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KS: I’ve heard that you once said Caroline, or Change is your most perfect play. What makes Caroline so perfect for you?

TK: I never said it was my most perfect play, I would never say anything like that. I have said that Caro-line is probably the play that I’m proud of most. Sometimes you have plays that you feel you could continue working on after it’s been published or seen by lots of people. And then there are plays you feel fin-ished with, and Caroline is in that category. It did exactly what it’s supposed to do and that’s why I’m so proud of it.

KS: What makes you so

HUMANITYAN INTERVIEW WITH TONY KUSHNER

BY KELUNDRA SMITH

TACK

LING

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner earned his place in the theatrical landscape as the

writer of Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011.

Kushner’s plays tend to incite controversy, and tell stories that question notions of race, sexual orien-tation and religion. In his semi-autobiographical

musical Caroline, or Change Kushner takes on the civil rights movement, black and Jewish relations and the emotional life of people on the verge of change. Or as he wrote in the October 31, 2004 “Playwrights on Writing” feature in the Los Angeles Times, “Change was coming.

Change is exciting. And in change there is loss.”

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proud of it? TK: One of the things I love about it is the score. I think Jeanine is just a great, great composer. In my opinion she’s one the greatest musical theatre composers of my genera-tion, and really a magi-cal writer and composer, and I feel as if the music for Caroline is one of the most beautiful musical theatre scores in recent years. She has an aston-ishing gift for melody and an incredible gift of how music works in theatre…If you ever have the privi-lege of working with her, she inhabits the souls of the characters you write. !ere’s a musical equiva-lent and language for

these people and she un-derstands on a deep level how the energies of these characters interweave to create the play.

It’s also a meaningful piece for me because it’s the closest thing to an autobiography I’ve done on stage. I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisi-ana, and in 1963 I was 7 years old I think. I grew up in a family with a fa-ther who was a clarinetist and a mother who was a bassoonist. My mother didn’t die when I was a little kid, but she got cancer when I was about 11 and my brother was the age Noah is in the play. And there’s an Af-rican American woman,

her name’s Maudie Lee Davis, and she worked as a maid, she worked for my family and I had a very intense relationship, an actual relationship, with Maudie. We’re still very close.

And it almost always makes me cry when I hear it. I think it’s a very

■ ABOVE GRETA OGLESBY, TONY KUSHNER AND COMPA-NY AT THE GUTHRIE THEATRE. PHOTO: MICHAL DANIEL.

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moving piece and I’m proud of what it thinks about and what it asks an audience to think about.

KS: When you’re talk-ing about the autobio-graphical elements of this play for you, did you and Maudie Lee ever have any type of encounter like the one between Noah and Caroline where she lashes out and says “hell is a place where Jews go when they die”? Did you and Maudie ever have any type of intense encounter like that? TK: I think that some-thing like that hap-pened. Let me put it this way. My mother, who grew up during the Great Depression on welfare in the Bronx, was certainly conscious of money. We each had an allowance of like $0.50 or something when we were little kids, but it really both-ered her as a good lib-eral Jewish lady to have Maudie pick our clothes up o" the floor… It es-pecially bothered her if we left pocket change, and I think I was espe-cially bad about that.... I believe there was a cup in the basement

of the house I grew up in, where my father still lives, where for a little while my mother used to tell Maudie that if she found money in our pockets, she should put it in a cup in the laundry room. I don’t remember that she said Maudie could take the money; I think that’s something I invented. !e thing that fasci-nated me about Maudie is that a lot of African American women who worked in the Deep South for white people in the 1960s were ex-pected to be cheerful, but she wasn’t. Maudie was a nice person, but she was very severe when I was a little boy and I thought that that was kind of glamorous and interesting and it made her very di"erent than the African Ameri-can women that worked in other white homes I would visit. I was also fascinated, because I think she was a very religious person; she was a Christian and I was intrigued by what she must think about us being Jewish. And I was told repeatedly by other people that Jews were damned because we

didn’t accept Christ as the Messiah. I know that I asked her on several occasions, and I tried to trap her into admitting that she didn’t think we were saved. It was noth-ing like what happens in the play; that was a dramatization. Although we did have real, knock-down, drag-out fights. I think I said to her when I was 5 or 6 or 7 what Noah says to Caroline after she says “Hell is a place Jews go when they die,” that President Johnson has a bomb. And I remem-ber being very wor-ried afterward that she would tell my parents, because I would’ve been punished. My parents would’ve been horri-fied that I had said such a thing. She never told them. KS: What are some qualities that you think that an actress playing Caroline should bring to the role? What makes a good Caroline have?

