The Selma Project: "Understanding, the Struggle for Community"

One of the most perplexing and monumental social-change projects an artist can undertake is to heal the wounds of racism. Here Bob Leonard, director of the Tennessee theater ensemble The Road Company, talks about a large arts project in Selma, Alabama, bringing a wide range of artists and community partners to the task. It took all of their arts and organizing skills and every ounce of partnering energy they could muster. —Eds.

People in Selma, Alabama, are doing something about improving race relations within their town and they are using the arts to do it. This is cause for praise, and opportunity to reflect on the difficulties of divesting ourselves of the legacies of our cultural and social history. Understanding, the Struggle for Community, an artistic residency that brought eight artists to Selma for two weeks in March, 1994, revealed a lot about the successes and struggles going on in this historic Southern town.

At first, I resisted the invitation extended to The Road Company, the Tennessee-based traveling theater company where I work as co-artistic director. Buddy Palmer, then the executive director of the Selma/Dallas County Council for the Arts (SDCCA), had asked the company to come to Selma for an arts residency that would demonstrate how the arts can aid in healing the wounds of racism. The project seemed overwhelmingly ambitious and the out-of-town theater company less than sufficient for the task. But I did not know Buddy very well. He is quietly resolute and very brave. While he is far from insensitive, accepting "no" must come with a thorough understanding of "why not." Over several conversations, Buddy convinced me that the project was being carefully designed for Selma and with Selmians. I found myself compelled by his care and his realistic approaches. He meant to do tangible work and he was asking people to help. He had been planning this residency nearly two years before it happened.

We agreed to a partnership between the SDCCA and The Road Company for planning, developing, casting and executing the project. In July, 1993, seven months before the project would take place, Buddy and I spent several days meeting people in Selma who had expressed an affinity for the project and an interest in participating. Buddy had developed the list over the previous months. It was an extraordinary series of meetings.

Like everywhere else in the United States, Selma has suffered a long history of racism. Unlike anywhere else, Selma is the site of the march that led the country to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The march arose from the protests and demonstrations of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) that broke loose in Selma. For that brief period of time in 1965, the heat was on and the frightened eyes of the nation were focused on this little town. Then, as quickly as they had arrived, the national leadership and national attention left Selma. Something of national significance had been birthed in the town, but the town itself was left greatly bewildered and little changed. For some, particularly within the African-American community, there was increased hope that change might be coming. For others, fear of the same. The 30 years that have followed have tempered both the hope and the fear. Change—the kind of change that reshapes social practice and political power—takes a lot of time.

Some Things Don't Change

When I arrived in Selma I was astonished to find that the mayor, who was elected on a "moderate" segregationist ticket in November of 1964 on the eve of SCLC's decision to target Selma, was still the mayor of Selma in July of 1993. Joe Smitherman had been mayor of Selma every day for nearly 30 years (except for a two-year self-imposed respite when he didn't run for office). Mayor Smitherman has accomplished this extraordinary term of office by going with the flow and keeping things normal—evidence of a careful and strict adherence to the rule of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." It is a complicated history in a complicated town, administered by a smart man.

It became apparent that one of the keys to his success, in the face of a radical increase in black voters following the Voting Rights legislation and its enforcement, was the appointment of African Americans to committees, councils, boards and other such positions of authority and power. Deftly if blatantly, these appointments were always just short of a majority. The mayor gained voter loyalty with no forfeit of power. In issues concerning race and African-American community building, the committees, councils, boards, etc., were effectively reduced in size to the number of the majority white vote. This situation exploded in 1989-90, when the school board fired its first African-American superintendent in a racially-split vote. The town erupted. The schools were closed. While the schools were quickly brought back in session and the town resumed normal life, nearly every white student in the junior and senior high schools fled to local "private" schools—a demographic reality that exists today. Selma High is 98% African American while the general population statistics put African Americans at 58%.

