Play earns national honor for Lincoln High teacher

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By MARGARET REIST / Lincoln Journal Star

Five years ago, Lincoln High teacher Chris Maly decided to write a play so his students would know the story of a 14-year-old boy and how his brutal murder helped mobilize the civil rights movement.

He had no idea where it would take him:

To the home of Emmett Till and the cousin who was with him when he was taken from his bed, beaten and shot.

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Christopher Maly received one of the 2008 NEA Human and Civil Rights awards on Wednesday at the Washington Convention Center in Washington. (Lauren Victoria Burke for the NEA)

Christopher Maly received one of the 2008 NEA Human and Civil Rights awards on Wednesday at the Washington Convention Center in Washington. (Lauren Victoria Burke for the NEA)

To the Lied Center for Performing Arts, where his students performed the play to a packed theater.

And finally, to Washington D.C., where Maly was honored Wednesday for the play “This Unsafe Star: The Emmett Till Story.”

“I just wanted to perform it for Lincoln High,” he said. “And it has just taken off. People have just taken ownership of it. It’s been a wild ride.”

At the National Education Association’s annual Human and Civil Rights Awards dinner, Maly and 11 other educators, community activists and students were honored for their efforts to ensure equal opportunity, improve relationships between diverse groups in public schools and expand educational opportunities for minority students and educators.

The honorees boasted a wide variety of accomplishments: from an educator who has fought to preserve the native Hawaiian language, to another who pushed for bilingual education for Hispanic students, to a community activist who helped quell youth violence in his Massachusetts town.

“The people honored tonight are ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” NEA President Reg Weaver said at the banquet Wednesday. “And that’s how we improve our nation — one idea, one person and one act at a time.”

Maly spent four years researching and writing his play, prompted by students who kept asking him questions about Emmett Till that he couldn’t answer. The play focused less on Emmett’s death in 1955 and more on the courage of his mother, an uncle and a man who identified his killers in court.

Emmett, who’d left his Chicago home to spend the summer at his great uncle’s home in Mississippi, was abducted, beaten and shot after he whistled at a white woman.

The white men arrested in his death were acquitted, but Emmett’s mother insisted on having her son’s body returned to her. She also insisted on an open casket. A photo of Emmett’s beaten body ran in Jet magazine, and 50,000 people filed past the open casket. Four months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Later, she said she was thinking of Emmett.

“I’ve always believed it’s an important story to tell and that it is relevant today,” Maly said. “But I guess I didn’t know how hungry people are and how much it resonates, how much people agree with that sentiment, how much they want to talk about social injustice.”

In Lincoln, the play motivated more of Lincoln High’s black students to participate in theater activities. It won a Mayor’s Arts Award, and it will be featured in an anthology by Louisiana State University Press of work about Emmett Till. An NEA film crew spent four days in Lincoln recording Maly in the classroom for a video that was shown at the banquet.

He hopes the play’s recognition is a testament to Emmett’s mother, who wanted his story to continue to be told, to help change things for the better.

Maly’s trip to Washington made him notice connections — evidence of change in America, change that a 14-year-old boy’s death helped put in motion.

When he was writing the play, Maly visited Emmett’s grave in Chicago and remembers reading an article in the Chicago Tribune about how Barack Obama — a child of Chicago — was contemplating running for president just more than a half century after Emmett was killed.

Then Maly ended up in Washington, where his play is being honored, at the same time the first black presidential nominee is moving toward the general election.

“As an American it just feels like, for the civil rights movement, that things are being fulfilled,” he said. “This really feels like a moment in time.”

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com