from the course empowered (1) to
understand that FST and Junebug Productions
are anchored in strategically different
principles of cultural work and aesthetics
and (2) to decide whether their commitment
for a future, especially if they remain in
New Orleans, is to pragmatic provoking of
consciousness among ordinary rainbow folk
about their “enslavement” in global horrors
or to capitalist ideals of theatrical
excellence. They must make a crossroads
decision. |
The Shambhala moment of
January 15 was shaped by the witnessing of Chakula cha
Jua, Frozine Thomas, and Bill Rouselle, all of them FST
alumni, by John O’Neal’s authoritative commentary, and
my own jeremiad about community theater in 2009, the
first year of the Obama Era. For ancient Sanskrit
thinkers and storytellers, Shambhala is a spice, a term
designating a place of peace, tranquility and
happiness. Those qualities did flavor the discussion of
cultural history, but cultural history is incomplete
with bittersweet herbs of war and greed. The five of us
put it all in the gumbo.
Chakula cha Jua [McNeal
Cayette] spoke passionately about his life and his
coming of age as an actor and director in FST. In 1985,
the year of FST’s funeral, he founded the Chakula cha
Jua Theater, which continued the kind of socially
responsible productions for which FST had been noted.
He is currently planning to direct Angola 3 by
Parnell Herbert, a play that documents the plight of
Robert Hillary King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace,
each of whom spent nearly thirty years in solitary
confinement at Louisiana’s penitentiary. Frozine
Thomas, who was much acclaimed for her role as Ma Reed
in Vernel Bagneris’s legendary blues and jazz revue
One Mo’ Time
(1979) and in its sequel Further Mo’ (1990) in
the Lyric Theater of New Orleans, told a poignant and
wise story of her initial maturation in FST and her
subsequent success in the theater world of New York.
With a blend of seriousness and humor, Bill Rouselle
revealed much about his early days in FST, a prelude to
his subsequent work with Black Collegian magazine
and his founding, with Kalamu ya Salaam, of the firm
Bright Moments.
These New Orleans
natives recreated a rich sense of how Free Southern
Theater coexisted and competed with Ethiopian and
Dashiki Theaters, and an even richer sense of how their
individual and collective commitments were focused on
work——the development of craft and sustained focus on
the intersecting of politics and art in the life of
their birthplace. Theirs was not a casual investment or
an ego-driven dabbling in culture. It was work of a
kind that made a historical difference and inspired
Frozine Thomas to end with an apocalyptic utterance:
unless we deal with festering stress in New Orleans, in
time the inhabitants shall destroy the city.
Given that John O’Neal
did not mention his still timely critique “Art and the
Movement,” published in
Black Southern Voices
(1992), I chose
to recount a few memories about the founding of FST at
Tougaloo College (1963) and its necessity as a cultural
institution in both the Civil Rights and Black Art/Black
Aesthetic Movements. I chose also to note O’Neal’s
remarkable appropriation of the SNCC character Junebug
Jabbo Jones to incorporate the wisdom of common people,
their folklore, into the dramatic genre of one-man
performance. By calculated indirection, I was trying to
sketch the options we have in deciding where do we go
from here. We can follow the model of eschewing the
values of so-called legitimate theater as did Tom Dent
in his classic play Ritual Murder (born assuredly
from his commitment to the goals of the FST as community
theater).
We resurrect the dead
for the edification of the living by addressing the
intimate relationship of local and global issues. We can
further dramatize and recreate Junebug Jabbo Jones as
the devastatingly brilliant hip hop intellectual a la
Huey Freeman from Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks. We
create mirrors for unstable twenty-first century
identities that distance audiences from multiple centers
of daily pain. Our third option is to make a new
investment in the unified, endless struggles of art and
politics and to search for forms unknown that permit
theater and community-based arts practices to be
instrumental in a reclamation of our humanity that is
most definitely not post-racial.
Foolish is the egg which would teach a bird how to fly.
And equally foolish are people who deny that progress is
a snowflake that is here today and gone tomorrow.
Copyright © 2009 by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
posted 19 January 2009
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The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers . It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
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The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
is a marvelous resource! It's not like any
encyclopedia I've seen before. Already, I have spent hours reading
through the various entries. So much is there: people, themes,
issues, events, bibliographies, etc., related to Wright. Yours is a
monumental contribution! The more I read Wright (and about him), the
more I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his work and its impact
on the worlds of literature, philosophy, politics, sociology,
history, psychology, etc. He was formidable!
Floyd W. Hayes
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
By Derrick Bell
In nine grim metaphorical sketches, Bell, the black former Harvard law professor who made headlines recently for his one-man protest against the school's hiring policies, hammers home his controversial theme that white racism is a permanent, indestructible component of our society. Bell's fantasies are often dire and apocalyptic: a new Atlantis rises from the ocean depths, sparking a mass emigration of blacks; white resistance to affirmative action softens following an explosion that kills Harvard's president and all of the school's black professors; intergalactic space invaders promise the U.S. President that they will clean up the environment and deliver tons of gold, but in exchange, the bartering aliens take all African Americans back to their planet. Other pieces deal with black-white romance, a taxi ride through Harlem and job discrimination. Civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, the heroine of Bell's And We Are Not Saved (1987), is back in some of these ominous allegories, which speak from the depths of anger and despair. Bell now teaches at New York University Law School.—Publishers Weekly /
Derrick Bell Dies at 80 |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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