Miami University's department of theater is in the early planning stages of a project to commemorate Freedom Summer of 1964, through a museum exhibit set to open this summer and theatrical performance set to open in 2009.
Miami assistant theater professor Ann Armstrong invited Carlyle Brown to be playwright-in-residence for the spring semester, and he agreed to work on displaying the history of Miami's involvement in the civil rights movement.
Brown - who is an accomplished writer, actor and has taught at New York University and Ohio State University - wants to use Miami's civil rights roots as a catalyst for the "Finding Freedom Summer: Documenting and Performing Freedom Summer at Miami University" museum exhibit and theatrical project.
Armstrong said that though the play was originally planned for the 2007-08 season, production has been pushed back to having a main stage presentation planned for 2009. Armstrong hopes the performance will coincide with Miami's bicentennial.
"(The play will be a) highly historical depiction of the 1964 Freedom Summer event and its effect on Miami's community, both white and black," Armstrong said.
Brown, Armstrong and Mary Jane Berman, director of the Center for American and World Cultures, will be casting students through a workshop model in the summer of 2007.
"(It is) as a highly collaborative process with students here on campus," Armstrong said. "I am very committed to an integrated (and) racially balanced cast for the project."
At the museum exhibit set to open this summer, archives from around Ohio and the nation will be on display.
"Americans have a combination of short attention spans and poor memories, and this exhibit is to remind and reinforce the struggle (of the civil rights movement)," Brown said.
Miami's connection to Freedom Summer dates back to June 1964, when the university's Western College for Women hosted a weeklong training session on achieving equal voting rights. The campaign trained volunteers who would be registering African-American voters in the South, and specifically in the state of Mississippi.
Of the more than 800 attendees, three Mississippi natives that attended the session were murdered in a hate crime upon their return to Mississippi. The loss of these lives displayed the dangers of the civil rights movement in what became known as Freedom Summer 1964. Miami's Western campus currently displays a commemorative plaque.
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"(The exhibit will be) archival and experimental in displaying the history of the civil rights movement," Brown said.
Brown also stresses that civil rights are not simply an idea found in a history book.
"Civil rights were experimental in the past and are still experimental in today's United States," Brown said. "It is important for the youth to understand where our nation came from in order to continually guide its future toward the goal of equality."
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