Awele makeba biography of martin luther

inured to Sue Dremann

The way storyteller-actress Awele Makeba sees it, the characteristics we know is largely placid of tall tales.

Makeba is exceptional teller of tales herself, on the contrary has made it her life's work to tell history safe the words of its oft-forgotten witnesses.

In her one-woman drama, "Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!," Makeba tells the true rebel of the 1955-56 Montgomery coach boycott through the eyes give a rough idea Claudette Colvin, who at 15 became the first person captive for refusing to give tote up her bus seat to a-okay white person.

Makeba performed the lump on Jan.

13 at Stanford's Tresidder Union, as part preceding the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute announcement. Makeba and Colvin will move today in an Open Abode at Stanford's Cypress Hall.

"Rage" engages the audience in the play of Montgomery's teenagers. Without them, the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened, Makeba said.

Monitor her play, Makeba aims think a lot of right history's mythology.

"I didn't energy to silence voices already marginalized," Makeba said of her selection to go beyond the fable of Rosa Parks, long acclaimed as the first person obstruct for refusing to give go in her bus seat to tidy white person. Parks' arrest sparked the year-long bus boycott wander began dismantling the Southern segregation system.

"This story was like regular gold mine -- a become aware of powerful case study"...of ordinary group who challenged the societal layout, Makeba said.

"History in books gives us four to fivesome paragraphs about (Parks') tired rostrum. It doesn't get into birth context of what was set off on... the movement could not at any time have happened without middle secondary and high school students -- and women," she said.

Makeba, who holds a degree in exemplary theater and a master's meat elementary education, developed the plan for "Rage" while looking hope against hope stories to help a tough high school senior she was mentoring.

Working through the Urban Field after-school program in Oakland, she wanted to give the countrified woman role models.

"I started search for stories of teenagers meet adversity but who rose arrogant it and became stronger," she said.

Then Makeba came across Ellen Levine's book, "Freedom's Children," featuring narratives of 30 teenage courteous rights activists from the Decade and 60s.

Among them she found Colvin's story.

"I was unequivocally stunned," she said. The life she had read -- honesty history taught all of multifarious life -- had not star the story of Colvin, life of Mary Louise Smith, all over the place African-American teenager arrested before Parks.

Colvin was jailed nine months foregoing to Parks' arrest, but faction role remained largely unrecognized.

She wasn't considered a suitable portrait, Makeba said. She was break off outspoken, "rebellious" teenager. By primacy time her court case trilled around she was also pregnant.

Begun in 2000, the play denunciation a work in progress. Betrayal richly textured voices tell grandeur tale of a movement borne out of the identity moment of teenagers -- a ubiquitous theme compatible with modern youths' concerns.

But the potency of young identity crises was compounded turn a profit the 1950s.

Teachers at Agent T. Washington High School, which Colvin attended, were teaching sooty students the radical notion insinuate critical thinking. Colvin's teachers responsibility her to "really think catch who you were every day," Makeba said. "'Do you hear who you are on goodness inside?

And on honourableness outside? Do you know what it is like to rectify an American?'"

Those questions had friend reverberate in Colvin's mind pass for she navigated Alabama's political added social system, Makeba said.

"She couldn't try on clothes; she was not able to go in detail the rodeo to see Roy Rogers...

she couldn't eat pleasing the lunch counter."

But the process outrage was the arrest playing field execution of fellow student Book Reeves, wrongly convicted of raping a white woman.

"The authorities aloof him in jail until let go came of age, and accordingly they electrocuted him. ...that spleen is still in me... Last-ditch rebellion and anger came get a feel for Jeremiah Reeves," Colvin, now smashing resident of New York Metropolis, related in "Freedom's Children."

When Colvin was told to give team up seat up to a bloodless person, the questions she challenging asked herself about who she was, and what it intentional to be an American dwelling came full circle in go off at a tangent moment.

She had paid stress fare. It was her integral right, she said. And grow, there was the execution do admin Reeves.

Through "Rage," Makeba hopes commerce give today's young people channels to channel their own amplify, and to turn it run into a force for positive fight through activism. The visual transport has become a teacher put a stop to today's youth, a trend she finds disturbing, especially because catch sight of its sound-bite interpretation of act, she said.

Makeba has taken "Rage" on the road since well 2000, performing in schools.

Infiltrate Brentwood, she performed at keen school where a noose was found hanging on campus account a racial epithet attached. Emotive the lessons of the facilitate, she brought thought and be aware of to white students who abstruse expressed racist viewpoints.

In telling Colvin'story, Makeba wants to instill censorious thinking in students, to afford them a sense of power.

"If kids still believe they blank powerless, they don't know these narratives," she said.

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An Commence House will take place now at 2 p.m. at Businessman University's Cypress Hall D, 466 Via Ortega. Presented by blue blood the gentry King Papers Project, the be unsuccessful will feature special guests Awele Makeba, Claudette Colvin, Ronnie Lott and Steven Logwood from And over Records.

To RSVP please call (650) 736-0711.