- Just ahead on "American Black Journal", we're kicking off Black History Month with a salute to the art.

We're gonna preview two new theater productions that are coming to Detroit that focus on African American stories, "Ruby: The Musical" and "Confederates", and we'll end with the classical string performance from this year's Sphinx competition.

You do not want to miss today's show.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

- [Narrator] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you, thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal".

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

We are coming to you from our brand new studio space at the Detroit School of Arts, and it's really fitting that today's show is, in fact, all about the arts.

We're gonna begin with "Ruby: The Musical", which is coming to Detroit's Music Hall on February 7th through the 9th.

The production tells the true story of a scandal that rocked Florida in 1952.

Let's take a look at a preview.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Listen, and I will reveal a tale of the South.

This place, these people, I know well, but this story astounded me about a woman named Ruby McCollum and her husband Sam.

♪ They're the Isis, the king and queen ♪ ♪ King and queen ♪ Finest black folk we've ever seen ♪ ♪ Ever seen ♪ They're the picture of royalty ♪ ♪ And the top of the city get what we need ♪ ♪ Whoo, it's a party (rock music) ♪ I'll tell you a story ♪ I'll tell you a story ♪ Quite extra ordinary ♪ Extraordinary ♪ One for history to review ♪ To review ♪ A negro woman raised in the South ♪ ♪ In the South ♪ Kills a white Southern gentleman ♪ ♪ And leaves to tell about it (jazz music) - He is Dr. Clifford Leroy Adams, a physician and popular politician just elected to the Florida Senate.

Yes.

He's a very important man.

♪ Ooh, curious and peculiar ♪ For sure ♪ That it did not end by the news ♪ - The Music Hall's production of "Ruby: The Musical" is presented by the Michigan Chronicle and the Knight Foundation.

Joining me now is Hiram Jackson.

He is the CEO of the Michigan Chronicle's parent company, Real Times Media.

He's here with Nate Jacobs, who is co-creator of "Ruby: The Musical".

Welcome, guys, to "American Black Journal".

- Thank you.

- Thank you, Stephen.

- Yeah, so Nate, I'm gonna start with you.

Tell us the story of Ruby and the story of "Ruby: The Musical".

What inspired you about this story to make this this work?

- I have a 25-year-old theater company in Sarasota, Florida.

One of my patrons sent an email, and I've eventually took a look into the email and discovered the story of Ruby and Sam McCollum, and it blew me away being a native Floridian.

I had never heard of this true story of an affluent black couple, the most affluent black couple in North Florida, associating with a businessman, a politician, also, a medical doctor, Dr. Adams, and became business partners in many ways.

Both married couples began to socialize with each other a lot, and then one Sunday morning, Ruby McCollum walked into his doctor's office and killed him, shot him dead, and went home and fixed breakfast for her children, and it became the crime of the century.

To the point Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist and and poet, was hired by The Pittsburgh Courier to come down to find out why this black woman shot this man.

- Yeah.

- Why is she still alive?

Ku Klux Klan did show up to take her out of that jail and do what was the thing of the day.

- Yeah.

- Which was lynching.

- The lyncher, right?

- And they found out that she had been stolen away and hidden and found out there was a lot of mystery around why she shot him and why she is protected, and Ruby lived to be almost 80 years old.

They did have a trial that Zora Neal Hurston came down to cover, but the musical, it started off as a play.

I decided to make it a musical and wrote most of the music for the show, and an evening of Phenomenal Entertain, believe it or not.

(Stephen and Hiram laugh) - Yeah, I was gonna say.

- It's not really a sweet story.

(laughs) - Music of jazz and Gospel.

- Yeah.

- We have a 21-member cast of singers and dancers and actors, a six-piece orchestra, and we presented it at my theater for six weeks, and it blew the socks off of our audience.

- Wow.

- I was even taken aback, how powerful it was, 'cause it talks about a lot.

It's a history lesson in a very entertaining setting and talks about paramour rights that Zora Neal Hurston called it, when back in, even slavery days, white men would take the wives out of their homes and do whatever they want, and the husbands could do very little.

- Right.

- Because it would threaten the lot.

- Right.

- With their livelihood, and in 1952, that was still happening.

- And that's what was happening with these families.

- Exactly.

- Was that there was a romantic involvement of sort- - He was her doctor, gynecologist.

