Toward a Theater of Liberation: Learning from the 50th Anniversary of the SNCC-inspired Free Southern Theater

Roadside Theater: The October 50th Anniversary Celebration of the founding of the Free Southern Theater (FST) brought activists and artists of different ages and backgrounds together with civil rights veterans, who as young men and women in the 1960s put their lives on the line for freedom. Often described as the theater wing of the civil rights movement, the Free Southern Theater was founded in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Mississippi by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, and John O’Neal. In 1985, O’Neal held a funeral, “a valediction without mourning,” in New Orleans for the Free Southern Theater. People came from struggling communities across the US to act and think together about social justice and to witness theater’s power to advance human rights. Roadside performed South of the Mountain, which tells the story of the moment in a family when hillside farming and barter gave way to coalmining and the company store. The 1985 funeral’s week-long series of performances and dialogues culminated in a traditional second line. Snaking out of Congo Square down Dumaine Street into Treme, the relic-filled FST coffin, its pallbearers, and its gathering of followers shimmied and shook to the syncopated beat of a traditional brass marching band.