Partnering at the Grassroots

This was my surface view when Buddy and I began our meetings. The people we met revealed a deep layer of commitment to change that is disciplined, determined, skilled and permanent. We met with Frank Hardy, an award-winning boxer and visual artist in his late thirties, who runs a training program for young people in boxing, painting and dance. He had begun the program entirely on his own, without funding or public support. Called the Selma Youth Development Center (SYDC), Frank's program is housed in an unused school building. The SYDC maintains the facility and raises money for any improvements, even though the building is owned by the Selma School Board. The SYDC is producing competitive boxers who have gained placement on U.S. amateur teams. At the same time, Frank teaches painting everyday and heads up the dance program. Frank says, "The arts play a very important role in the development of a child. They allow a child to develop as an individual. Sometimes a child does not fit into the realm that society sets for you. The arts gives you a way to make your own place." Frank bore witness to the fact that the arts had saved him. "When I was a kid I got into a lot of trouble. I found myself through boxing and painting. Then my life changed. I've come back to Selma to run a program I needed when I was a kid."

Funding for SYDC deserves a special story, a tribute to one Selma business responding to a Selma need. Frank is employed by a local corporation, Tri-Tech Services, Inc., makers of airline ground-support equipment. This business was so impressed with the program that Frank had initiated in his own spare time that they reassigned him from the assembly line to be the director of SYDC. One of the corporate partners, Calvin Bowie, said that they think this is the way business and private individuals should do things. "We're proud of SYDC. It is very beneficial to Selma. We can't provide everything the program needs but we can provide this." Calvin, in response to my questions, said, "We don't do this for publicity. In fact, publicity is the wrong way. People could get the idea that Tri-Tech is taking care of SYDC and no one else needs to, which is way wrong. The programs at SYDC need broad community support." In addition to Tri-Tech, three local churches and a few private individuals keep a thin line of cash supporting SYDC. However meager in program support, SYDC is rich beyond imagination in human and community power.

We met with Meria Carstarphen, a junior high-school teacher of Spanish and Photography in her twenties, who has taken on the prodigious task of renovating an old and unused high school building into an arts center that will serve children and adults, black and white. Meria's dream is a center where people of Selma can make art of all kinds for their own creative expression. Meria made it clear that she has the vision and the personal capacity to see this ambitious vision become real. She also made it clear that, if our residency project could bring a poet into her photography classroom, she could promise a vibrant and creative partnership that she would strongly support.

Like Meria, Frank was immediately willing and anxious to participate in the arts residency that Buddy and I were proposing. He too was able to provide a clear picture of what kind of arts residency might benefit his program. He wanted dancers and choreographers who could nourish SYDC's dance program. He offered use of his facility as a principal site for the residency. Frank also offered a valuable partnership, a partner who had a deep understanding of how community grows through people helping each other.

Organizing from an Arts Base

Frank's knowledge did not come from some vague inspiration or some mystical source. I learned that Frank and many others in Selma had benefited from a strong education in this approach, with a long local history. When he was in his late teens, Frank had been involved with Black Belt Arts and Cultural Center (B'BACC), an arts-based organizing program in Selma that had begun in the early '70s. B'BACC, the brainchild of an activist lawyer named Rose Sanders, was founded on the use of storytelling, music and African dance to provide African-American children strong positive self-image development, personal discipline, community pride and vision beyond the limitations of the social framework dominant in Selma. It worked. Not only in Frank's case but in person after person we met, including the executive director of the Brown YMCA, as well as a social worker who teaches parenting classes to preteens in the housing projects and writes plays for children to perform in housing-project community centers.

B'BACC, still a strong program itself in Selma, has also spawned the National Voting Rights Museum, run by JoAnne Bland and Sam Williams, both alumni of B'BACC. The museum honors Selma's heritage in the history of the Civil Rights Movement with a specific and particular focus on the hundreds of otherwise unnoticed and barely- remembered people in and around Selma who actually were the protesters, the demonstrators, the marchers and the citizens involved with the struggle. The museum, housed downtown on the banks of the river in sight of the famous bridge where the march met the armed forces of segregation, is more than a repository of memorabilia. It is a facility for art and education. Sorely underfunded, it exists through the dedicated hard work of people in Selma who keep the faith in community-building. Here, again, Buddy and I met with people who knew the difference between a cosmetic program of "nice" art and a valuable program of creative power. We were put right on the spot.

