Monday, February 27, 2012

My new Reader's Theatre play

Having spent much of February teaching about different aspects of Black History Month, I was shocked to discover that by third grade some students still had this idea that Martin Luther King was married to Rosa Parks. Some even thought he freed the slaves.

I quit shaking my head and decided to spend this culminating week learning more about Rosa Parks and giving the kids a bit of participatory fun.
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Go Ahead and Call Them: A Reader’s Theater Play About Rosa Parks
Jonathan Sanders, Jury Elementary School, Hazelwood School District

Scene: Montgomery Fair Department Store, Montgomery, Alabama
Manager:  Rosa, thank you for putting in extra time today. So many folks want clothes pressed and altered for the Christmas season.  Is it possible for you to come in early tomorrow? I think we are going to be as busy as today.
Rosa: Thank you, sir. I will come in early. I could use the hours.
Narrator: Rosa Parks walks to the bus stop near the Montgomery Fair Department Store. She is tired. Her back and legs hurt from many hours pressing clothes and handling alterations. Rosa takes her seat in the middle of the bus.
Two black men sit in the two seats next to her. She shares a seat with another black man. Several stops later, a white man gets on the bus and the driver looks in the rear view mirror.
Rosa clutches her purse and thinks to herself.
Rosa: [aside]: I want nothing more than to go home, see Raymond, and put my feet up. It has been a long, long day.
Bus Driver: “I’m gonna need you folks in the middle seats to head back to the colored section. I need to offer this gentleman a seat.”
Narrator: The three black men move to the “colored” section of the bus. Rosa Parks sits there. She refuses to move.
Bus Driver: “Ma’am, you need to move to the back of the bus. The law is the law.”
Rosa : “I know what the law says. I am not going to move.”
Bus Driver: “Ma’am, if you don’t move I am going to have to call the police.”
Rosa: “Go ahead and call them. Do what you must.”
Narrator: Passengers begin to murmur as the driver exits the bus and crosses the street to a pay phone. They show different emotions.
White male passenger: [aside] “Why isn’t this colored woman moving to the back of the bus? It’s not like she doesn’t know what the law is! The law is the law and we all have to follow it. I’m tired! I want to get home!”
White female passenger: [aside] “Now why does she have to be like this? Just go to the back of the bus and let us all get where we need to go!”
Black male child: “Mama, why isn’t that lady moving to the back of the bus? Are the police gonna make all of us get off the bus?”
Black mother:  “Child, hush yourself! You know nothing good is gonna come from this.”
Black male passenger:  [aside] “We all know what the law says, we’ve been trying for years to get this law changed. I want to get home, too!”
Narrator: Several Montgomery police cars pull up, lights spinning.  The driver and two white officers board the bus.
Officer One: “Ma’am, you know you can be arrested for this.”
Officer Two: [to the driver] “We can have her removed from the bus and given a warning or you can swear out a warrant and we can arrest her.”
Bus Driver: “I will swear out a warrant. Go ahead and arrest her so I can get this bus moving and finish the route.”
Narrator: The Police take Rosa into custody. She is taken to the police station, booked, and fingerprinted. She gets one phone call and she uses it to call E.D. Nixon, a prominent member of the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The day after the arrest, Jo Ann Robinson and the members of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) printed a leaflet that called for a one day boycott.
This is what it read:



Reader 1:  Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.
Reader 2: It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.
Reader 3: Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the bus they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.
Reader 1: This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the busses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.
Reader 2: You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus.
Reader 3: You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses.
Narrator: Jo Ann Robinson was a professor of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery. Like Dr. King, she played a major part in getting the word out.
Professor Robinson: “Rosa Parks was not the only African-American who had to suffer the indignity of standing on a bus with empty seats. The year before she was arrested, three black women were arrested for doing the same thing she did. As soon as I found out about her arrest, I gathered several of my senior students and contacted a colleague in the college’s printing office. We worked through the night running copies on the old mimeograph machine. We put three messages to a page and by 4 a.m. we had tens of thousands of copies ready to distribute. With help from other members of the WPC, we made sure every black man, woman, and child in Montgomery would read one of our leaflets. We had planned months before for a boycott. Now our planning had paid off.”
Narrator: Nearly every African-American in Montgomery refused to ride the bus on Monday. A meeting that night was attended by over a thousand people. The boycott continued for 381 days – over a year – until the city changed its local law.
Rosa Parks: You might be wondering what happened to me in court. Well, I was found guilty of violating city ordinance and fined $14. My lawyer and I appealed and in November 1956, almost a year after my arrest, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. The law was changed the following month.
Narrator: Rosa Parks and her family moved to Detroit in 1957 but she continued to speak out for civil rights. She died in 2005 at the age of 92. She and other brave people like Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Jo Ann Robinson, and tens of thousands of other people took a stand for civil rights.