UCA to preview opera based on story of LR Nine

Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

CONWAY -- Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. was in the second grade when he sat in front of his family's black-and-white television set in September 1957 and watched the news about Arkansas from his home in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia.

He watched it night after night, until Sept. 25, 1957, when heavily armed federal troops escorted nine black youths into the all-white Little Rock Central High School. Like the students, Gates, who had just turned 7, was black. Older than he, they were still children.

"What I remember most was the contorted faces of [white] parents, screaming, 'Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Don't Want to Integrate!' the chants being led by cheerleaders from the school," recalled Gates, a Harvard University professor, filmmaker and PBS television program host.

With the help of Gates' historical knowledge, composer and conductor Tania Leon's musical talent, and author and playwright Thulani Davis' writing, a small group of artists will visit the University of Central Arkansas on Monday night to perform a preview of The Little Rock Nine, an opera that was the brainchild of a now-former UCA dean, Rollin Potter.

Leon said she hopes the full, 1-hour-and-45-minute opera will be completed by the summer or fall of 2018. Efforts will then begin to raise money for the production. A decision has not been made on the premiere's location.

The roughly 10-minute preview will consist of one scene featuring actors, all recent UCA graduates, singing the arias, or elaborate solos with accompaniment, depicting four members of the Little Rock Nine discussing why they chose to attend Central High. The four are Nisheedah Golden as Elizabeth Eckford, Ronald W. Jensen-McDaniel as Jefferson Thomas, Candace Harris as Minnijean Brown and Kendra Thomas as Melba Pattillo.

Jefferson Thomas died in 2010 at age 67.

With the help of interviews and books, "Thulani has come up with a text that reflects exactly what they were actually thinking at the time," said Leon, pronounced Lay-ohn.

Leon chose to include Jefferson Thomas's character in the scene "because this is the first commemoration when he is not alive," she said. "This is giving him a voice."

Now, 60 years since the Little Rock Nine desegregated Central High, Gates is 67 but still remembers that he was "astonished" at the hate. Even though he grew up in a predominantly white town on the Potomac River, he said he never experienced "even a hint of racist treatment from my teachers or classmates."

"I never have forgotten those words, or the look on the faces of the parents chanting that phrase," he said in an email interview. "I remember feeling sorry for those kids, and wondering what kind of people lived in the South."

The idea for the opera dates to 2011. Potter, then dean of UCA's College of Fine Arts and Communication, said three things had happened over a short period of time.

In 2008, UCA began showing the Metropolitan Opera's high-definition transmissions. "A few of the opera [were] about historical events" in the 20th century, he recalled. A UCA professor with whom Potter worked, Donna Stephens, was doing extensive research and writing grant proposals related to the Little Rock Nine.

In 2010, Stephens produced the documentary film, The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made: The Role of the Arkansas Gazette in the Central High Crisis. Meanwhile, Potter read David Eisenhower's book Going Home to Glory and a few other biographies about Dwight Eisenhower, who was president during the Central High crisis.

"Donna's research heightened my interest; the Met operas about the [20th century's] historical topics pointed to a shift in operatic repertory; the Eisenhower presidency was quickly gaining new stature, with more attention being paid to accomplishment in civil rights," Potter said in an email from his current home near Chicago.

"One day in a discussion which related to the above, I realized that an opera about the Little Rock Nine could have a significant impact on our understanding of this important historical event and emphasize both progress and the obviously slow trajectory which has brought us to where we are today," Potter said.

In October 2012, Potter and Stephens went to New York where they discussed the idea with Leon. In 2013, Leon contacted Gates, the opera's historical adviser, and Gates suggested that Leon and Potter work with Davis, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for the libretto, or text. Other works by Davis include the libretto for X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X.

"The saga of the Little Rock Nine is one of America's great historical dramas, replete with emotion, passion, and color," Gates said. "It is ideal as the subject matter for an opera. ... I think we have Rollin Potter to thank for that."

Leon and Gates had been friends since they met in Italy in 1992. While there, Gates read parts of his own memoir, Colored People, to Leon and others.

In that memoir, Gates recalled watching TV news each morning and night during the Central High crisis. "I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes," he wrote.

"The children were all well scrubbed and greased down, as we'd say," he added. The boys' hair was "short and closely cropped, parted and oiled." The girls' hair had been "'done' in a 'permanent' and straightened, with turned-up bangs and curls. ... Starched shirts, white, and creased pants, shoes shining like a buck private's spit shine. Those Negroes were clean. ...

"'They handpicked those children,' Daddy would say. 'No dummies, no nappy hair, heads not too kinky, lips not too thick, no disses and no dats.'"

The Cuban-born Leon immigrated to the United States 50 years ago when she was in her 20s. Her civil-rights memories are of Martin Luther King's marches and his 1968 assassination, but she has read about the Little Rock Nine.

The theme is the same, she said.

"We can go back to the beginning of time. ... It's almost like the same story, different players, different issues," she said. "We are not comfortable with each other. ... Reasons can vary. There's always a conflict about not accepting someone else."

Art and, hence, opera can affect social behavior, she believes.

Many people, she said, won't read a long book about history. But they will sit down to watch a story. "In opera, in two hours, you might have a really, really in-depth vision into something you [previously] were not so knowledgeable about," she said.

While the preview will focus on just four of the nine students, the full opera will include all nine characters and the many others, from the troops who guarded them to Eisenhower and, of course, Orval Faubus, the governor then.

To Leon, the Little Rock Nine's experiences speak to the hopes and sometimes the struggles of so many young people then and now.

"I don't care where you come from. I don't care what language you speak," she said. "All humans aspire something. ... Everybody has dreams. ... And what is beautiful is to see a young person that has that dream ... take the steps to meet that dream."

Leon said she came from "a very, very poor family" in Cuba.

"If someone [had become] a big obstacle to my dreams, I would not be speaking to you now in the United States," she said.

Her mother was her only relative to see Leon travel as far away as Switzerland for an opera she had composed. "My life has been a Cinderella life," Leon said. "We as humans cannot predict what another person is going to do. ... We don't know who the next genius will be."

Leon said she would like to talk more about that topic when she visits UCA.

Stephens, an associate journalism professor and director of publication and community relations at the College of Fine Arts and Communication, will moderate a discussion by Leon and Gates, who also will answer questions from the audience.

photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Composer and conductor Tania Leon

State Desk on 09/24/2017

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