Love Songs from the Liberation Wars—A Special Showcase Performance

Love Songs from the Liberation Wars is an original work, composed by Washington D.C.-area singer/songwriter Steve Jones and directed by labor activist and cultural worker Elise Bryant. It tells the moving story of an early victory against workplace injustice and Jim Crow segregation, led primarily by African American men and women in one of the largest factories in the 1940s South—the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem.

On June 17, 1943, several hundred African American workers sat down at their jobs and refused to work until their pay and working conditions improved. Over the next few days, thousands walked off the job across multiple tobacco companies. This began a years-long struggle, told by Robert Rodgers Korstad (Duke University) in his prize-wining book, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South.

In this one-night special showcase performance, 5 performers will bring a variety of characters to life as they perform selections from the full jazz opera in an intimate, concert-style experience.

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