Schoolchildren of color in America have walked a long and arduous path to educational equality. Racial segregation persisted in public schools long after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling on Brown v. Board of Education declared it unconstitutional. And while the so-called Jim Crow laws that once segregated all aspects of public life were predominant in southern states, segregation was by no means limited to the South.
A new multidisciplinary stage production chronicles the history of public school desegregation in two northern U.S. towns—Hillsboro and Columbus, Ohio—while celebrating the talents of central Ohio performers.
Converging Arts Columbus presents The Journey: Breaking Barriers, created and directed by Columbus artist Destiny Coleman, Saturday, April 11 at 7 p.m. in Columbus’ Lincoln Theatre. Local actors, jazz and classical singers and instrumentalists, dancers, and spoken-word artists will join to tell the stories of the famed Lincoln School Marchers of Hillsboro, Ohio, and of school desegregation in Ohio’s capital, Columbus.
“Our audience really appreciates having historical context of things happening both here in Columbus, but also in the African and African American communities,” said Coleman, who serves on the board of Converging Arts Columbus. “Featuring those artists in our shows and just showing a diverse perspective of artistry is the mission of Converging Arts Columbus.”
Between 1954 and 1956, a group of African American women, mothers of students at Hillsboro’s all-Black Lincoln School, led the cause for school integration in their town. They marched with their children daily for nearly two years to the town’s all-white Webster Elementary School, demanding that Black students be allowed to attend the school.
In what would become the first northern test case of the Brown decision, the Lincoln School Marchers’ plight was championed by the NAACP, whose attorneys argued successfully in federal court that the Hillsboro schools had to integrate.
In Columbus, Judge Robert Duncan’s 1977 federal court ruling in Penick v. Columbus Board of Education resulted in the implementation, between 1979 and 1985, of a court-ordered busing program aimed at achieving racial balance among the Columbus Public Schools. The busing program operated in the district through the 1995-96 school year.
The live performances in The Journey: Breaking Barriers will be augmented by video clips on Hillsboro and Columbus desegregation history, Coleman says. Portions of The Lincoln School Story, a documentary produced by Ohio Humanities about the Lincoln School Marchers, will be presented during the performance. The production will also include video footage from interviews with former longtime Columbus Public Schools teachers Catherine Willis and Shirley Duncan, widow of Judge Robert Duncan, and with former Columbus Public Schools student Andrea Boxill.
The Journey: Breaking Barriers is the third in Coleman’s series of three stage productions exploring African American history. The Journey: A Celebration of Music Inspired by African American Culture was presented in 2019 by Opera Columbus and the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts and covered four centuries, from the era of slavery in the U.S. to the Civil Rights Era. In 2023, Converging Arts Columbus presented The Journey: Civil Rights, which focused exclusively on the Civil Rights Movement.
All of these productions, Coleman said, highlight important though, in some instances, less well-known chapters in African American history and in the history of segregation in Ohio and the American North.
“The whole purpose of creating these Journey productions is to tell the lesser-known stories of things that actually happened in the United States, the things that people are not learning about in schools, and they’re not reading up about as they go on with their lives,”
Coleman continued, “It’s really to tell these lesser-known stories so that people can know the history.”
Converging Arts Columbus presents The Journey: Breaking Barriers on Saturday, April 11 at 7 p.m. in the Lincoln Theatre, Columbus.
