In 1971, a group of my high school English classmates and I attended a performance of William Shakespeare's Othello on the campus of Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, just outside of Columbus. The drama tells the story of a dashing Moor and how a duplicitous friend named Iago alienates him from his love, Desdemona, resulting in tragedy.
The production of Othello was part of a series of plays presented at the small Methodist school in those days. They featured well-known actors supported by students from Otterbein's drama department. The lead role was played by Brock Peters, with his majestic bearing, deep bass voice, and dark skin. He was magnificent and memorable.
But I remembered something else about that performance when I learned today that at age 78, Peters, who spent six decades as an actor on stage, screen, and television, had died.
My memory was of a scene in which the ebony-skinned actor took the blonde-haired, very Caucasian student who played Desdemona into his arms and kissed her. Ours was an interracial high school, the percentages of whites and blacks roughly reflecting their proportions in the country back in those less racially cosmopolitan days. There were even a few interracial dating relationships.
But as we sat in the theater that spring night, only three years had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and twice in our senior class' three-year stint at the high school, school days had been canceled owing to racial tensions. An African-American classmate of mine and I routinely elicited nervous laughter and fearful glances when, at opposite ends of hallways between classes, he would yell out to me, calling me the N-word and I responded by calling him Honkie. As tame as that seems now, in 1971, we were really pushing the envelope. Or we thought we were, anyway.
That night, when Brock Peters and his Desdemona kissed--a long, romantic, gentle kiss--I'll never forget that a white classmate of mine, sitting some three or four rows behind me, let out a loud, involuntary combination of a gasp and a groan. The sight of a black man and a white woman kissing had offended him. "Ohhhhhhh!" he said.
I was embarrassed. And afraid. And angry.
Today, as this memory crossed my mind, I realized that it wasn't just the audience who heard my classmate's racist reaction. So had the actors on the stage, including Brock Peters. I thought too, of how brave it had been for him, the people at Otterbein, and our teachers to have all come to the theater that evening and with Shakespeare's play as their weapon, gently and emphatically challenged the sin of racism among us. They might well have anticipated the very reaction given out by that classmate. But the performers didn't miss a beat and carried on.
Peters and other black actors of his generation did this repeatedly: Exercising talent, poise, and self-control, they challenged a racist society's sensibilities, usually with subtlety and like King, the eloquent preacher who cited America's prevailing religious creeds and its political compacts to make his case for racial equality and justice, used the very cultural heritage that white society claimed to revere to make the same case.
Peters seems always to have retained his dignity. He was not as well-known or as accepted by white American audiences as his equally-talented contemporary, Sidney Poitier. No matter; his gifts as an actor and his ability to play the beautiful instrument that was his voice were unmatched.
But when I think of that night, now so long ago, it's not Peters' talents as an actor I remember so much as his courage as a human being, as well as his ability to channel the volcano in his soul that seemed always just below the surface, to not only entertain, but also to enlighten us.
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