Staged reading, ‘Turning 15,’ echoes the belief that ‘a voteless people is a hopeless people’

By David Winship In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, children led the voting rights protests. They demonstrated and were jailed because they couldn’t be fired from their jobs for advocating for their civil rights. The students chanted the rallying cry of “Give Us the Ballot.” When police shot and killed young Jimmy Lee Jackson, the initial march ended in Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettis Bridge.  When news of this racist confrontation went national, people from all over the country came to join the 300 marchers who vowed to, and completed, the march to Montgomery. Among those marchers was 14-year-old Lynda Blackmon, a girl who had been a part of the Selma protests and the Bloody Sunday march. Lynda Blackmon Lowery wrote her story, “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March” as a young adult book in 2015, which won the 2016 Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for Older Children. Fracaswell Hyman’s adaptation of the book, in cooperation with New Heritage Theatre Group and Loire Valley Theater Festival, was presented as a staged reading on Wednesday, July 31, at the International Black Theatre Festival, with Blackmon’s role presented by Tony-Award winner Tonya...