Free Southern Theater

The Free Southern Theater (FST) was a community theatre group founded in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Madison County, Mississippi by Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Doris Derby, and John O’Neal. The Company Manager was Mary Lovelace, later Chair of the Art Department at U.C. Berkeley. The company disbanded in 1980.

The Free Southern Theater was a part of the emerging Black Theatre Movement and also closely allied with the civil rights movement—O’Neal and Derby were also directors of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They presented plays by Langston Hughes, John O. Killens, James Baldwin, and Ossie Davis as well as providing a space for their members to write their own plays.

The founders sought to introduce free theater to the South, both as a voice for social protest, and to emphasize positive aspects of African-American culture. O’Neal, Derby, and Moses outlined the philosophy of the troupe in a founding document:

Our fundamental objective is to stimulate creative and reflective thought among Negroes in Mississippi and other Southern states by the establishment of a legitimate theater, thereby providing the opportunity in the theater and the associated art forms. We theorize that within the Southern situation a theatrical form and style can be developed that is as unique to the Negro people as the origin of blues and jazz. A combination of art and social awareness can evolve into plays written for a Negro audience, which relate to the problems within the Negro himself, and within the Negro community.

In 1963, John O'Neal, Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, and William Hutchinson drafted "A General Prospectus for the Establishment of a Free Southern Theater, Jackson, Mississippi." This document outlined the goals of the theater company and how they would accomplish them. They included:

With these goals in mind, they solidified a mission statement: "Our objective is to stimulate creative and reflective thought among Negroes in Mississippi and other Southern states by the establishment of a legitimate theater, thereby providing the opportunity for involvement in the theater and associated art forms."

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