One night in October 1963, two men and a woman sitting in a cigarette-smoke-filled room decided that the civil rights movement needed a cultural element.

“We needed an arm of the arts that would be able to bring the word about different issues to people,” said Doris Derby, the woman in the room, “ not just in political settings, not just in mass meetings, not just in church… we needed another way.”

That other way was the Free Southern Theater, which Derby, John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses founded at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss.

“We theorize that within the Southern situation a theatrical form and style can be developed that is as unique to the Negro people as the origin of blues and jazz,” they wrote in “A General Prospectus for the Establishment of the Free Southern Theater.”

“Our fundamental objective is to stimulate creative and reflective thought among Negroes in Mississippi and other Southern states by the establishment of a legitimate theater.” 

Starting with three Black actors and five white actors, the Free Southern Theater toured rural Mississippi and Louisiana performing such plays as Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” according to the Amistad Research Center. As a result, the theater “influenced community-based radical theaters across the country.”

In 1965, the theater moved to New Orleans where it organized community theater workshops for “those who thought they would never get a chance to act, write, sing, or dance on stage,” according to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 

Faced with ongoing financial woes, the theater received support from Black artists and writers from across the country. According to New Orleans HIstorical, “its first donation – a check for $5 – came from Langston Hughes himself.” 

In 1980, Free Southern Theater performed its last play and its successor, the O’Neal-led Junebug Productions, was born.

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...