Acting on a Dream

(This story appeared in High Performance #68, Winter 1994.)

Things are moving fast in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, pop. 39,000. I recognized the signs immediately as I drove through the thriving little 230-year-old village south of Raleigh. The downtown shops are bustling and the main street is overdue for a remodel. Out on U.S. 401 there are two new shopping centers. Change is coming.

I've seen it happening everywhere in the South. Sleeping country towns waking up. Corporations from all over the world are attracted to the region, especially to North Carolina, and when they move in they bring a lot of folks with them. This year 80 percent of the new residents of Fuquay came from out of state, looking for a pretty, quiet spot not too far from the metropolis where they can get the most land for the least amount of money. In Fuquay-Varina, there's a lot of land like that on the west side of town, neighborhoods primarily and historically African-American.

White families began moving into West Fuquay over the last eight years and, while changes are still subtle, it's only a matter of time before gentrification drives up the value of all the available land. The hand-writing is just about on the wall for this black community, and if its history and character are to be preserved, the citizens know they must take action now.

The Fuquay-Varina Community Development Corporation (CDC) is doing something about it. If these people overcome all the obstacles in their path, in 1995 they will take over the old Fuquay Consolidated Elementary School on Jones Street and start renovating it, creating a center for the community that will hold its heart and soul, its past and its future.

The CDC has big plans for the six acres of buildings they want to acquire from Wake County, including an African-American history museum, apartments for the elderly, a food-service operation and a business incubator. Showing me a scale model of the community center, they were excited. "We've been movin' and shakin'," said businesswoman Mildred Scott Lucas, pointing out the gymnasium that will be tranformed into an arts and recreation facility.

Fuquay-Varina Consolidated is one of several former schools that are objects of renovation projects in the area around Raleigh. Community and church groups are scraping for funds to save these historic buildings for family life centers, service agencies, rental housing and early-childhood education programs. The Fuquay-Varina CDC is unique, however, in its agenda. Unlike most such groups, this CDC is putting the arts high on its wish list. Plans for the new arts center include a theater, where they hope to develop a company that will provide training for arts professionals, create new work and regularly present plays from African-American culture. The Arts Center will also house performance space and recording studio to serve the many expert choirs and vocal groups in the area who now have to rent hotels in which to practice and perform. The center will be a place to show off this considerable community asset to the rest of the world.

I'm used to hearing about artists asking CDCs for help, but it's rare to come across a community development corporation with faith in the arts as a means to stability and growth. Most CDCs see the arts as a frill, just entertainment.

"I see art and culture as tied into the development of a community," said activist Shirley McClain, a driving force in the CDC. "Without art and culture, history dies. That's what we've lost in this community. Paintings. Plays."

When the CDC consulted the citizens for a mandate, they were told to write the arts into their mission statement, with a specific request for a theater.

"The people remembered when they were in school and they performed in plays all the time," said McClain. "We did two or three plays a year. We would write them and do them. We had free access to the stage. That created an appetite for it, and helped us develop as public speakers."

True to this vision, the CDC presented a play as a fund-raiser at Fuquay-Varina High School—Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," starring CDC members and directed by McClain. Hansberry's play, said McClain, is an example of the rich body of African-American art created over the last 40 years that literally holds the spirit of a people, its story and its being. The cast members, all alumni of Fuquay Consolidated Elementary School, blame school integration in 1970 for their loss of this canon of artwork, particularly theater. Black children in an integrated school had far less opportunity to perform and to explore African-American drama, literature and history.

"Now you go to majority [integrated] schools and they put on majority plays," said "Raisin" cast member David Prince. "No black plays and few roles for black kids."

This fall's production of "A Raisin in the Sun" was more than just a fundraising vehicle, it was a soul-raising too. Though the play was written in 1959, the cast feels strongly about its timeliness. Like the CDC, the play is concerned with real estate, enterprise and the survival of African-American families: A black family, headed by its grandmother, is afflicted with "ghetto-itis," and makes the move into "a little two-story" in a suburban neighborhood The young husband struggles to start a business and his sister dreams of medical school. The plot swings dramatically between hope and despair.

"That play is right now," said McClain. "All the things that faced the black family in Chicago in 1959 are here now in Fuquay-Varina. Economic obstacles, poverty, hopelessness, problems for the black male. We want it to inform the young black males of our community, and educate the white audience too."

David Prince, who plays Walter, adds, "The makeup of the family in the play is typical of our time—it is headed by a black female. The play brings up the issue of jealousy between black males and females. Walter wants power, but he does not use it wisely—until the end when he makes the right decision."

Their longing for a theater is palpable in this talk. The people of West Fuquay have a life, a history in common. Religion and politics provide an arena for that energy, but art holds humanity up to the light in a different way. Art stores anger and joy, myth and dreams. It can inflate imagination, battle entropy and jump-start regeneration. McClain and her cohorts know this and they are eager to bring their neighbors together in a theater where they can touch their hearts and minds, spread out vital issues of family, pride and justice in the way that only great art can do. Their mission is so firm that they are willing to work incredibly hard to rescue the elementary school from the wrecker's ball.

The need for space is evident. I met the cast in a 100-year-old empty house where the rehearsal was squeezed into a tiny front room. To rent the only truly adequate rehearsal space—the auditorium at the high school—would cost them almost $100 an hour.

As cast members began to arrive McClain told me they had been working together for four months, rehearsing three nights a week after work, sacrificing their family time and their free time to polish the play that the New York Times said "changed theater forever." The players are from all walks of life: a teachers' assistant, a supervisor for the state Department of Human Resources, a long-distance truck driver, a restauranteur, a social-service administrator, a high-school student, a playwright, a retired principal, a nursing caregiver.

All are members of the Fuquay-Varina Community Development Corporation and all know the value of this work. David Prince and Mamie Richardson and Robert Marley and Brian Harris and Earl Holland and Portia Rochelle and Mildred Scott Lucas and Vicky and Jonathan Debnam and Scott Jones and Alvera Butts and Shirley McClain are doing it, doing it for their town, doing it for themselves.

Linda Frye Burnham is a co-director of Art in the Public Interest.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #68, Winter 1994

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999