Author and actress E.P. McKnight is coming to USM to perform her Broadway-style, one woman play, “I Question America.” The play acknowledges the life and work of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights leader and voting rights activist from Mound Bayou, Miss.
The event is being organized by USM’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, and will be held in the Hannaford Lecture Hall on the Portland campus Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 5:00 p.m. The play is free and open to the public.
“We hope USM will join us that evening,” said Reza Jalali, coordinator of Multicultural Student Affairs.
Junior Benjamin Skillings, president of Multicultural Student Affairs, said they began brainstorming event ideas in October. By December, the group had decided to organize a production of McKnight’s play.
McKnight has acted in television shows such as “Law & Order” and “ER,” and has written a play and a book of inspirational poetry in addition to “I Question America.” She has performed “I Question America” at over eighty colleges and universities around the country. The play chronicles the life of Hamer from her childhood spent laboring in the cotton fields, to her time as a member of Mississippi’s Democratic National Convention of 1968.
Hamer’s equal rights activism began when she registered to vote in Mississippi in 1962 after attending a sermon by Reverend James Bevel, a leader of the civil rights movement during the 1960s.
“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared?” Hamer once said in a speech about her experience registering to vote in Mississippi. “The only thing they could do to me was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”
While traveling through South Carolina in 1963, Hamer and other voting rights activists were arrested on a false charge, jailed and then beaten by police. Despite this incident, Hamer continued to dedicate her life to the civil rights movement.
McKnight said she decided to write the play over fifteen years ago after reading a small article about Hamer in a newspaper. “When I read those lines, they spoke to my heart and I said ‘here’s a woman who gave so much and nobody knows who she really is,’” McKnight said in a 2009 interview with WLOX, a news station in South Mississippi.
McKnight said the play speaks to Hamer’s legacy as a civil rights icon. “Most people are really moved by what she went through, especially young people,” said McKnight on WLOX.
Jalali said he hopes McKnight’s performance will bring students together, even if only for a few hours. “It’s important to pause and remember we’re all one family,” Jalali said. “This event forces us to look back at history.”
A $2,500 grant, which Jalali obtained from Prudential Financial Services, is financing the performance, along with other financial support from USM Women and Gender Studies and the USM President’s Council on Diversity.
Students involved at the Multicultural Center in the Woodbury Campus Center in Portland have been advertising the upcoming performance on Facebook and on posters hanging up around the Portland and Gorham campuses. The group has also notified local high schools and other college campuses about McKnight’s upcoming one woman show at USM.
“Civil rights issues are something that always exist,” said junior Mohammed Dini, president of the Somali student organization. He and Jalali said they hope McKnight’s performance and Hamer’s legacy will raise community awareness of the struggle for civil rights that they see going on in contemporary society.