Jennifer Andreacchi '19
Truth-telling and Persevering: Professor Hermine Pinson on 'Walk Together Children,' The Civil Rights Movement, and William & Mary
This academic year at William & Mary has been inspired and invigorated by the highly awaited fiftieth anniversary of African Americans in Residence at the College, with special events spanning the academic year. These events, dedicated to furthering a deeper discourse surrounding African Americans at the College, include influential guest speakers, performance and visual art experiences, and many campus visits from Lynn Briley, Janet Brown Strafer, and Karen Ely, the heroic women themselves who arrived at William & Mary in 1967 with more than just academic challenges ahead. More than ever before, W&M has taken initiative to reflect upon its history with the commemoration slogan “Building on the Legacy,” which specifically intends to venerate the many African American lives that have been dedicated to the betterment of this institution. With these past and upcoming events enveloping this academic year in the spirit of meaningful recollection and passionate advocacy, we can look to the future with the hopes that William & Mary will only become a more inclusive space for minority students and faculty alike.
The 50th Anniversary of African Americans in Residence calls upon us all to look back on those momentous occasions that have helped to shape our personal experiences at the College, and for Dr. Hermine Pinson, Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Africana Studies, she remembers Walk Together Children. In the early 1990’s, former Department of Theatre and American Studies faculty member and director Bruce McConachie approached Professor Pinson in the hopes of recruiting her as a scriptwriter for an upcoming play with the Williamsburg Grassroots Theatre Project. The play’s main objective would be to synthesize and perform previously recorded conversations surrounding Williamsburg residents’ personal stories of their experiences during the desegregation of the town in the 1960’s. “I saw this as a great opportunity, and once I got over my intimidation and feelings of insecurity and I figured out what it was that was being asked of me, I really began to enjoy the project,” Professor Pinson states, recalling how she overcame her doubts as a new professor not as well acquainted with the performing arts as she might have preferred: “I had experience as a poet, but I had never written a play, and so I thought what an honor, and what a burden it was!”
The title of the play, of Professor Pinson’s finalized script which is available in its entirety on the Williamsburg Grassroots Theatre Project website, gets its name from a spiritual, also called “Walk Together Children.” Pinson remembers suggesting the title to her colleagues when they asked for her input on what would best suit the piece. “My mother had actually introduced me to this spiritual because she was a member of the Fisk University Choir. She had this recording that she would play all the time.” Professor Pinson says as she smiles, recollecting the music that accompanied some of her earliest memories. “The other lines of it are ‘Walk together children, don’t you get weary, there’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.’” Pinson goes on to explain why the centuries-old spiritual was such an ideal title for a play centered on racial equality: “as a part of the Civil Rights Movement, people did a great deal of walking, and often members of the church were leading these marches as much as students from nearby colleges and universities.” An inspiring blend of Christian spirituality, moral values, and a commitment to nonviolence, which Professor Pinson compares to the message of Mahatma Gandhi, the Civil Rights Movement altered America’s cultural landscape forever. Our very own Williamsburg was not excluded from the changes that followed these peaceful protests carried out nationwide.
The memories that the residents of the City of Williamsburg shared with William & Mary students in a series of recordings for a class project became the raw materials with which Professor Pinson crafted the script of Walk Together Children. These anecdotes range from passionate and involved to observational and detached. Professor Pinson notes that integration in a tourist town set Williamsburg apart from other regions in Virginia at the time, as any violent backlash was extremely unwanted. She notes that “hearts and minds were changed afterwards, rather than before the Civil Rights Movement.” For this reason, its creators knew that Walk Together Children would prove a powerful project. “The material itself was so filled with the tension of the struggle” Professor Pinson reflects, as she explains her role reviewing the recordings during the extensive production process. “He [Bruce McConachie] conducted classes in American studies, and from those classes, his students went out into the community and they interviewed members of the community in what was called story circles.” After these recordings were transcribed into a rough script, Professor Pinson describes, “It was my job to look at that script of each person in the story circle, and then to sort of smooth it out and revise it so that it was more palatable for an audience. That would call for deleting extraneous things, deleting repetitions. Sometimes, not necessarily repairing grammatical errors, but making the story that the person told more dramatic, more palatable for a listener, more understandable, more accessible.”
Walk Together Children is no simple, predictable story of struggle and success, good and bad, victory and loss. At its core, it tells the hard truths about how integration affected a great diverse selection of people, ranging in age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc. Professor Pinson remarks that a strength of the play, particularly towards the end, occurs when “the play attempts to acknowledge the wrenching aspects of integration,” revealing that “integration was not all positive. It wasn't all a bed of roses; there were losses.” She reflects further in saying that some members of the Black community, because integration was not always achieved through fairness, “might’ve felt that they suffered greater losses even as they gained in the ability to eat where they wanted to eat and shop where they wanted to shop and pray where they wanted to pray.” Walk Together Children is no stranger to these “wrenching moments” that show the challenges faced by the Black community during integration. At one poignant moment in the story circle, African American teachers and administrators shared their stories of being demoted or replaced and struggling to find work as schools were integrated.
In her concluding statements, Professor Pinson shares more about her own experiences as an educator and the observations she has made about the relationships between the student body, the faculty, and the administration at William & Mary over her time here. She states, “Students have become more active not only in Black Lives Matter but in other organizations that promote social justice.” In terms of administration response, she shares, “I think the university is cognizant of some of the things it needs to do to do to address certain issues and redress certain issues, and we have a long way to go, but I think we are on the right path of openness and…more transparency.” Her reflections on the unifying force that exists between minority students outlines the need for increased diversity across college campuses in the United States. More can be accomplished when many isolated groups realize the similarities between their predicaments and seek justice in larger formations: “Students share certain interests for being oppressed and silenced in certain ways. Therefore, they’ve joined hands to practice certain strategies, some of which I would say they’ve learned from the Civil Rights Movement.” Walk Together Children, a conglomerate of local anecdotes surrounding the nationwide movement for racial equality, feels more relevant now than ever. Professor Pinson reminds us that when walking together, we are stronger.
Learn more & Listen: Williamsburg, Virginia Grassroots Theater Project