TK: Well, I mean, you have to have a great voice because we wrote the part for Tanya Pinkins who has this super human range and vocal power. It’s a very

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demanding role. You go all the way up to this really high soprano voice and down to this lower belt; it’s tough to sing it. Marcela Lorca directed it spectacularly in Minneapolis and had a spectacular woman [Greta Oglesby] singing it and that’s enormously important. I think you need to be—as Tanya is, and as Greta was in Minneapolis—a really amazing actress. It’s a very di#cult part. She’s a person who is unable to stop mourning her own life and unable to stop feeling that she’s been robbed of something because she has been robbed of many things. And she’s a person of immense heart and soul and intellect who really su"ers from her circum-stances really terribly. It’s really hard to play some-one like that and dig past the brusqueness to the vulnerability and the

longing. And there are certainly a lot of oppor-tunities for those things to be shown.

KS: Something I’ve no-ticed about the charac-ter Caroline is that she seems content with be-ing discontented. You talk about the anger and the brusqueness. Is this what you think south-ern African Americans were feeling before the Civil Rights Movement?

TK: I don’t feel she’s content with being dis-contented. I mean her friend Dotty is more typical from what I imagine, from my un-derstanding what was going on in the African American community. Dotty is somewhat rep-resentative of people who were feeling the tide of history turning, and feeling themselves being lifted up by it and moved forward.

And Caroline is some-one—I’ve always been very interested in periods of very radical and revo-lutionary transforma-tion, and for whatever reason I am intrigued by figures who are able to catch the wave and also people who aren’t; and people who get left be-hind in a way and can’t quite join in. And what I was intrigued by in thinking of Caroline as a fictional character was somebody who can’t let go, can’t surrender the anger of the injustice in the name of hope, in the name of a belief in trans-formation. And when she engages this 8-year-old in a battle, when she’s destabilized enough by the indignity of the deal with the pocket change to say the things she says, it horrifies her. But her solution, sort of tragi-cally, is to punish herself and even more furiously refuse change. !is is

What I was intrigued by in thinking of Caroline as a fictional character was somebody who can’t let go, can’t surrender the anger of the injustice in the name of hope, in the name of a belief in transformation.

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what her big number “Lot’s Wife” is about. She asks God to give her the strength to give up the things that are most human and most pre-cious to her, apart from her kids--her love, her desire, she asks God to take hers away because she feels that she can’t af-ford to be human. And I think that’s the tragedy of the character, and one of the things that’s sort of heartbreaking about the play.

KS: When you’re writ-ing about typically ‘oppressed’ minority groups like homosexu-als and African Ameri-cans, sometimes depic-tion can be taken as law. Do you ever feel any responsibility to those groups you write about to depict them more positively or extremely accurately so you’re not creating a caricature? For example with Caro-

line or Change has it ever scared you that you might be feeding into the stereotype of the “angry black woman?”

TK: I think if I ever wrote anything that didn’t scare me then I wouldn’t be doing my job. I don’t think a writer worth anything writes from a place of comfort.

I would hate to think that it was that case that if one writes an African American woman who is simply angry then it’s a stereotype. !e stereo-type is another way of saying that the character is only representative of a cliché about people and little more than that. I don’t think that’s true of the character I created in Caroline. You’d have to approach it having decided that. If you re-ally listen and look at the di"erences you hear a variety of human expe-

rience. It would be hard to make the case that the African American characters or the Jewish characters are clichés, I don’t think they are. I guess I would say that because I wrote them.

KS: I read something in the LA Times where you said, “Music rounds out su"ering, it reveals its obverse.” How do you think music does that in Caroline, or Change? Or do you think there are some things music can’t round out?

TK: !ere’s a way in which music opens up parts of you that are dif-ficult to open through language, and frees and exalts the psyche of the mind and the heart in a way language simply can’t. !ere’s a certain kind of sorrow and ec-stasy that you can access with musical theatre that you sort of can’t

!ere’s a way in which music opens up parts of you that are di#cult to open through language, and frees and exalts the psyche of the mind and the heart in a way language simply can’t.

