ARTISTS

Toward Empathic
Imagination and Action
by Anna Deavere Smith
Photo: Blake Alcantara.
For Notes from the Field, Anna Deavere Smith conducted interviews
around the country. Here, she speaks in Baltimore with Kevin Moore,
who captured the video of Freddie Gray's arrest.
Photo: Kevin Hourigan
While traveling in various parts of the country to do interviews upon which Notes From
the Field is based, I was particularly influenced by two women I met in South Carolina, one
in Charleston and the other in Summerton. They were both actively involved in the midtwentieth
century movement to desegregate American schools: Millicent Brown and Beatrice
Rivers.
Ms. Brown helped integrate Rivers High School in Charleston, South Carolina in 1963. She told
me about the trauma she suffered as the first Negro to walk the halls of Rivers when she was
15 years old, facing hostility from many students and teachers alike. After some months she
began having symptoms of a heart attack. Today, at age 68, she still has those symptoms.
She is collecting a series of interviews with others around her age, who were “firsts.” Many
still have the same physical and psychological symptoms that they experienced as barrierbreaking
youngsters.
Beatrice Rivers was a petitioner in the desegregation case Briggs v. Elliot. Filed in 1951,
it preceded the more famous Brown v. Board of Education into which it was eventually
subsumed. To this day, pulses go up for the old-time black folks in Summerton, South Carolina
when they talk about their case. They are proud of their struggle and upset that most
Americans evoke only the Brown case when they talk about civil rights history.
FROM THE ARTISTS
NOTES FROM THE FIELD EDUCATIONAL TOOLKIT 5