SNCC, The Free Southern Theater, Junebug Productions, & John O'Neal

A.B. Spellman, former deputy chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

“Well, if theater means anything, anywhere, it should certainly mean something here. Why don’t we start a theater?”

Read that sentence again: it challenges the very meaning of theater. It hangs that meaning on place (rural Mississippi); on audience (rural Black people); and on circumstance (an aggressive and very dangerous challenge to oppression built over centuries). This was ars gratia populis; art not for its own sake, the governing principle of the time, but art for the people, a notion that the establishment despised. Furthermore, this was art that would be made in service to radical political struggle; art made by people who were deep in political activism and seen by them as congruent with activism; art that would call the people to assembly and prepare them for action. This is the story I could never tell at the Arts Endowment. But it was the best story."

This is an excerpt from A.B. Spellman’s essay in Art in a Democracy, Volume 2, re-published in the Daily Yonder. Click below to read the piece in the Daily Yonder.

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