A Play About Segregation Tries to ‘Ride a Fine Line’ in Florida

Given the chance, Arthenia Joyner would have ordered a bacon and egg sandwich with a glass of orange juice. Instead, workers inside an F.W. Woolworth store in Tampa, Fla., declared their lunch counter closed to her and other high school students 65 years ago.

The students refused to leave without being served. The protests did not carry the national prominence of the Greensboro sit-ins, Montgomery boycotts or Selma marches. “What I found out is damn near nobody knows what happened,” Joyner, 82, said recently. But the acts of resistance produced results. Within months, Tampa’s counters were desegregated. Other public areas like beaches and movie theaters followed.

Joyner hopes more people will learn of Florida’s contributions to the civil rights movement through “When the Righteous Triumph,” a play that dramatizes the 1960 protests. After a small debut in 2023, the play will be performed at the Jaeb Theater inside Tampa’s David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts over the next two weekends, with its audiences including students from around 40 local schools.

The play arrives at a moment when arts and educational offerings are frequently in dispute nationally, and regional arts venues are left navigating shifting terrain.

Several arts organizations sued the National Endowment for the Arts this week over a new mandate that says grant applicants must comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders barring the promotion of “gender ideology.” President Trump recently signed an executive order withholding funding from schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.”

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has described the state as where “woke goes to die.” He has signed laws that many believe will drastically limit race education in schools, and last year vetoed all $32 million in art grants that had been approved by state lawmakers.

“We’re sort of really trying to ride a fine line of when we talk about the play and how we talk about the play,” said Karla Hartley, the producing artistic director at Stageworks Theater, who originally put on the production. “So we don’t sort of draw the ire of certain people in the state government.”

Tampa’s mayor, Jane Castor, welcomed the performance and planned to attend. “Today especially, when so many people want to tune out the news and current events, this play reminds us of the importance of civic participation and the progress we’ve made,” she said.

The initial run of “When the Righteous Triumph” caught the eye of former U.S. Representative Jim Davis, the state’s Democratic nominee for governor nearly two decades ago. Davis is the grandson of Cody Fowler, an attorney who is featured in the play and pushed Tampa businesses to integrate.

So Davis took it on himself to revive the play so that more people could see it, especially students, who could learn why some streets are named after certain figures.

“They want to be able to touch and feel on something that is meaningful to them as part of history, and that’s what this play does,” Davis said.

Art grants fluctuate annually. Hartley said her organization is anticipating a shortfall of around $60,000 because of the recent cuts. The area is also recovering from two hurricanes, and regional theaters are still adapting to smaller audiences following the pandemic.

Hartley expected Davis to blink at the cost of reviving the play. Instead, he pushed forward.

Davis assembled a fund-raising committee that raised about $500,000 to go toward production costs and to produce the play for television and an accompanying documentary.

“Change is going to come locally,” Davis said. “It’s not going to come in state and national capitals. The power is in what communities can do and have done in the past.”

Matinee performances with post-show discussions featuring real-life sit-in participants are being offered to high school students. Only one high school declined an invitation over concerns about language in the play, Davis said.

“We’ve been very careful about deferring to parents and educators about what was age appropriate,” he said.

On Thursday evening, Davis addressed an opening-night audience of about 300 people. He walked onto a stage that was outfitted as an old-school diner, with frayed newspaper clippings about the sit-ins highlighted in the background.

“We are here tonight because our crew believes that in these turbulent times this inspiring message about how we can come together is a very timely, compelling message,” he said. “Not just in the city, not just in the wonderful state of Florida, but for the country.”

The playwright Mark Leib began writing “When the Righteous Triumph” in 2021. Chris Jackson, its director, returned following the original run, as did nearly all of the cast members. Archival, grainy black-and-white footage from the civil rights movement was spliced between scenes.

The recent national and regional scrutiny of the arts did not intrude on the opening-night performance. An appreciative and polite audience clapped and cheered at the conclusion of the approximately two-hour play.

Joyner, who became an attorney and state senator, was a junior at Middleton High School in 1960. Clarence Fort, the president of Tampa’s N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council, organized the protests, gathering about 40 students from two high schools. The Rev. A. Leon Lowry, who had taught Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College in Atlanta, backed the students.

The students first met at a church to discuss what to anticipate. Some, Joyner said, feared violence would erupt.

“But it didn’t happen,” she said. “They came together, negotiated, and all of the stores opened at the same time. And that was the beginning of the end of segregation at stores in Tampa.”

Julian Lane, Tampa’s mayor at the time, ordered the police to protect the demonstrators. The sit-ins lasted for a few days.

“It was a flashback to the past and brought back memories. I’m happy that we are educating the public and the students,” Joyner said, adding: “It serves as an example of what can happen when people of good will, like minded, who share values to do what’s right, will come together.”