Ah, January, when we pledge ourselves to resolutions intended to better ourselves and the communities in which we live! One resolution that I hope you make is to Catch the Spirit and attend DARASA: A Civil Rights Tribute, our fundraising event, January 20th , 7pm, at Big Hopp’s.
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JLT is making the resolution to celebrate the significance of January in the African-American legacy. Not only is January the birth-month of the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement, it is also known as “Emancipation Month” when on the first day of January in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the states of the Confederacy. You can say that the Emancipation Proclamation was the beginning of the 19th Century Civil Rights Movement.
Why celebrate Civil Rights? The nobleness of its purpose and the selflessness of its participants inspire succeeding generations to act nobly and selflessly to correct indignities inflicted on people because of their race, religious beliefs, gender, age, and sexual preference.
DARASA: A Civil Rights Tribute is a montage of scenes, monologues and music drawn from the company’s archive of Juneteenth Jamboree plays relative to the Civil Rights Movement. I have asked three local artists, whom I describe as “Jamboree stalwarts,” because of their noble and selfless participation in our festival of play readings as dramatist, actress and director to make selections from their favorite Jamboree plays.
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Toni TaylorPlaywright Toni Taylor weaves together her two plays, And the Next Day They Changed the Water and This Land Is Your Land/Can You Hear It?. . . . Water illuminates the struggles and successes of turn-of-the-century African American science students at an Indiana college, who became inventors of several modern-day conveniences. Have you ever wondered how the natural elements on a plantation felt about slavery? . . . Land/Hear . . . is an inventive imagining by trees, soil, and water about the horrors nature witnessed. Ms. Taylor’s works are enacted by members of the Green Castle Baptist Church’s arts ministry.
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Regina Lang The nurturers and nourishers of the Civil Rights Movement are African-American women. Actress Regina Lang portrays “Ardella” from The Bathroom Cleaner by Elizabeth Orloff, and “Mamie” from Ifa Bayeza’s Till. Both women characters,
“Everyman” and the iconic Rosa Parks are the chosen subjects of director, Kathi E.B. Ellis. The dreaded traffic stop for a Mississippi reunion-bound Chicago family, in Driving While Black by Samuel L. Kelley, demonstrates the potential for tragedy from racial profiling. Steelworkers are the heroes, in Here Am I Send Me by Benard Cummings, in the aftermath of Rev. King’s assassination during the Memphis garbage men strike in the 60's. The recent passing of Rosa Parks, the first woman to lay in state in the nation’s Rotunda, receives a loving paean in Louisville native, Be Boyd’s Mother of Civil Rights.
DARASA: A Civil Rights Tribute also includes the traditional and classical music performed by the Fisk
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Kathi E. B. Ellis 
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