- Yeah.

- And they ended up starting having a relationship and had a baby together.

- Yeah, oh.

- A girl baby, and she was pregnant again, but mysteriously lost the baby when she was arrested.

- Yeah, yeah.

- For the killing, and so a lot of drama, a lot of music, a lot of intrigue, and the people are in for a really, really fascinating history lesson.

- Yeah.

- In a way they have never studied history.

- Right, right, right.

Hiram, talk about the Chronicle's involvement in bringing this to Detroit.

- So you know, in your introduction, you mentioned I'm the CEO of Real Times Media, and we have properties across the country.

One of which is The Pittsburgh Courier.

- Right.

- Which is, arguably, one of the most black newspapers in the history.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Of newspapers.

This gentleman here happens to be my cousin.

- (laughs) Yeah, right.

- I didn't know him seven years ago.

- Right.

- You know, we got random calls from Florida inquiring about our stories from The Pittsburgh Courier, our archives, Pittsburgh Courier.

Simultaneously, I was at a wedding for a cousin and bumped into Nate's brother, Michael, and Michael shared with me the story of Ruby McCollum and the fact that they had been trying to contact folks at The Pittsburgh Courier.

So it was an incredible coincidence here, incredible.

- Someone was aligning things.

- Aligning.

- For all of that to happen.

- Absolutely, - At the same time.

- So I dispatched one of my staff members to help them, and, literally, a year later, they invited me to the premier.

- [Stephen] Oh, wow.

- We shared the rights of our archives.

They produce an amazing story.

The music is original.

The wardrobe is of the period, and so I started going to Sarasota and was just blown away by the work that Nate had been doing.

I went to his 20th anniversary, incredible production, and we're storytellers.

- Yeah.

- And we have about two million images in our archives, and, to me, this was an untold black story.

- Yeah.

- And it really was a sweet spot for us.

We also owned the Chicago Defender, and it really inspired us as a company.

- Sure.

- To find more of these untold black stories, and with the challenges in print, we both know that.

- Yeah.

- We have been looking for other ways of storytelling.

- Of telling those stories.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- So there're so many connections here.

It's divine, and so I thought it would be appropriate for the Michigan Chronicle to be the producer.

- Yeah.

- Executive producer here in Detroit.

- Yeah.

- Because we have a great audience, people trust us, and it's just a way that we can share with our audience.

- Sure.

- An amazing story that hasn't been told much.

- Yeah, and it's a story that'll resonate here in Detroit obviously.

- Yes, absolutely.

- As many of us who are from the South and remember.

- Yes.

- Things like that.

I'm really curious.

You were staging this in Sarasota.

- We staged it as one of our main stage, our production at my theater company.

- Okay.

- We worked on it for three years.

Foundation was the writings of Zora Neal Hurston that she did for The Pittsburgh Courier.

- So what was the reaction in Sarasota where people probably didn't know the story?

- I have a predominantly white audience and Sarasota has a very small black community.

A lot of wealthy theater goers lived there.

They were coming out of the theater, tears coming out of their eyes, coming over to me, and saying, "Thank you for telling this story."

- Yeah.

- "Thank you for sharing this history about Ruby and Sam McCollum."

I was a little taken aback, because there's a lot we tell even to the point of Ku Klux Klan members coming out.

- Right.

- In a song that they do in the show, and they were so grateful that we was telling that history.

- Yeah.

- That taboo laid back history that everybody knows about but don't like to talk about, but Like Hiram was saying, but it is necessary.

- Yes.

- If you don't propagate history, you have a tendency to possibly repeat it.

- Sure.

- And the last thing we want to repeat is some of that stuff that's in "Ruby".

- Right.

- But it was so phenomenal to see black and white people respond the way they did.

I remember a busload of African Americans that had come from Clearwater, Tampa, and it was mostly black women, and in the parking lot, as they was getting back on the bus, I heard these women saying, "I can't believe they told this story."

(Hiram and Stephen laugh) So I walked over and I said, "Do you know what she said?"

"Oh, yeah, all of us on this bus know about this story," and then one lady said, "I was Ruby's neighbor.

I was standing in my kitchen, looking out of my kitchen window as they arrested her that morning."

- Wow, wow.

- And so even coming that close to this history that we found in the email and decided to propagate for the same purpose, I said, as the artistic director, "We need to tell this story."

