John O'Neal

John O'Neal (1940-2019)/memory notes

Departed spirits, who are eternally with us, demand that I make a ritual of condolence.  I obey.

John O'Neal --------Resolute, idealistic but fearful, and philosophical, he came to Tougaloo College in 1962 along with other civil rights workers and created there a meaningful segment of history/narrative.

A proud member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, he stayed with us from time to time when he wasn't somewhere else in Mississippi, demonstrating with SNCC workers for the cause of freedom.  He participated in our modest dramatic activities in Ballard Hall, our theater, and in Ernst Borinski's famed Social Science Forums in the lab (basement of Beard Hall), and talked.

We thought him to be most articulate, a role model of intelligence from the North.  We were impressed that he had earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy, that he was putting what he had learned to practical use.  He talked and talked. He was pleasantly and annoyingly gregarious.  He talked.  We listened.  We learned that if you set John O'Neal to talking, he just might tell you everything he knew and a few things yet to be known.

O'Neal was quite a raconteur.  He excelled in acting in the drama of social struggles and in using theater as art to nurture social changes.  He, Doris Derby, and Gilbert Moses founded the Free Southern Theater at Tougaloo in 1963.  See The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater (1969) and its "Preface"  (pp. xI-xiv) by Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner, John O'Neal, and Gilbert Moses, New York City, 1968.  See also "DIALOGUE: The Free Southern Theatre." Tulane Drama Review 9.4 (Summer 1965):61-76.  Later in New Orleans, O'Neal founded Junebug Productions, and he got  a great deal of inadequately acknowledged creative assistance in writing material for Junebug from Nayo Barbara Malcolm Watkins, author of Some Hellava Good Loving…seasoned woman's journal of poems on love and liberation (2001).  John O'Neal talked himself into  becoming  Junebug Jabbo Jones, the truth-teller of tales.

DOCUMENTS

December 15, 1979

Dear John,

I've now completed final grades for the semester, so it's possible to attend to the backlog of correspondence.  I appreciate your sending me a copy of "As A Weapon Is To Warfare…"  I like it as much as I did the day you delivered it, perhaps more since I can SEE what you said.  There are one or two typographical errors I'll correct, and I will send a copy to Charles Rowell for Callaloo.

I may get a chance to visit later this month.  I leave for Moss Point on Monday, for home and a much-needed respite from varieties of academic madness.

I wish you, Marilyn, and the children a joy-filled Christmas and happiness throughout the coming decade.

Fraternally,

Jerry

January 10, 1980

Dr. Charles H. Rowell

Department of English

University of Kentucky

Lexington, Kentucky 40506

Dear Charles:

I have enclosed a corrected copy of John O'Neal's "As A Weapon Is to Warfare…," a paper delivered at our Freedom Summer symposium.  John has given us permission to use it in an issue of Callaloo, and I urge you to accept it.  It constitutes a quite interesting statement about art and politics, about the recognitions that Southern black experiences must provide for the rest of the nation.  If you decide to use it, send John a note at

601 S. Scott Street

New Orleans, Louisiana 70129

and ask him to submit a contributor's note.

Sincerely,

Jerry W. Ward

February 24, 1982 ---O'Neal wrote a beautiful poem "Flowers for the Massive Monk."

Here are typical lines ----

                I never met my musical mentor,

                never saw with these two eyes

                the massive frame bent over toward the keyboard

                as if he sought by sheer force of will be become

                one with the massive music machine.

I never saw the man myself,

but Theolonius Plunk  de Massive Monk plucked the chord

                my soul is tuned to.

………….

Theolonius Plunk de Massive Monk is dead.

                But it'll be a good while 'fore he's gone.

Now I ask myself why I did not include the poem in Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry.  Mea culpa.  A Roman Catholic mea culpa.

According to Charles Cobb, Free Southern Theatre died in 1980.  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  In "Black Theater South: Interview with John O'Neal, Friday, March 19, 1982 -----an interview John and I never got around to taping ---question 1 was:  In your essay "Free Southern Theater: Living in the Danger Zone," you  wrote: "The greatest value to be gleaned from the first sixteen years of the struggle to build the FST is the understanding that politics and art are integral to each other."  Do you think such understanding is still the greatest value after 19 years, and for whom?    (The Black Scholar, 1979, p. 13)

Is there an answer to that question and the nine  others somewhere in

Holden, Theresa Ripley, ed. Don't Start Me to Talking…Plays of Struggle and Liberation: The Selected Plays of John O'Neal.  New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2016.

John, are you laughing at me with an answer?  A biothanatopolitical answer.

2019

I am gathering materials to donate to Amistad Research Center .  I am surprised to find in my archive box a folder marked "FST Project (1983-84)."  I am reminded that John O'Neal and Wayne Coleman spent a few days at my apartment in Washington, DC in 1985, when they were on a fund-raising trip for the FST funeral.  I was working at the National Endowment for the Humanities that year, and they were trying to obtain funeral conference money from NEH, Mississippi Council for the Humanities, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.  Wayne and John tried to convince me FST was dead.  I am not easy to convince.

The folder said to me this morning, "Hang on to me a while longer.  You'll need me on March 2, 2019, Tom Dent's birthday, to share with your closest friends for the annual ritual of memory.  Moreover, you need me to prevent your telling stuff you  can't verify."

O.K.  I will hang on.  But this I can verify.  I can verify that out of deep respect for what John O'Neal achieved in his lifetime on this planet, John Oliver Killens and I did reprint his essay "Art and the Movement" in Black Southern Voices (1992), pp. 452-459; I can verify that the closing sentences of that essay are simply powerful -----

"If we fail in this historic moment, then the legacy of suffering we pass to our children will be increased.  Our failure would increase the ultimate cost of the struggle and will postpone the time when the social order shall be transformed.  Future generations wait to see if we will shoulder our share of the burden.  There is no question about whether we will ultimately win.  The question is how much it will cost."

Departed spirits, who are eternally with us, demand that I make a ritual of condolence.  I obey.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 18, 2019