John O'Neal will perform "Don't Start Me to Talking…" at Millsaps Thursday, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m., in Room 215 of the Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex.
As an African-American boy in Mound City, Ill., in the 1950s, John O'Neal never planned to spend much time in the South. After getting his bachelor's degree at Southern Illinois University, he planned to move to New York City and pursue the theater. But the year he graduated was 1962, and, as he says, "What was happening in the South was the most important thing that had happened in the history of the world." Along with feeling strongly about the non-violent movement in the South, he also had ethical considerations. "The source of what is called 'evil' in the world is the tolerance of the contradiction between what you say and what you do," he says. "It's easy to excuse ourselves from living up to our own standards and values."
So in 1963, he told his parents he was scrapping New York for Jackson, Miss. His mother screamed, "Oh, Johnny, don't you know they're killing people down there?" and he did, of course, which was why he had to come. When he got to town, O'Neal became a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, commonly pronounced "snick"), which was organizing Freedom Schools and helping blacks register to vote. He thought he'd be here for, oh, maybe five years, and then the race problems would all be fixed. After a few weeks down South, though, he realized that to really work for the Movement, to put his life in line with his priorities, he'd be here a lot longer than five years. It was going to take a lifetime.
As a result, O'Neal integrated his personal objectives and artistic goals with his ethical and political beliefs. He knew he had to do theater, but he wanted to do theater with a social conscience, theater with a finger on the pulse of the African-American struggle for civil rights, theater that breathed in the suffering and breathed out some kind of art. He made up his mind about the kind of art he wanted to do: substance over form, content over process. To do this, he had to start his own theater—there wasn't one around that would serve his needs—but first, he needed to find a partner.
A friend of O'Neal's told him about a guy named Gilbert Moses, who was editor of the Mississippi Free Press, a Movement newspaper in Jackson started by civil-rights workers including Medgar Evers. Moses, also African American, had grown up doing theater. O'Neal tracked Moses down at Tougaloo where the editor was covering a production of "Inherit the Wind," and the two decided that day to found a theater together to offer African Americans the opportunity to express themselves, and as a way to spread the civil-rights message. SNCC was behind them.
The first production of the Free Southern Theater, in the summer of 1964, turned out to be "Inherit the Wind," which re-enacted the 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" court battle in Dayton, Tenn., between lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. O'Neal played the Darrow character, and Moses directed. They took the show to 20 Southern cities in 22 days, covering all the Freedom Schools, with a final performance in New Orleans. The next show they did was "In White America," a documentary play written by Martin Duberman that soon became the history text in the Freedom Schools.
It was around this time that SNCC started using a mythical character called Junebug Jabbo Jones. Junebug's origins weren't especially distinguished; he was first a comedic character dreamed up by students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., to ridicule their pompous professors. Howard students, including Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, would bring Junebug South with them when they showed up here to join the civil-rights effort. In the South, Junebug—like many student volunteers—would grow up fast and become his more insightful personification, leaving his more frivolous college days behind. SNCC volunteers would soon use the Junebug character as a sort of black everyman, equipped with little education but kitchen-table wisdom, to symbolize the common people.
"Junebug was very much like the real people in the South, only he wasn't trying to escape his identity, he was trying to celebrate it. People like him are the ones who made the Movement move," O'Neal says.
The Junebug character made an impression on O'Neal. The Free Southern Theater moved to New Orleans in 1965 and eventually dissolved in 1980. That same year, O'Neal founded Junebug Productions and performed "Don't Start Me to Talking or I'll Tell You Everything I Know: Sayings from the Life and Writings of Junebug Jabbo Jones" for the first time. The one-man play is a creative conglomeration of stories O'Neal gleaned from people who had been involved in SNCC when the organization began to dissolve in the mid- to late '60s.
"Oral literature tends to evaporate when the occasion for its use goes away," he says. "When the SNCC people moved apart, I started copying stories down, asking people to tell me Junebug-isms. I thought, 'Hey, I'm gonna make a play out of this.'"
Since then, O'Neal has collaborated with others to write two other works for the Junebug character—"You Can't Judge a Book By Looking at the Cover" and "'Til the Midnight Hour." And since 1980, he has crisscrossed the country and part of the world bringing the Junebug shows to major cities, small towns, universities andd community organizations.
"Storytelling is a valuable thing, because it gives us an alternative to contentious debate as a way to explore ideas and content," O'Neal says. "It brings people closer to unity, and to understand the things they have in common."
O'Neal will perform "Don't Start Me to Talking…" at Millsaps Thursday, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m., in Room 215 of the Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex. Admission is $10 for adults, $5 for students.
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