- We need to tell it.

- "That patron was right," and even I got up the night the show opened, and she was in the audience, and she said, after the show, "You didn't tell everybody I sent you that."

- I told you, right?

- I was in the audience, and I was saying, "Oh, I'm sorry I didn't see you."

So then I started, she came back a couple of time.

Mrs.

So and So gave me an email.

So it was really eye-opening to me.

- Yeah, yeah.

- To see the power of "Ruby".

- The power of the story.

- And what it does to us as people.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And, timely, more than ever, right now in our country.

- Yes.

- That this should be on a stage.

- Yes.

- And here in Detroit.

- And here in Detroit.

Definitely, so come out- - February 7th through 9th, yeah.

Guys, congratulations on the work, and thanks for being here on "American Black Journal".

- Appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- Up next, we are gonna hear about the play, "Confederates", which is coming to the Detroit Public Theater, but, first, we've reached into our archives for a clip from a 1980 Detroit Black Journal conversation with the late Detroit playwright Ron Milner.

- Did I perceive myself as a writer?

No, but I was the kid who would make up stories.

Tell me a baseball story or a cowboy story, and I'd act out all the parts with all the sound effects and all of that.

So I was writing, but I didn't think of it as writing.

I was doing that then all the time, and it was only in high school that I started to think of it, and I still didn't make the connection between those two things, because in school, writing became a formal kind of thing that you did with paper and pencil, and so I didn't connect what I had been doing then, and the fact I became even embarrassed in junior high school, somewhere, one of those years, one of those grades, they asked me to do that, and I had always been very comfortable doing that, and all of a sudden, I couldn't do that anymore.

I mean, I was too cool to be up there making a fool outta myself.

So I stopped, and I think, at that point, it might have been coming where I may start to deal with it on paper.

- "Confederates", a play by award-winning Detroit playwright Dominique Morisseau opens February 6th at Detroit Public Theater.

Now, this play focuses on two black women living in America 160 years apart.

It jumps back and forth in time to show the impact of racism and gender bias on both of their lives.

The play is directed by another Detroit native, Goldie Patrick.

I'd like to welcome her now to "American Black Journal".

Great to have you here.

- It's great to be here.

Thank you for having me.

- Yeah, and congratulations on the play.

- Thank you.

- I love this concept, two lives, 160 years apart.

- Yeah.

- But told in a way that they kind of overlap, right?

- Absolutely.

- They fold over each other in different ways.

Talk about the story and how you came up with it.

- Yeah, so you know, "Confederates" is such a brilliant play, and it's largely a brilliant play because it uses a genre bending to technique and aesthetic that uses comedy and satire and farce, at times, to really investigate the way systems of oppression disenfranchise black women, and black women often find themselves silenced by those systems.

- Yeah.

- So we get to watch the clever ways black women maneuver these systems in spite of the oppression.

We get to watch the mistakes that their allies try to make in thinking that they're supporting these two characters, and, ultimately, I think the hope is that the audience walks away understanding that until we are all committed to dismantling systems, that individual work towards liberation is something that we have to commit to in addition to the bigger work.

- Yeah.

- So it's a wild drive.

- Right, right, right.

- It's a wild ride.

- And Dominique has written so many really fascinating stories like this.

Talk about the process of taking it from the page.

- Yeah.

- I guess, to the stage.

Right, the telling this story in a way that people can follow and be engaged by it.

- Oh, man, I had the honor of first working on this play in 2018 before it ever went to the stage.

So I had the honor of sitting around a table with a cast of actors, and, now, I have this honor at Detroit Public Theater of taking it from sitting around the table to putting it on the stage, which is a huge journey.

- Yeah.

- The dramaturgy, which is the world building that this play requires, is some of the work that I'm most passionate about.

I'm a professor myself, and I'm a hip-hop womanist.

I'm a scholar womanism, and so we spent an intense process of really investigating the characters, learning about the history of enslaved women of African descent during this time period.

We studied ways that black women in academia are struggling through those systems.

We learned the names of these abolitionists, and we really anchored each character on a real person.

So all the actors, which are incredible, they had an anchor of history to make really creative, fun choices, and the hope is that the audience, when they see these characters go, "Who is that?"

- Yeah.

- And then they go, "Oh, I wanna learn about the people who that character is based on."