Real Goals to Meet Real Needs

A couple of white, liberal guys with some grant money could certainly make an arts program happen in Selma, but when it was over what would it mean to Selma? Would the visiting artists depart after the final performances, taking their fees and leaving pleasant memories, or would the residency provide anything of permanent value in Selma? What would be different in Selma after the residency was done?

Buddy and I had to go way beyond the generic do-good impulse to aid in healing the wounds of racism. Obviously, to begin with, the people of Selma were struggling with that task all by themselves—for better or for worse—and a half-dozen outside artists would not/could not do much one way or another in that regard. We could, however, begin to build a residency that was designed for the real needs of the people and programs that were working in Selma. To do that, we had to bring artists who could complement and augment the work that was already going on. This realization made casting the residency team much more manageable. It was clear, for example, that we had to bring dancers in as part of the residency team. We also had to bring storytellers and musicians. In addition, we began to know exactly the kind of artists we were looking for, not simply in terms of artistic disciplines but also in terms of the community work happening in Selma. We could cast artists whose training and/or experience coincided with the project goals that had become clear as Buddy and I finished the series of meetings in July.

We worked up a very complete goals statement. We were successful in accomplishing these goals because they were practical and achievable. The first order of need was to use the residency to help Selma artists and cultural workers to recognize each other as a mutually cooperative group, reducing the sense of isolation within Selma that each group of workers expressed as we met them. During and following the residency, several artists and arts groups began coming together for weekly lunches to get to know each other better, and to find out how they might serve one another's needs. These groups recognized that they all shared a common interest in building healthy communities and reducing the adversity of economic and racial boundaries. This group of Selma cultural workers continued to meet regularly after the residency was finished.

We agreed that we would use the residency to attempt to find new resources that could aid the efforts of the Selma artists and cultural workers who partnered with the project. We contained this goal within the frame that one new donor, or one new volunteer, would be the kind of new resource that we were hoping to uncover—rather than some unrealistic hope to "answer the survival needs" of the groups. At the final performance of the residency, a trained dancer, who had returned to Selma after her education, came forward as a volunteer interested in helping SYDC's dance program. Residency artists opened doors to funding sources that have expressed interest in the kind of programs operating in Selma. A Selma writer, working on his first playscript, developed an ongoing artistic relationship with a residency artist who continues to help him in the struggle of rewrites and edits.

We intended that the residency would produce tangible products that could "live on" after completion of the residency: i.e., photo essays, videotaped documentation of performances by Selma artists, desktop publication of writings created in workshops, etc. A photo essay created by Meria Carstarphen's junior high-school class while working with a residency poet is the property of the class and continues to be used for a number of community purposes. Collections of poems written by students in poetry workshops are being published in a cooperative venture between the project and a local community college. These publications will be distributed to the participants and will also be on hand in the schools for demonstration and fundraising purposes. Alabama Public Television videotaped the project and aired the resulting program in June of 1994. This videotape and other video and photographic documentation have been compiled by the Arts Council to serve in conceptualizing and developing new projects in Selma.

We agreed to provide training time for artistic leaders in Selma designed to share the administrative as well as artistic skills of the resident artists, and targeted to the needs of Selma activities. This was accomplished on a one-on-one basis, as the need was identified. The residency artists have made themselves available for continued relationship with their Selma partners. In addition to the one-on-one approach, a county-wide teacher workshop was conducted as a mentoring session, presented by a local college.

We identified the need to centerpiece a final performance that would celebrate the people and artists of Selma, using the resident artists to shape the celebration and to complement it with their own performances. This performance featured new dances choreographed by the resident artists and danced by Selma youth. This way the dances remained in Selma after the residency. New songs, written by workshop participants about their personal experiences growing up and living in Selma, were composed and arranged by residency musicians and performed by the Selma youth who had written them. The photographic essay—a slide show of student photographs intercut with poetry written by the same photographers—was compiled by a residency poet and presented as part of the final performance. Praise Poems, written by students in workshops, were performed by those same students. A small play, portraying a family's struggle to find money for shoes, was written and performed by the young people of SYDC. Performances by the residency artists were interspersed throughout the evening.

