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In 2008 for the reopening of the @smithsonian @amhistorymuseum my team developed a new interactive theatre experience called Join the Student Sit-Ins, which involved a role-playing exercise based on what sit-in activists practiced during the Movement. 1/
I solicited comments from numerous veterans of the movement, historians, teachers, artists and test audiences. The program sought to offer emotional learning for Smithsonian visitors - to use the arts to allow people to feel something they couldn't understand by other means. 2/
I also hoped to add some more understanding of the radical nature of the nonviolent direct action campaign that students undertook with increase vigor beginning in February 1960. When history becomes mythic as this story had, it loses some of its singularity. 3/
I heard people talk about the Greensboro Lunch Counter & activists like John Lewis & suggest they felt "of course" they were right, they were destined to succeed & they would have joined the protestors. I wanted people to feel for themselves what crossing dangerous lines meant 4/
I also wanted people to understand the philosophy of nonviolence espoused by Lewis, the Greensboro 4, Diane Nash & others and their mentor Jim Lawson. I wanted the show's main character, a sit-in trainer drawn from these folks stories to be a real person, with fears and doubts 5/
As many real people did, my composite character had doubts about whether nonviolence would work, and as most activists were, was spurred into action by anger, so channeling that into nonviolence was a challenge. 6/
So in the original script, the main character while teaching program participants admitted not being taken with nonviolence as a way of life like Ghandi or Bayard Rustin or Lawson, but viewing it as the most effective tactic to achieve the goal of destroying segregation 7/
None of the readers or early participants of the program ever spoke to this point or asked about that section of the script. Until I performed it for John Lewis. I was incredibly nervous that this serious, intense legend of the movement would think my play silly or trite 8/
After the program, I asked him what he thought and was markedly relieved when he said he though it was "just like the training programs he went through under the teaching of Rev. Jim Lawson." 9/
Then John Lewis had something else to say. He said "I noticed you said in the play that nonviolence was a just a tactic. That's not right. It has to be a way of life. If it is only a tactic, you one day you will break. You have to take it into your heart and into your soul" 10/
I changed the script and added some of his words into the program and ever since we have invited people to consider that struggle to embody those ideals that guided Mr. Lewis' life and work. 11/
Over the last 12 years more than a million people took part in Join the Student Sit-Ins & hopefully understood a bit more than while thousands of ordinary people drove the Freedom Movement, they had to dig deep to find extraordinary power within themselves.. As @repjohnlewis did