- Yeah, yeah, so in some ways, I think part of the point here is to point out that it's 160 years.

- [Goldie] Yeah.

- That the gap is between these two lives, but in many ways, it's not quite that much.

- Exactly.

- There's not that much difference.

- Oh, absolutely.

Dominique is courageous.

- Yeah.

- In writing this play.

- Yeah.

- And her courage is necessary to tell the story of black women in America, because we are courageous.

- Yeah.

- You know, the play is less about us surviving and about the brilliance of us thriving.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And it's not an easy story, but it's a beautiful one, and her approach to it is allowing us to laugh at how absurd white supremacy is as a delusion, right?

(Stephen laughs) You see how you laugh at it?

- Right, yeah.

- And we don't always get that.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes, we have to sit in how painful the harm has been.

- Right.

- But this play is this brave approach that says, "Isn't it absurd to think that we aren't brilliant, that we aren't geniuses, that we don't make the world that we all live in?"

- Yeah.

- And so it's new.

It's different, and I think that's what makes it so appropriate for Detroit, 'cause Detroit is the place where culture is created.

- Right.

- Detroit is the place where brave voices speak up.

- (laughs) Right.

- And so Dominique has added to that cannon in a Detroit way.

- Yeah, talk about doing this at Detroit Public Theater, and I love the word that you used a little bit ago, dramaturgy.

I don't know if I've heard that word before.

- Oh, dramaturgy is my jam.

(laughs) - But explain that a little more for the viewers.

- Absolutely, dramaturgy is the study of plays in the context of understanding all of the aspects of the world of the play.

So it often deals with history.

It deals with the sociopolitical and aspects.

It deals with deepening character development.

It deals with premise.

It deals with all the nerd stuff, because I'm a nerd.

It deals with all the nerd stuff, but it helps support a playwright in writing the work, and then it helps support a director in bringing the work into- - Staging it, yeah.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- I love Detroit Public Theater.

I love coming home to Detroit.

Look, I'm born and raised in Detroit.

My passion for theater was developed at Golightly Educational Center by Juanita Wesley.

- Yeah.

- So I'm proud to come home to Detroit and work with Detroit Public Theater and see all of my family and community come into the theater and see work by a Detroit playwright.

- Yeah.

- With all Detroit native cast.

- Right, right.

- With a Detroit based crew.

It's powerful.

- Yeah, yeah.

- It's powerful.

- What's the message that you want people, especially people who are maybe not as familiar with the African American story or struggle, who will come see this to take away from it?

What understanding should they be getting here?

- That's an interesting question.

You know, this play has been a practice of liberation for me, because I've been able to unapologetically direct this play, focusing on black women in my audience and the care and the freedom that they deserve.

- [Stephen] Yeah, yeah.

- And I've been able to do that, because I believe that's how Dominique wrote the play.

So I would say to audiences that consider themselves allies of black women in the pursuit of freedom, investigate how you can become an accomplice.

Investigate how you can risk more.

Interrogate the things that you're afraid to say in mixed company or in private.

- Yeah.

- Figure out what actions support the rhetoric, and then be willing to do it.

We talk a lot.

This place says, "You gotta move."

- You gotta do more.

- You gotta do it.

- Yeah.

- Because guess what?

We don't have to do it anymore.

- Right, right.

- Black women, resistance is rest, it's joy, it's pleasure, it's stillness, and so there's this dual opportunity for black women to rest, resist in that way.

- Yeah.

- And then a call to arms for those that consider themselves allies to step up and be active.

- Wow, wow, what a wonderful way to kind of summarize the work.

- Oh, thank you.

The work is beautiful and it's moving.

I hope everyone is transformed as they experience it.

- Yeah, all right.

well, congratulations.

- Oh, thank you.

And we look forward to the play, and thanks for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- On "American Black Journal".

And, finally, today, the 28th annual Sphinx Competition that celebrates black and Latinx classical string players took place in Detroit last month.

Detroit PBS is gonna broadcast the finals on Monday, February 10th at 10:00 pm.

We are gonna leave you now with a performance by the first place senior division laureate, Gabriela Lara from Venezuela.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org, and you can connect with us anytime on social media.

Enjoy, and we'll see you next time.

(orchestra plays) - [Narrator] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you, thank you.

(bright music)