Cast performs readings of banned KKK play

<p>Despite being banned by a Stone Mountain, Ga., theater, the show went on for the play "Shermantown _ Baseball, Apple Pie and the Klan," when cast members Saturday performed readings at a Decatur church.</p><p>Art Station Theater owners in July decided to drop the play _ which is about the co-existence of the town's black community with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s _ because of racial slurs used by a Klan imperial wizard in the play.</p><p>But DeKalb History Center officials and playwright Calvin A. Ramsey thought the production was important enough to hold readings of the play at the church's Renaissance Project Theatre.</p><p>"It's a story that needs to be told," said Sue Ellen Williams, executive director of the history center. "The story is of a community of people and how they grew themselves under the shadow of the Klan."</p><p>Ramsey, a former insurance agent who wrote the play after hearing Shermantown's stories from black clients, said he plans to release the play in the fall, possibly in Atlanta and hopes eventually it will be performed in Stone Mountain, the town famous for a large relief memorial carved out of the bare rock depicting Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.</p><p>History center officials plan to release a DVD containing oral histories of Shermantown residents to county schools and libraries.</p><p>Every Labor Day in Shermantown _ a town named by blacks freed by Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman after he took Atlanta in 1864 _ hundreds of Klansmen gathered for an annual meeting. It was an event held by local resident James Venable, the former imperial wizard of the Klan.</p><p>"Shermantown" the play shows the complex nature of Venable's interactions with the black community in the middle of a main Klan Labor Day rally. As a well-known criminal lawyer, he was the person blacks could count on if one needed to be bailed out of jail. The day after the Klan's annual event, he would throw a similar barbecue for blacks on the same field.</p><p>But the small town also knew him to be the Klan wizard who did not want blacks to vote and he held negative views against Jewish and Catholic people.</p><p>An opening monologue portraying Venable's thoughts on blacks and other groups prompted Art Station Theater director David Thomas and his board to pull the play.</p><p>"The language in the monologue is not only racy, it's inciting and slanderous about Jews and Catholics," he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in July.</p><p>But Gloria Brown, a life-long resident of Shermantown, said the play was not offensive. About a dozen of the nearly 100 people in the audience during the Saturday afternoon reading of the play were Shermantown natives.</p><p>"I don't see why the Art Station would turn it down," the 65-year-old said. "In 1940, it didn't bother us what they said. The Klan never bothered us at all in Shermantown."</p><p>Brown said she and other blacks endured other injustices, such as having to order hot dogs at the back of restaurants and being denied seats on public buses.</p><p>"All my hope was I would live to see the day that it changed _ and I did," she said.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2005/8/140307