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with language, unless you’re Shakespeare. I’ve experienced that with Caroline. People are re-ally moved by it and I know the music is do-ing part of that.

I’m not saying it’s su-perior. !ere are things language can do that music can’t. I grew up in a house with music with two parents that are pro-fessional musicians, so I understand the power of music, and working with Jeanine gives me access to that power. If one of the logical con-sequences of su"ering is grief, and this is certain-

ly a musical about grief and loss among other things, then music can get at grieving places in a way language doesn’t; I imagine that’s what I was trying to say.

KS: You were talking a little bit earlier about being a playwright ver-sus a novelist or some-thing else. In a time when it seems like plays and theatre are losing a place in the cultural arena—why do you still feel the urge to write plays? Would you still write them if no one went to see them? TK: Well no one’s ever

asked me that last part of that question before. I think the answer is no. I wouldn’t because you couldn’t. I suppose you technically could write a play and have nobody see it done in front of an audience. It’s like

■ ABOVE GRETA OGLESBY, DOUG ESKEW AND COM-PANY. PHOTO: T. CHARLES ERICKSON.

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DESTINY

Brecht never got to see Good Person of Szechuan in front of an audience because he died when it was in production, but for the most part the play to me, putting it up on its feet in front of an audience, is a part of the writing process and I don’t feel like I could feel it’s finished.

!ere’s a way theatre teaches critical con-sciousness. You have to grapple with what’s ar-tificial and what’s not, what’s a dream and what’s being awake. I don’t think any other art form is as depen-dent on those kinds of dialectics as theatre. Plus the live, unfinished event, it’s never done. It’s not a commodity. Everything is changing and that infinite ability, the fact that it can’t be completed and it disap-pears when it’s done, it teaches incredibly hu-man lessons. !e fact that theatre is absolute-ly impossible to com-modify—you can sell t-shirts and co"ee cups in the lobby—but it’s not the event. You can record it, but that’s not the event. It’s an inher-ently political medium for that reason. !ere’s nothing we need more

than to be able to look at the world with a double awareness.

KS: Do you ever have the desire to direct your own work?

TK: Well I trained as a director originally (he received his MA in di-recting from NYU). I think I was too afraid to go into writing im-mediately. !e play-wright who in my early years I revered more than any other play-wright, Bertolt Brecht, was also a director of his own work. I’ve be-come more and more interested in the pos-sibility of doing that. I think there’s a cer-tain value to directing your own work if you know how to do it. A lot of times when play-wrights direct, and I don’t know who said this, he said this in ref-erence to when Samuel Beckett directed some-thing like Godot or End Game, that when Beckett directs them, they’re impressive, but dead. He wonders about the weight of the play-wright’s authority, when you show up knowing everything. It’s very hard to discover new stu" when the writer’s

there telling you what things mean. So, may-be sometime in the near future if I had a play that wasn’t huge and enormous and complicated.

KS: Well my last ques-tion is a simple one, or perhaps it’s a compli-cated one, and that is what inspires you?

TK: God you have to define inspire. !e need to pay the rent inspires me. I really do worry if I was rich would I write. I do this to make a living. What turns me on? What gets me excited? I love contradictions. Nar-ratives. !e dream of writing a really great narrative, a story that as it’s unfolding is tell-ing you why things happen and helps you explore the nature of reality. I’m proud of the gimmicky plot of Caroline. I’m turned on by humor, history and reading history and di#cult poetry especially makes me want to write. When I’m feeling stuck or dry I turn to that. Politics. I love political strug-gle. I find it endlessly fascinating and chal-lenging. l

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Broadway and film composer Jeanine Tesori says she sees music as her way of honoring her grandfather’s dreams, and her unique approach to compo-sition comes from her varied musical taste—everything from Stephen Sond-heim to the Talking Heads. She took inspiration from the turbulent social and political atmosphere of the 1960s to create a musical mosaic for Caro-line, or Change. Tesori says whenever she talks about Caroline, or Change she learns something, something al-ways sneaks out.

INTERVIEWED BY KELUNDRA SMITH

KS: You originally said “No” to playwright Tony Kushner when he asked you to compose the music for Caroline, Or Change. Why? What made you change your mind?

