Nonfiction

This month I invite you to listen to my interview with Sonali Kolhatkar, the Los Angeles-based host of the radio show Uprising with Sonali.  Enjoy this discussion about Richard Durham’s life and accomplishments, and have a wonderful holiday season as we approach a promising new year!

Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio and Freedom

Published 1 Dec 2015, 9:00 am |       

• Listen to this segment

 

Possibly the best portrayal of one of the roots of the “Black Lives Matter” movement you’ll ever see, takes place on Sunday November 8, 2015,

“LIVE” At The Ebony Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles, California with

Word Up! For Justice: The Life of National Radio Hall of Fame Inductee & WORD WARRIOR – Richard Durham

Word Up! for Justice is a 90-minute theatrical presentation of the life and work of Radio Hall of Fame activist writer and producer, Richard Durham. Durham was the first African American writer/producer to create a radio drama series in the 1940s; he wrote and produced a television series in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and he wrote Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, The Greatest.

This one-time presentation of Word Up! for Justice features Durham’s Peabody Award-winning biographer, Sonja Williams and a stellar cast of professional actors on Sunday, November 8^th at 3:00PM at L.A.’s Nate Holden Performing Arts Center.

This multimedia production is based on the recently published biography, Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom by Sonja Williams. The show ends with a never-before produced controversial script, The Target, written by Durham in the weeks following the 1969 police raid on The Black Panther Party in Chicago.

The Target foreshadows and resonates with today’s Black Lives Matter Movement.

Richard Durham literally turned America’s negative stereotypes of African Americans on its head. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, radio dramas were in vogue and television was in its infancy. The Amos ‘N Andy Show on radio was filled with stereotypic black characters created, written, and voiced by two white actors in black-face. The radio show was popular from the 1920s through the 1950s, and a television adaptation ran on CBS and in syndication from 1951 to 1966. Richard Durham was determined to counteract those negative stereotypes with positive stories and images of African Americans from the rich history and culture so rarely, if ever, depicted.

Durham’s series, Destination Freedom, premiered on June 27, 1948 on Chicago radio WMAQ with more than 90 episodes airing during a two-year run. The scripts were written and produced solely by Richard Durham and featured seldom-told stories of black heroes and heroines. Durham’s way with words was lyrical, realistic, and sometimes provocative.

He went on to write for the Chicago Defender, Muhammad Speaks, and other media outlets and to create the television series, Bird of the Iron Feather in the late 1960s. Richard Durham became a speechwriter for emerging Black political figures like the first Black mayor of Chicago, the Honorable Harold Washington.

Durham’s influence had been buried for 50 years. Now that work has been transformed into the upcoming November 8^th live performance: Word Up For Justice! The Life of National Radio Hall of Fame Inductee and WORD WARRIOR – Richard Durham.

TICKETS are available until November 3rd through PAYPAL: PAYPAL ID maisha4wordup@gmail.com .

TICKETS Nov. 4th through Nov. 8th:  at the Ebony Repertory Theatre  or call the box office: (323) 964-9766.

 Greetings!

Please click on the title below for a detailed Q&A with writer/blogger C.M. Mayo about the writing of my book, Word Warrior.

Sonja D. Williams on Writing “Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom”

September is Richard Durham’s birth month. He would have been 98 years old on September 6^th.

To honor Durham’s birth and to celebrate the publication of Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom this month, I wanted to feature the following excerpts from two early chapters from in book.

Enjoy!

Rural Wandering

 “Izzy!”

Silence.

“Izzy, where are you!?”

Only the whisper of the wind moving through magnolia leaves disturbed the quiet.

Izzy Durham was nowhere to be found. Again. The energetic toddler was exploring as much of the land around his family’s house as his young legs would take him. But one of his older sisters was not amused. She could never find her brother when she needed to, like when their parents expected them back in the house.

“All I remember is looking for him all the time,” Clotilde Durham Smith explained. “Being a boy, I guess he would wander around…He started that early in his life.” Although Clotilde was only two years older than the sibling whom she and other family members called Izzy, Clotilde saw herself as his protector – the big sister who needed to make sure that her younger brother was OK.

Izzy was just fine.

In his wanderings, this inquisitive child who entered the world on September 6, 1917 as Isadore Durham – this mischievous young boy who would become the probing journalist, innovative dramatist and astute political analyst known as Richard Durham – was soaking up his environment, learning how to observe and dissect the world around him.

During the early 1920s, Isadore’s world was ripe for exploration. The Durham home sat on 80 acres of verdant farmland just outside the town of Raymond in Hinds County, Mississippi. Fruit from the farm’s sticky-sweet peach, pear and fig trees provided fodder for the canning jars of Chanie Tillman Durham, Isadore and Clotilde’s mother. The children’s father, Curtis George Durham, cultivated the farm’s cotton and cornfields.

Chanie and Curtis George Durham as photographed during the 1940s

In 1923, Izzy’s parents decided to move away from their Mississippi’s farmland in order to seek better opportunities in the northern state of Illinois.

Chicago

Five-year-old Isadore and his siblings got ready to leave the only home they’d known for a place they’d never seen.

Someplace called Chicago.

This somewhere place had already captured their mother. Four months earlier, Chanie had moved to Chicago to find their new home. She sent for her children once she found a suitable place.

So on a warm day in late August 1923, Isadore, Clotilde, baby Caldwell, Winifred and Marie loaded their bags full of clothes and toys onto their father’s horse and buggy. Curtis carried his children to Jackson where they would catch the Illinois Central (IC) Railroad’s Chicago-bound train…

When the train finally lurched to a stop in Chicago, Chanie scooped up her children – likely wide-eyed with excitement. The children probably pelted her with questions as they took in one unfamiliar sight after another. Undoubtedly, Isadore eyed Chicago’s gigantic brick, concrete and iron structures, taller than any tree on his family’s farm and grander than any building he’d ever seen.

All around him, a hurricane of humanity whizzed past; more people than he ever knew existed. Izzy saw a body of water – Lake Michigan – so blue and expansive that it seemed to touch the sky.

And on the paved streets of this strange place, clanging buses, his mother called them “streetcars,” screeched by like roving beasts, swallowing up people and flying down roads busier and wider than any he’d ever walked.

What a thrilling, intimidating new world!

In short order, Izzy and his siblings stood in front of what they must have perceived to be a towering structure.

Built during the 1890s, this three-story, light gray, limestone and brick building, attached on both sides to two identical structures, sat on an unpaved street eight miles south of downtown. Chanie guided her children up seven stone steps that led to a small stone porch. She opened a heavy front door and led her kids into a tiled vestibule.

They were home.

 

After exploring their three-story home’s first floor,

Isadore and his siblings likely ran through the kitchen’s back door and bounced down the steps into a fenced-in, grass-filled yard. The kids must have wondered why their yard looked like a pebble, a tiny afterthought compared to the sprawling acres on their Raymond farm.

Once they reentered the house, Chanie guided her children up to the second floor. She told them that for a short time they could use only two of that floor’s four bedrooms.

The home’s white owner still lived there with her daughter, although they were preparing to leave. Many whites reacted to the waves of black migrants flowing into Chicago with a definitive action.

They moved – distancing themselves as much as possible from the perceived threat of these new residents.

After reading these excerpts, I hope that you’ll be inspired to spend time more with Isadore Richard Durham in Word Warrior.