Rarely do we get the experience to listen to a first-person account of history. Even more rare, that history is crafted by a professional storyteller into a powerful performance.
Jim Gregory, Storyteller and Performing Artist, presents his powerful first-person account of a young white man’s activism in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement.
Storytelling Performance at FGCU
“The Hanging of Tom Brown:
An Odyssey into the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement”
Cohen Center Ballroom
Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU)
10501 FGCU Blvd S, Fort Myers, FL 33965
Thursday, February 20, 2020
6:30pm Reception
7pm – 8:30pm Performance
Jim Gregory was born into a white family that has lived in Tennessee since the 1800s. In 1958, fresh out of high school, returning from a brief vacation in Pensacola, Jim chose by chance to eat at a lunch counter just before a sit-in began. His resulting arrest as an accomplice to the demonstrators awakened him to the injustice of the “separate but equal” race-relations policy.
During Jim’s first three years at Tennessee Wesleyan College, he was haunted by the lessons of his summer of 1958. Having spent most of his early life under the influence of his grandfather, a Methodist minister, he came to feel that he had to do something.
In his presentations and CD, “The Hanging of Tom Brown,” Jim tells the story of how converting an old school bus into an RV turned into a summer project to take used text books to Black schools in the south. His tiny crew grew into a band of eight idealistic young people. His story shows how their project grew into participation in “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, how they came to the Selma-Montgomery March in Alabama, and how Jim and his team paid a high price, sometimes in blood, with far-reaching effects on their lives and futures.
Sponsored by FGCU Department of Language and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Seidler Foundation.
For more information, contact Lori Cornelius, [email protected], and Dr. Joel Ying, [email protected].