JT: !e reason I didn’t want to do it at first is because the presentation of

it was so dense. I thought, “!ere’s no room for music in this.” It’s not that I didn’t want to do it. !en we ended up working on something else together later, and he said to me I think you said no to something a little quickly, because I wasn’t able to explain things about it. !en he went through it with me and then I understood what he was trying to do with it and what my role could

F U L F I L L I N G A N A N C E S T O R ’ S

■ JEANINE TESORI

DESTINY

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be. I never want to do anything un-less I understand because that’s a di-saster and a bad time.

KS: You recently collaborated with Tony Kushner on Blizzard at Marblehead Neck at Glimmerglass Opera—how did that experience compare to working with him on Caroline, or Change?

JT: Well, you know, we have a pro-cess and I understand him and I know him so well. I think we can predict each other and know each other’s thoughts, and there’s an in-credible short hand, which saves a lot of time. I’m interested in things he’s interested in and we’re always playing with form—not as an agen-da—that’s just the [type of ] writing that’s exciting to me.

We’re very interested in discarded stories. I think Caroline is not an often-heard story. I think the same with Mother Courage (another musi-cal Tesori and Kushner collaborated on, based on the political play by German playwright Bertolt Brecht), certainly when we worked together in writing those songs we were ask-ing ourselves what hasn’t been stated in a certain way? What have we al-ready stated? Every theatre piece I do, I like to challenge myself. I don’t like to repeat. I like to stretch myself. He feels the same way.

KS: You talk about playing with form. Caroline, or Change has been said to blur the lines between musi-cal theatre and opera. Do you think this is a fair judgment? How would you describe the musical style?

■ GRETA OGLESBY IN CAROLINE, OR CHANGE AT THE GUTHRIE THEATRE. PHOTO: MICHAL DANIEL.

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JT: I just can’t describe it. I know I’ve tried to describe it, and every time I look at what I’ve called it, it just sounds stupid. I’ve called it folk opera. It’s a magical piece. It’s a piece that’s through-sung, I don’t know what the label is. I think that perhaps it operates sometimes as a play, sometimes as an opera, some-times as a musical. I don’t know if everything can be summed up as a label all the time. !at’s how I feel about my work with Tony. I don’t’ quite know what it is.

KS: !e show has an amalgamation of musical forms—Latin influences, gospel, jazz, Jewish, nursery rhymes, Christmas—what made you choose to blend all those musical styles in the show?

JT: !e reason I did it is not just to exercise my own versatility, but to show how the world was working. To me, it’s a mosaic of people who have a lot of di"erent rhythms, in a time when America had a lot of dif-ferent rhythms that were clashing in an intense way. For Caroline, it’s her own life, and the idea that she, as her ancestors have toiled, is working in this hot basement. She’s singing holler songs, field songs. Piped in are these songs that are happening in 1963 with girl groups.

!en you have the music coming in from the north with the family, so there are all of these influences that are working themselves out and try-ing to find a way to sit together, liter-ally, at a comfortable counterpoint. Trying to do it, without seeming cacophonous, is a challenge.

It was interesting to me to see if Caroline can sing to classical clari-net? Yes she can. Could they sing on top of this klezmer for Hanukkah and [have] it be an expression of a husband’s breakdown? Yes, it could. So that was what we were trying to achieve.

KS: Before !oroughly Modern Mil-lie closed in 2004, you were the first woman composer in history to have two original musicals—the other being Caroline, or Change—running concurrently on Broadway. Is that a milestone for you? What was that time like in your life?

JT: Well I think having anything on Broadway is a milestone for me. Having anything up that people are potentially paying money to see is a milestone. As much as I love New York and I love Broadway, it’s not the end all be all for me. It’s a great place to work, but it’s not the place

To me, it’s a mosaic of people who have a lot of different rhythms, in a time when America had a lot of different rhythms that were clashing in an intense way.

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where I have the most fun because of the economic pressure.

You know, I’m always doing a lot of projects because I started late in some ways. Even though I trained from a really early age, I gave up music for a solid four years when I was young, and I think those four years were al-most 15 in some ways. I stopped from 14-18, and that incredible energy that you bring into music as a teenager—I can see it with my 14 year old—I missed it. So I always have three or four projects going on, because I al-ways feel like I’m playing catch-up.

KS: Do you have a favorite instrument you like to play?

JT: I play the piano mostly. I started when I was 3 and I’m 50, and I love playing it. It’s part of me when I play. I’m so grateful that my parents pushed me. And I’ve also said to kids, “I know everyone says don’t stop, but they don’t tell you how boring and tedious it can be, and do it anyway.” !e idea that—except for those four years, which cost me for a while—I feel that when I sit down to play that instrument is an ex-tension of who I am.

