The Writer Behind an Extraordinary Play

 

The popular “The Four Freshmen,” which sold out three times in Cluster Springs last month, was written and directed by a Halifax County native. The one-act play recalls the historic sit-in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter in 1960.

“As a 4 or 5-year old living in Nathalie I recall listening to news reports of sit-ins at lunch counters and boycotts of public facilities,” says Diann Crews, the writer and director.. “At the time, I thought the protesters were being mean and disrespectful for breaking the law.”

 

As an African-American herself, “I vividly remember Jim Crow Laws as a child. I recall standing at the end of a lunch counter with my parents or a sibling to order food at Newberry’s and Roses five and dime stores, using the “Colored” restroom in Leggett’s Department Store and attending the Halifax County Fair on Thursdays, the only day we attended.” 

 

Times have changed, due in part because of the sit-ins and boycotts that led to the desegregation of lunch counters across the United States, including many southern states.

 

Crews sat down to write this play at the end of 2019 to commemorate the upcoming 60^th anniversary of the bold efforts of four freshmen: David Richmond, Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, (known today as A&T University.) The play was performed for a high school audience near her current residence in Prince William County Virginia in 2020 with an all-high school cast. 

 

“I wanted to write the play from the perspective of an 18- or 19- year-old male, full of energy, believing that you can conquer the world, living in the most powerful nation on the planet, and yet experiencing the public treatment of a second class citizen,” she says.

 

Without the backing of any theater company, she asked young men in the area practically at random if they could take one of the lead roles. Others she found through word of mouth and eventually enlisted Ronald Lipscomb, Maquis Berkley, Kennedy Miller and David Pyles. Unfortunately, no encore show is planned now because they can’t find a common date to perform again. I didn’t know much about the sit-in and found the play informative and the acting quite good.

 

The 15 actors in the short, one-act play were predominantly African-American of varying complexions except for a white waitress played by Kathy Fraley. T­­he varying complexions of African-Americans allowed Crews to cast them in white roles, as it was extremely difficult for her to recruit whites.  

 

For years, Crews wrote plays intended for church audiences, but then she penned “A House Divided: The Desegregation of Schools,” based on the 1967 case of Betts v. County School Board of Halifax County, Virginia. The setting is a school board meeting, opened to the public, to discuss the highly contested topic of school desegregation.  The play, which was held at the Meadville Center on Chatham Road in 2017, drew an extremely large audience.  I would sure like to see this.

 

She took the play of “The Four Freshmen” to the TJM Community Center board, which readily approved the idea. “We thought it would be educational,” says Dale Miller, who owns the center’s building. “We thought it would benefit a lot of people who are not familiar with the story.” Miller purchased the former Cluster Springs Elementary School building from the county in 2019. “I decided to turn it into a community center to give back to the community,” says the retired corrections lieutenant, who is from Virgilina.  Proceeds from the show were divided by the center and the L.E. Coleman African American Museum.

 

Miller and others had fixed up the building and have hosted a seniors lunch with bingo and guest speakers once a month. There is also an exercise room and space for special events and the nicely finished auditorium.

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