This event was presented at the 300-seat Selma Performing Arts Center to a standing-room-only crowd, racially and economically mixed. Tears and laughter filled the evening as the audience responded to the varied expressions of life as it is felt and lived right there at home. It was a repeated refrain that this event was a long-awaited first for Selma.

We had agreed that the project would present the Arts Council itself serving as a resource and facilitating agency for the whole community across racial boundaries and class distinctions. The Arts Council coordinated extensive workshops throughout the school system, working with teachers and principals at all grade levels to bring the right artists into classrooms where the arts could serve the ongoing curriculum. Workshops were also arranged in senior centers, in a home for battered women and in other community centers. Again, the workshops were carefully designed to bring the artists into working partnerships with the participants. These workshops were covered by the local paper and public TV, highlighting the importance of the process of the residency that allowed for creative activity in a broad social spectrum, facilitated by the residency artists.

Building a Committed Artistic Team

The artists that were brought together for this residency were a very special group of people. They represented a wide variety of artistic disciplines and personal life experiences, yet they shared a common commitment to progressive social and political change through the artistic event of person-to-person expression of truth and love. Adora Dupree, from Johnson City, Tennessee, is a storyteller, writer and actress. She works as a solo artist and performs with Carpetbag Theater of Knoxville and The Road Company. Alice Lovelace, from Atlanta, Georgia, is a poet and community organizer. She has run a number of community-arts organizations in Atlanta and works extensively in schools throughout Georgia. Joyce Williams and Jacques Howard, also from Atlanta, are a singing duo called Joyce and Jacques. Since they met in the choir at Spelman College, they have been writing and singing their own songs for audiences throughout the Southeast. Willie Jordan, a graduate student in directing at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, is an accomplished theater artist who has taught theater in high schools throughout North Carolina, helping scores of students attain state and regional awards. Toya Lewis, a dancer with the world-traveled African American Dance Ensemble from Durham, North Carolina, and Beverly Botsford, a drummer who also works with the AADE, completed the team.

In January of 1994, two months before the residency, this team met in Selma for a long weekend to plan and schedule the residency activities. The artistic team, along with Buddy and myself, met with some 25 people from Selma who were committed to building partnerships to make this residency work. Frank Hardy was there, JoAnne Bland and Sam Williams from the museum, a dozen teachers from the public schools and several other folks who had become involved over the months of preparation. An amazingly-motivated group, with enough time to identify needs and consider creative solutions, these people created the base for our residency.

We used the meeting time to introduce the artists to their potential partners in a workshop format. We identified our understanding of our mutual goals. We negotiated those goals so that all involved agreed and shared in the vision of the project. Finally, we identified partnerships, getting artists together with programs for mutual benefit. This was a crucial and very creative time. It resulted in a strong base of personal involvement on all sides as well as a working plan of activities. We had built an enormous energy and a structure to put it to use. We also found the name for the residency, Understanding, the Struggle for Community. After that, it became a logistics effort of some size, but the success of the project was safely in the hands of the participants. It was a joy. The results were assured by the care and realistic approach that Buddy had initiated and infused at every step along the way.

The residency is complete and the out-of-town artists are off to other projects. Selma is still Selma. But some very important little things have changed the way things are. Frank is working with Adora. Meria has found helpers in her effort to fund the renovation of the old school into a cross-cultural arts center. Young writers have written about what it feels like to live in Selma, and they have a book to give to people who are interested in reading what they have to say. Young dancers have a new dance and a new way of understanding their own lives through their dance. The school system has the documentation in hand to substantiate the development of more projects. The Arts Council is an experienced and recognized force for change across cultural and social barriers. This makes no guarantee about the future but it establishes progressive change in the present, right now. This is the work of the arts in communities.

This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring/Summer 1995.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002