The Haunting of Jim Crow
by Allan Havis

A factual dramatic account of the advancing history of the Brown v. Wade Supreme Court decision in counterpoint with the personal drama of Senator Strom Thurmond’s unacknowledged mixed race daughter, Essie Mae Williams Washington.“Part drama, part documentary, part civics lesson, THE HAUNTING OF JIM CROW will leave you wanting to know much more about its subjects: civil rights pioneer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the long-lived Dixiecrat icon Sen. Strom Thurmond and the mixed-race daughter Thurmond never publicly acknowledged, Essie Mae Washington-Williams.

Playwright Allan Havis has foregrounded these three characters in this ambitious panorama of American racial politics during the 1950s … With President Eisenhower sitting on the fence, attorney Marshall fought to win, then to implement state-by-state, the decision that dismantled, at least for a time, segregation in public schools.

Behind the scenes, Thurmond was lobbying justices Hugo Black and Earl Warren to vote the other way, while meeting in his Capitol Hill office with the teenage Essie Mae Washington sweet and heartbreaking in her ladylike gentility, her restraint and unspoken need).

Havis frames the whole with a narration by a contemporary Los Angeles teacher, Leza, who was a student of Washington-Williams.

Because the secret daughter revealed her identity after Thurmond’s death in 2002, Leza wants desperately to know how Essie Mae was able to maintain her silence for so long.

Leza is far fiercer than her teacher ever was.

So the play manages to dramatize many current tensions in the continuing and far-from-resolved dynamics of race in the United States … THE HAUNTING OF JIM CROW is one of those town-gown collaborations we see all too rarely in … theater.

Because it presents a multifaceted view of history–and shows in clear terms that class divisions, real estate values and the rollback of affirmative action have created a new form of segregation in the public schools–the play has strong educational value.”

—Anne Marie Welsh, Union-Tribune (San Diego)