The Free Southern Theater: Civil Rights by Other Means

In nineteen sixty-three, organizers associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founded a theater company at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, before it later made its home in New Orleans. John O'Neal, Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, and Denise Nicholas called it the Free Southern Theater, and the name described its purpose precisely: it was free, in that it charged no admission to communities that had no money; it was Southern, in that it operated in the rural Deep South where professional theater had never existed; and it was a theater, which meant it believed that art was a form of organizing.

The company performed Beckett, because Beckett's plays about waiting and endurance could be performed with minimal production resources and resonated with people waiting for rights that kept not arriving. They performed original plays about sharecropper life, written by members of the company or commissioned from playwrights connected to the civil rights movement. They performed in church basements and on courthouse lawns, in communities in Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana that had no other access to live performance of any kind.

The Tulane Amistad Research Center holds the organization's records. The Civil Rights Digital Library documents its connection to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose organizing strategy included cultural work alongside political action.

The Free Southern Theater operated until nineteen eighty, a nearly two-decade run during which it documented its own work extensively. It is among the least-known institutional legacies of the civil rights movement. The political organizations of the era, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, are better remembered. The Free Southern Theater made the argument that the people those organizations were organizing deserved art, not just strategy. The argument was right.