KS: What inspires you?

JT: You know I think I’m pushed by—when I work with George Wolfe (playwright and director who directed the Broadway production of Caroline, Or Change)—who’s a close friend—he says we’re always pushed by what our ancestors couldn’t achieve. My grandfather was a musician and com-poser and conductor and he died at a very young age, and was not able to—and I know so little about him,

but I get the impression that he wasn’t able to do much. I find it a big inspi-ration that somehow I was given the opportunity that he was denied. I definitely feel that, that’s my greatest inspiration.

KS: What do you want audiences to get from Caroline, Or Change?

JT: You know, I don’t think that way. I think people should get what they get. From having done shows where the audience comes in with a lot of information, like Millie and Shrek, I like that Caroline is there with little information. Hopefully they see something they’ll be able to hold for a long time. !at’s the kind of art I love to see, where the half-life is long, and you can consider it and think about it time and time again. My hope for Caroline is that people will consider it long after they see it. l

Hopefully they see something they’ll be able to hold for a long time. That’s the kind of art I love to see, where the half-life is long, and you can consider it and think about it time and time again.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR AND CHOREOGRAPHERMARCELA LORCA BY JOSEPH WHELAN

JW: What appealed to you about Caroline or Change when you first thought about directing it?

ML: !e first time I read it, I really loved the interplay of the fantasti-cal and realistic elements in the play. !is kind of work requires a deep investigation and provokes you to be very creative in your solutions. It was a good challenge for me. Also, at the time, the Hurricane Katrina disaster was heavy on my mind. It had happened six months before I read it. Caroline, or Change is set in Louisiana in 1963 and brings up issues of class and racial inequality. I was very passionate about putting a play on stage that would ask how far have we come since the 60s, and what’s happening now. So the play encouraged a social-political investi-gation as well as a theatrical-artistic investigation, which I thought was

very rich. !en when I heard the music, I was swept by its rich emo-tional power... and I became deter-mined to find a way to direct it.

JW: It caught your interest.

ML: It is always interesting to look at what divides us across culture and across social class and across nation-alities, religion... all the divisions that we have. !ere are always go-ing to be divisions and there are al-ways going to be contrasts, but deep inside we all want the same things, and the play reveals this in a very subtle and beautiful manner. !ere are no evils in this play, which is a wonderful thing. Every character is a good, well-intentioned being who is looking to communicate and act in the best possible way. !e play reflects on how we respond to events from our own perspective, culture or generation, and how di"erently we digest life, and at the same time seek such similar things.

JW: Tony Kushner doesn’t leave the

A MUSICAL WITH THE DEPTH OF A DRAMA

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evil out altogether, Caroline’s son is in Vietnam, there’s the statue of the Confederate soldier . . .

ML: And that’s a true story by the way, that statue is still a centerpiece in Lake Charles. It is the time of the civil rights movement and there’s na-tional turmoil after so many years of discrimination... I think the circum-stances of the time are striking and continue to be pretty striking to this day. I visited Louisiana recently. I went for research and I felt a lot of the coordinates have not changed sig-nificantly since the 60s. !ere’s still a lot of inequality and lack of opportu-nity for certain people, it’s very obvi-ous. !ere’s a line in the play that says, “Change comes slow, change comes fast, but change comes,” and that is true for di"erent regions, cit-ies, nations, as well as for individuals. But in terms of the characters in the play, they all want to connect, they all want to survive, and they all want to thrive. Some thrive more eas-

ily and some are having a very hard time surviving, or adapting to chang-ing times, like Caroline, an African American woman, single mother of four, working as a maid and strug-gling to make ends meet. JW: So the play operates on numer-ous levels.

It deals with a conflict of another time that con-cerns racial tension. I was very passionate about speaking about race rela-tions and putting a play on stage that would ask how far have we come since the 60s, and what’s happening now.

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ML: !e subject matter is universal. It is about change, about social change, about money and its value, and also about internal change and about small moments we have with people and how we choose to relate to each other across social class and cultural back-grounds. !ose issues are universal and so important, and they make the play, I think, a catalyst for communi-ties to come together that otherwise would not come together and talk to each other in really direct ways.

JW: Was that your experience of the Minneapolis production?

