Peter Levy is a recently-retired history professor. Among his teaching areas was documenting the many aspects of the Civil Rights era. A reading of his play Mrs. Richardson, directed by James Brown, is being presented this season by the BPF. Peter responded to a series of questions posed by BPF Board Advisor Larry Lambert to discuss the play, his writing and his motivation.
L – Your site notes that you have recently retired as a distinguished professor of history and that you are now writing plays. Why did you choose this medium after writing so many books?
P – I am a life-long theatergoer, and I believed I had stories that I could translate into compelling historical dramas. I also hoped to reach a new audience for these stories. Moreover, learning to write plays is giving me something challenging and constructive to do in “retirement.”
L – Why did you decide to concentrate much of your work on the Civil Rights era?
P – My initial focus was Recent American history (post-1945), especially the 1960s. The more I studied and taught, the more I came to see the fight for racial equality as the central force of this era, and one that still resonates today.
L – Why did you choose to write about the Gloria Richardson story and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in particular?
P – Do you want the short or long answer? The short answer is that Richardson’s story is an extremely compelling one, about a person and movement that isn’t well known but deserves greater attention. The longer answer involves my quest to better understand the movement outside of the Deep South and during the latter 1960s—i.e. outside the “classical” era of the civil rights movement, a quest I began in the late 1980s. As I began my research, I soon realized I had hit a motherlode, one that allowed me to discuss a middle-aged militant woman who defied nearly all stereotypes about what a civil rights leader looked like (after all, she’s not a man, a minister, or a young college student), which partially explains why her story remains obscure.
L – Did your research for Mrs. Richardson lead you to any better understanding of this chapter of the movement, especially with regard to the Cambridge, Maryland location?
P – I think I answered this above, except to note that I didn’t have to do much additional research for the play. I did, however, have to think hard about what information I’d have to focus on and how to present that information in away that would work in a play.
L – How long did it take you to create Mrs. Richardson.
P – I’ve been working on Mrs. Richardson, on and off, for at least two years.
L – What do you want the audience to take away from watching Mrs. Richardson?
P – With the risk of being somewhat repetitive, foremost, that the movement in Cambridge was one of the most vibrant in the nation and that Richardson was a key activist whose story can still benefit us today. One of the things that makes Richardson so important was her unwillingness to compromise on her fundamental principles—most notably the belief that human rights can not be left up to the whim of the white majority—that at its core the civil rights movement sought equality in its fullest sense, including decent housing, healthcare, education, and employment, and that these needs remain, for way too many, unrealized.
L – Do you get any pushback from readers about a White man writing so extensively about this incredibly significant period on Black American history? If so, how do you address any criticism?
P – Pushback is the wrong word because though some have asked why I decided to write on this subject, Black men and women have been overwhelmingly supportive of my research and work. Just last weekend, I shared the stage with Gloria Richardson’s daughter, at a staged reading of “Mrs. Richardson” at the Reginald Lewis Museum. And rather than pushback, when an audience member asked if we’d be willing to take the show on the road, together, she responded quite favorably.
Gloria Richardson, too, received my work well too, as have local activists in Cambridge. Indeed, the only real pushback I ever got was from Frederick Malkus, a long-time white state legislator from Dorchester. When I went to interview him, his very first words were: “why did I want to peel back that scab? What good could come from telling this story?” (You can think about this the next time you cross the Frederick Malkus bridge on the way to Ocean City.) Unfortunately, as we can see with the move to ban DEI and the teaching of CRT and far less critical forms of Black history, such resistance has not diminished over time.
L – Where do you go from here? What’s next on your creative bucket list?
P – First, I want to build on the reading of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival to improve this play, so that it can be read and/or performed at schools, churches, community institutions and theaters. Second, I am in the process of writing several other historical dramas. One of these, tentatively entitled 43 Deep Green Lane, tells the story of the first Black family—the Myers– to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, then the largest and most famous suburb in American, in 1957. Most simply, rather than being met by the welcome wagon, they were met by a mob. And though this event gained national attention at the time, with some even referring to Daisy Myers as the Rosa Parks of the North, its remains even more than the movement in Cambridge, though equally important in terms of understanding where we are today.