By Kathy Kurtz Ferrari
Staff Writer
1/28/10
The world was a different place 40 years ago, especially in the southern United States. Just ask James Kates, who recently visited Milton on a cold and blustery night to share a history lesson with cast members from The Milton Players. The local thespian group is preparing for their latest production, “The Left Hand Singing,” and Kates knows the story all too well.
The play, written by Barbara Lebow, is a fictional story based on facts surrounding the 1964 Freedom Summer, an important part of the battle for civil rights. Also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, it was a movement involving white college students from the North who were trained and traveled to Mississippi to help blacks gain civil rights and register to vote. Kates was one of those students from the North, and his visit gave insight to the actors as they looked for motivation for their roles, while at the same time learned about a chapter in our nation’s history.
Milton resident Pat Brawley, who portrays the parent of one of the students, found Kates’ visit extremely helpful.
“It was wonderful having him come to speak with us,” Brawley said. “It was amazing to hear about the strength, the energy and the commitment of those who took part. I don’t think I could do that.”
What “that” included for those involved in the project, was risking their lives as they took part in what was supposed to be a non-violent effort to extend basic rights to all Americans. But the deeply rooted bigotry in the South during that era posed such real threats that three participants were murdered.
“We always felt unsafe. There was no instance in the state where you did not feel that you were not in danger,” Kates explained to the group. “This is one thing that is very difficult to convey. …It was what you lived in.”
Kates now splits his time living in Brookline and New Hampshire. He was just 19 years old when he decided to spend the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut traveling to the Deep South as a volunteer with the project.
Working with organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality, Kates and others like him went through a rigorous training on the campus of Western College for Women, now part of Miami University in Ohio, for a week before they traveled by bus into the South.
“I remember at one meeting in the spring of ’64 where we were told explicitly, ‘We are not talking about the possibility of one of you being killed. We are talking about the probability that several of you will be killed.’ That was the way it was phrased. We went in with that consciousness,” Kates said, adding that as he read the script for the play, he felt it minimized how dangerous the situation actually was.
Kates was invited to speak through small-world ties in local theater. His brother, Peter, is involved with the South Shore theater community, and when word got out that The Milton Players had chosen the play, the visit was arranged.
The play’s director, Brian Delaney, who grew up in Milton and graduated from Milton High School in 1980, was instrumental in choosing “The Left Hand Singing” for the group’s performance, a detour from past, lighter play choices. Ultimately the board made the final decision.
“I’m glad they voted it through, because I think everybody has been grabbed by it, and we thought it would be a timely social statement,” Delaney said.
With Black History Month coming up in February, and having just celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the timing does seem to fit.
“We were very happy to have access to someone we’re interpreting in the show,” Delaney said. “Everybody felt that he was very helpful. We’re all amateur actors, and when you have an opportunity to dig a little deeper into a role, it adds depth to the context.”
Kates, who is now co-director of publishing company Zephyr Press in Brookline, has been very approachable to the group and has even introduced them to another helpful tool: a book he has published called “Letters From Mississippi.” It is an updated version of a previously published book compiling letters written by participants in the Freedom Summer project. He has kept in touch with many people he met during his experience over four decades ago. He is planning on attending one of the performances, and often makes appearances on the topic. But occasionally he is uncomfortable with the attention paid to him for the risks he took.
“We were very much aware that we were doing something bigger than ourselves,” he said, as he searched for a way to articulate feelings the actors might be able to use for character development. “I had no sense that I was doing it for someone else. My sense of self included the community. …This was perhaps one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done in my life. I am acting for myself, for my larger self, for the community.”
And within that same lifetime, a little more than 40 years later, Barack Obama was elected as the first black president of the United States. So, what does Kates think of that?
“I have a reaction to Obama the symbol and Obama the man,” Kates said. “You’ve got a wily Chicago politician. …But if you separate out the symbolism of who he is, of what he is, it’s so incredibly powerful and so moving. But you separate that out completely from the politics and the ongoing things, and the danger is that people’s expectations confuse the two. And that may bring the country down in some ways. People expected so much from him that he never promised. He was quite upfront about it, that he was a Chicago politician. But people were seeing him as the next Martin Luther King, which I think is a mistake on several counts.”
The Milton Players’ performances of “The Left Hand Singing” will take place at the Milton Woman’s Club, 90 Reedsdale Road, on Friday, Jan. 29, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Jan. 30, at 2 p.m.; Friday, Feb. 5, at 8 p.m.; and Saturday, Feb. 6, and Sunday, Feb. 7 at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.miltonplayers.org.
For more information on the book “Letters From Mississippi,” edited by Elizabeth Martinez, visit www.zephyrpress.org.