February 2024 Writer’s Night: Rosa Parks in Black History Live Tour

The WCWF has partnered with our local Chautauqua group and the Colorado Humanities’ Black History Live Tour to bring you the living-history portrayal of Rosa Parks by nationally acclaimed scholar/actor Becky Stone on Tuesday, February 6 from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Art Center. RSVPs required, upper left above this post.

The portrayal will be performed in a Chautauqua format, which is a first-person dramatization of a historical figure. The speaker’s monologue typically lasts 40 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A, first in character and then out of character as the scholar/performer.

Rosa Parks was indeed a writer and author and Becky is incorporating these elements into her performance at our request. The audience will be able to ask questions of Rosa Parks and then of Becky herself when she steps out of character.

A Chautauqua performer writes their own script, and Becky will talk about her research and writing processes with the audience. We encourage lots of interaction!

We know this is a bit outside our usual offerings, but we wanted to incorporate Black History Month into our February Writer’s Night and this opportunity to collaborate presented itself.

To learn more about what a Chautauqua performance is and about the Black History Live Tour, click this link.

Bios

Rosa Parks Bio

Rosa Parks, even as a child, challenged Jim Crow. She understood herself to be a child of God. That knowledge fueled her sense of civil rights and personal dignity. She seemed fearless. After all, she had witnessed her grandfather taking an armed stand against the Ku Klux Klan. She dared to throw bricks at white boys taunting her brother. She stood up to angry white mothers. All of which led her grandmother to exclaim, “Rosa Louise MacCauley! You’re going to be lynched before you get out of high school!”

As Parks grew into womanhood, her fears about lynching increased; however, her commitment to changing America also increased. She married a man already involved in raising money for the defense of the Scottsboro boys, and she became the secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP, a job that involved recording incidents of civil rights abuses and police brutality, as well as writing protest letters to legislators and newspapers. Parks challenged segregation at every turn, with only partial success, until the day she took action to defend her personal rights and suddenly galvanized the Black people of Montgomery to take a stand together. Change in America was on the way with the Montgomery Bus Boycott – the only protest of its size, length, and impact in the history of the United States. In 1992 Rosa Parks published her autobiography Rosa Parks: My Story, where she recounts different parts of her life and why she decided to stay in her bus seat. A few years later in 1995, she released Quiet Strength, which is a memoir that focuses on her faith.

Becky Stone Bio

Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, Ms. Stone became a storyteller upon moving south. She holds a B.A. in Drama from Vassar College and an M.A. from Villanova University in Elementary Educational Counseling. Her acting credits include Lime Kiln Arts Theater, VA; Warehouse Theatre, Greenville SC; Haywood Arts Regional Theatre, Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater, Asheville Community Theatre, Highland Repertory Theatre, Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater in Asheville and Merida, Mexico, and Asheville on Broadway. Ms. Stone has also presented at North Carolina and Colorado Humanities Chautauqua festivals and Black History Live tours as Maya Angelou, Harriet Tubman, and Josephine Baker.