Staging History: Nicole Burton and Rikki Howie Lacewell

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Part of doing public history is exploring the ways in which moments of the past are disseminated and interpreted outside academia. In this special episode, playwright Nicole Burton and director Rikki Howie Lacewell sit down with Dr. Debbie Harwell (Instructional Assistant Professor of History, University of Houston) to discuss their stage adaptation of her book, Wednesdays in Mississippi: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change, Freedom Summer 1964 (University Press of Mississippi, 2016). Both page and play detail the civil rights initiative led by Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Together with Polly Cowan, their plan was to send interracial and interfaith teams of northern women down to Mississippi during 1964 as a way of supporting rural Black communities and civil rights workers. Beyond delivering aid, these women quietly fostered change by holding intimate, cross-racial meetings with Southern women, where honest conversations helped shift attitudes and build grassroots support for the civil rights movement. While neither Burton nor Howie Lacewell readily identifies as a public historian, their efforts to convey underrepresented histories are firmly grounded in archival research and oral history methods. Even so, both stress that it’s not just about the facts - it’s about cultivating an experience for audiences to connect with the truth of the past.  

To learn more about the play, Wednesdays in Mississippi, read coverage here. 

For more on Nicole Burton and her work:

• https://www.nicolejburton.com/ 
• www.pipelineplaywrights.org

For more about Rikki Howie Lacewell: https://www.confidencetheatrics.com/about

The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph