By Julia Stumbaugh On August 23, 2020 a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer shot a 29-year-old Black man named Jacob Blake in the back. In the days that followed, Charlottesville actor and director David Vaughn Straughn sat down to write a play. “I felt this anger and intolerance and frustration,” says Straughn. “I knew that was […]
By Julia Stumbaugh On August 23, 2020 a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer shot a 29-year-old Black man named Jacob Blake in the back. In the days that followed, Charlottesville actor and director David Vaughn Straughn sat down to write a play. “I felt this anger and intolerance and frustration,” says Straughn. “I knew that was […]
Let’s pretend for a minute. It’s sometime in the not-too-distant future. Charlottesville is a thriving black kingdom, free of the white gaze and white corruption, and comprised of various hamlets, including Vinegar Hill, Starr Hill, and between them, Gospel Hill, the kingdom’s seat and center of spirituality. Such is the premise of Hambone, an original, […]
Lights go up on the wood-paneled stage in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium to reveal the inside of a jitney cab station in Pittsburgh. It’s early fall 1977 and the Hill District, a group of neighborhoods that have long been the cultural center of black life in the city—full of black-owned homes, […]