Columbia College is set to host the one-man play “The Movement: 50 Years of Love and Struggle” Monday night at 7 pm in Launer Auditorium.
The play chronicles the political and social changes over the more than 50 years since the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The play is produced by the theater company Dialogues on Diversity. Ron Jones, who will be performing, is the company’s executive director.
“What we try to do is use theater as a delivery system,” Jones said. “We try to fuse it with as much humor, information and insight as we can to hopefully give people a platform to have conversations about the nature of these issues.”
Keith McIver is the director of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee at Columbia College. McIver said that the relatively new committee is hosting several kinds of events to promote diversity.
“The committee is relatively new on campus and in our community, and we’re trying to put on a lot of different programming and making sure that they meet the needs and explain diversity in its many faces.”
Jones created the play to show a multi-dimensional view of the African-American experience over the last 50 years.
“For a lot of – not just African-Americans, but I think Americans in general – they focus too much on the pain and struggle of the African-American experience,” Jones said. “There’s also great amounts of beauty and triumph and dignity that I think, for lots of people, would give context to understand why the struggle is so significant.”
Columbia College’s Black Student Coalition will host a screening of the documentary film “I Am Not Your Negro” later this month.