PLAY IDEAS:

-John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and his trial

-Sojourner Truth Speaks out

-Harriet Tubman leads slaves out of bondage

-Denmark Vesey plots a slave insurrection, and/or his trial when it was foiled

-The great Nat Turner rebellion

-Frederick Douglass fights slavery and racism

-Congress debates the 3/5 Compromise

-Averting Civil War with the Missouri Compromise

-William Lloyd Garrison’s fight for racial and gender equality

-Harriet Beecher Stowe comes to write UNCLE TOM’S CABIN based upon her experiences in Southern Ohio

-Abe Lincoln meets with black leaders about a return to Africa

-Aboard a slave ship

-The defense of the slaves who took over the slave ship Amistad by John Quincy Adams

-Black cowboys and pioneers

-Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre

-Blacks in the American Revolution

-Phillis Wheatley, American Poet

- William Still and the Underground Railroad

-Dred Scott pleads for his freedom before the Supreme Court

-Plessy vs. Ferguson and the rise of Jim Crow in America

-The beating and lynching of Emmett Till

--Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and school desegregation

--Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson and the Montgomery Bus boycott

-the Brownsville Affair and the unfair discharge of Black soldiers

-champion boxer Jack Johnson and a hostile world

- OF Jackie Robinson and the integration of Major League Baseball

-- the unfair prosecution of the Scottsboro boys

--Jesse Owens and his triumph in the “Nazi” Olympics

-Joe Louis and his bout with “Nazi” boxing champ Max Schmelling

-the Black Panthers and black power

-OF the short, powerful life of Tupac Shakur

-The controversy of Bill Cosby

-Marcus Garvey and UNIA fighting for African solidarity

-An argument between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois

-Malcolm X confronts Elijah Muhammad (or argues with Martin Luther King)

-Mary McLeod Bethune meets Eleanor Roosevelt and becomes a force for equality

-The Shirley Chisholm story

-Oprah Winfrey creates a media empire

-N.W.A. fights mainstream music to bring legitimacy to “Gangsa Rap”

-The story of Ella Baker

-The Story of the Trailways/Greyhound Freedom Rides

-The Story of the lunch counter sit-ins

-The Port Chicago disaster

-The story of the Tuskegee Airmen

-The story of the Buffalo Soldiers

-The Story of the case of Loving vs Virginia and an end to the banning of inter-racial marriages

-Muhammad Ali against the world

-The fight of Fannie Lou Hamer in the Jim Crow south

-A. Philip Randolph and the Pullman Strike

-Paul Robeson fights the House on Un American Activities

-The Michael Jackson story

-Trayvon Martin and racial profiling in Florida

-The Watts Riots in Los Angeles

-The Hough Riots in Cleveland

-The troubles in Ferguson, MO.

-The shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland

-The story of Barak Obama

-The story of Martin Luther King

-George Washington Carver, the genius of Tuskegee

-Garrett Morgan, inventor and activist

-The murder of Civil Rights worker Medgar Evers

-The Selma church bombing

-Billie Holiday- Lady Day sings “strange fruit”

-The powerful life of Louis Armstrong

-America’s first black comedy star: Bert Williams

-Reginald Lewis and how to make a billion

-The rise of Ben Carson

-The Story of the Nation of Islam from Farad to Farrakhan

-Black athletes/black power at the Olympics in Mexico City

-Madam C.J. Walker self-made millionaire

-Gordon Parks, pioneer of black photography and film

-Morgan Freeman and the end of “black” history

-Lebron James from poverty to superstardom

-Hattie McDaniel makes acting Mammy into an art form

-Sidney Poitier breaks through the color barrier to stardom

-Nina Simone and a voice of equality

-Beyonce and Kanye West go at it