ML: Indeed, there were great dis-cussions around the production, across generations and cultures. I had the fortune to live in the same city where the play was running and I saw it multiple times and felt the audience’s reaction through the run of the show. It is such a rich journey, so beautiful and it moves audiences in such a profound way. It created a sense of social movement in the community and it became very im-portant for many people to see it. I was very moved by the response to the play and to Caroline’s story. !e very last moment of the play, you see this young girl, Caroline’s daughter, 16-years-old, a civil rights activist, strongly speaking about how proud she is of being her mother’s daughter, and looking into the future with an incredible fierceness, like she is going to conquer the world. For audienc-es, young and old, to see characters who have incredible strength and power on stage, and who embody the best, most courageous aspects of our recent history is of huge im-

portance and very inspiring. Many who remembered those times were deeply moved, and for those who, like Caroline, felt stuck in their lives it was transformational... But for young people to be reminded in a direct and powerful way of the kind of commitment and unity that the civil rights movement inspired was extraordinary to witness. !at de-spite being such di#cult times for so many, it was also a time when Afri-can American kids were out in the streets, together with people of Jew-ish and white descent right along-side them working for equality and justice. To be reminded that small changes and big movements are pos-sible, reminded of that kind of com-ing together and fighting for what’s right in a peaceful way, and that the future belongs to them.

JW: !at’s a lot for a musical.

ML: !at’s what’s unique about this particular musical—and I don’t think of it as a musical. It has the complexity and dimensions of a dramatic play but it is almost en-tirely sung, and the singing allows the internal life of the characters to be richly and deeply expressed. It feels more like a modern opera with styles that include gospel, Motown, Jewish and classical music. You can-not attack this play like you would a musical. I think what’s extraor-dinary about Caroline, or Change is that Jeanine and Tony have created a most unique form of theatre—a play where music, text and dramatic action are intricately woven into a form that feels profoundly moving and surprisingly natural.l

■ LEFT: HURRICANE KATRINA AFTERMATH, AUG. 29, 2005. PHOTO: JOCELYN AUGUSTINO/FEMA.

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APRIL: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Ralph Ab-ernathy, and 58 others are arrested in Birmingham, Alabama after leading a peaceful protest against the city’s segregation-ist policies. !e arrests prompt violence between police and demonstra-tors. Alabama Governor George Wallace defies federal regulations order-ing the desegregation of schools in the State. MAY: President John Kennedy orders troops to Alabama to restore order after

clashes between police and civil rights activists. JUNE: Vivian Malone and James A. Hood become the first African Ameri-can students to attend the University of Alabama. !e students are enrolled despite Governor Wal-lace’s pledge that no black students will be admitted to the school. | NAACP Secretary Medgar Evers is assassinated by a sniper in front of his Jackson, Mississippi home. | Pope John XXIII dies and suc-ceeded by Pope Paul VI.

TIMELINE: EVENTS OF 1963

“None has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America; there are no ‘white’ or ‘colored’ signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.”

John F. Kennedy, speaking in support of civil rights legislation.

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President Kennedy is cheered by more than a million in the streets of West Berlin on his way to deliver his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. | Ayatollah Khomeini is among 30 clerics arrest-ed in Iran for protesting the regime of Shah Mo-hammed Reza Pahlevi. AUGUST: More than 200,000 gather in Wash-ington to demand the passing of civil rights legis-lation. Speaking to a crowd on the Mall, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his

“I have a dream” oration. SEPTEMBER: Four Af-rican American girls—Denise McNair, 11, Car-ole Robertson, 14, Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14—are killed in Birmingham when a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan ex-plodes during a Sunday church service. Two Afri-can American boys—Vir-gil Ware, 13 and Johnnie Robinson, 16—are shot dead later in the day, Robinson by a policeman. OCTOBER: !e film Lilies

of the Field starring Sid-ney Poitier is released in the United States. Poitier will become the first Af-rican American to win the Academy Award for best actor. NOVEMBER: South Vietnam’s Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother are murdered by a group of military lead-ers headed by General Duong Van Minh. Doz-ens of American soldiers are killed in the growing conflict. | President Ken-nedy is assassinated in Dallas on November 22.

“I submit that an indi-vidual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who will-ingly accepts the pen-alty of imprisonment in order to arouse the con-science of the commu-nity over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

Letter from the Birming-ham Jail, Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr.