Carolyn German's New Z. Alexander Looby Play Takes Shape for 2010 Opening

Like hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other Nashvillians before and since, Carolyn German would walk through the lobby of the Z. Alexander Looby Theatre, passing by the historical marker heralding Looby's role in Nashville history without really giving it much thought. Then one day, during a visit to the Looby Center in her role as director of theatre for Metro Nashville Parks, German stopped and read intently the information included on the plaque, learning that Looby was an attorney who played in a key role in Nashville's storied civil rights history.

That set her sharp and inquisitive mind to thinking: Could the life of Z. Alexander Looby be fodder for a new play?

"When I first started working for Metro Parks as director of theatre - when I first went into the theatre, I was there about the functioning of the facility," she remembers. "When I was walking by the photograph of Z. Alexander Looby, I wondered, 'who is this man?' Sure, you can read a historical marker, but that doesn't really fire you up."

That serendipitous encounter with Looby's photograph and the accompanying marker in the lobby of the community center/public library/theatre complex that bears his name, led German to further research which "fired [her] up," and has now, in turn, led to Signs of a New Day: The Z. Alexander Looby Story, her new play set for its world premiere in 2010 in a production by Amun Ra Theatre.

"After seeing that photo and reading the marker, I said to myself, 'I need to know more about him in order to be responsible to the space," German explains. "I needed to know more so if anyone should ask me about him, I would be able to answer."

The information she was able to glean from that initial research intrigued German, who has lived in Nashville for more than two decades now and has gained a justifiable reptuation as an actress, singer, playwright, director and producer.

"What little information I was able to find really intrigued me," she says. "I did more research and I realized, 'this was a fabulous person,' and I realized I was not alone in my judgment of him and I also realized a lot of people simply don't know who Z. Alexander Looby is..."

That realization led to what German describes succinctly as her "light-bulb moment": "Why don't we tell his story through theatre?"

With that idea freshly germinating in her keen mind, she approached the powers-that-be in Metro Parks' hierarchy for permission to proceed on the idea for a play about Looby's life and role in Nashville's history. When she got their blessing, she immediately set to work, learning more about Looby, his wife Grafta and their "fascinating lives."

"The first thing I did was to talk to my boss and ask, 'can I do this?'" she says. "The first step we took was to present an excerpt from an early draft of the play during a Martin Luther King Day concert. The audience loved it and were intrigued about what we wanted to do with this play."

While many people presume that the noted civil rights attorney came from a monied background, the reality is quite different, the playwright discovered.

"He fascinates me," German says. "He came to the United States from the West Indies with nothing. He was an orphan who had a job on a whaling ship who made his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts - that was either the end of his job or else he jumped ship, that part of the story remains unclear."

What is clear is that Looby always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and, although he did not come from money, he was amazingly well-read: "In some ways, he is the poster child for the phrase 'Education is Key,'" German says. "He worked his way through college, through life...something that is so inspiring for anyone who hears his story."

"The other thing that was striking me as I was writing was that Looby was either positioning himself in a lot of the right places at the right time or he just happened to be in a certain place at a certain time - and to make every opportunity his own," German suggests. "He was in working in New Bedford just as the labor unions were just starting to get fired up in this country. He went to college at Howard University, Columbia University and New York University and he was in Harlem in 1926, during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance."

Looby then found himself in Nashville during the crucial days of the civil rights movement in the American South, first gaining national attention due to his involvement in the legal aftermath of 1946 race riots in Columbia, Tennessee.

After World War II, soldiers and sailors, , including a young man from Columbia who had served with distinction in the U.S. Navy, were coming home from the war to the socially unchanged and largely racist society. His mother had tried to get a radio repaired at the local Castner-Knott Department Store, only to be met with not-so-subtle racial prejudice.

"The repairman was apparently flippant to the woman over the phone, so she came into the store with her son," German explains. "The woman, basically, had been lied to about something by the repairman and pointed that out."

The repairman, in turn, reached across the counter and slapped the woman, prompting her son to defend his mother's honor by punching the man. Both the woman and her son, the war hero, were jailed. The offending repairman was not.

Riots ensued in Columbia, and the National Guard was called in to help local police restore order in the normally quiet southern Middle Tennessee town. A Guardsman or a police officer was shot - it's not quite clear who the shooting victim was - and subsequently some 25 African-American men stood accused of the act. At that point, members of the NAACP became involved, soliciting the aid of attorneys who had gained a reputation in civil rights cases, including Maurice Weaver, a white lawyer from Chattanooga who had enjoyed some success in the arena, Thurgood Marshall, who ultimately would become the first African-American Supreme Court justice, and Z. Alexander Looby.

"It was a hugely important case and the lawyers were able to get 23 of the 25 accused men acquitted," German says. "As a playwright to likes to write things that will have a wide level of audience appeal, that sort of story is perfect. You want to write something that a lot of people can enjoy and it's exciting for me to write about this fascinating man who was crucial to so many civil rights advances in this country."

As so often happens, Carolyn German, the playwright, became Carolyn German, the private investigator, searching for clues to the character of Z.Alexander Looby and his wife, Grafta, and all the other characters who peopled their richly colorful lives.

"If I'm looking at this from a completely historical perspective, I can find out the basic information," she explains.

But in order to relate a more complete picture of the Loobys, German had to delve further, to investigate the events and situations surrounding the couple more completely.
"One thing that particularly fascinates me about Looby is that he was living his life the way he wanted to do it all along. The historical references are there and the personal journey is there," she muses. "You can't beat the lessons that we can tap into by relating this story."

The Loobys were childless, so there wasn't a key individual charged with maintaining the family legacy, keeping the story front and center, thereby leaving the Looby story largely to the work of newspaper reporters, the occasional historian and wildly disparate tales passed around from person to person in the African-American and caucasian Nashville communities.

"I think gathering these people's stories together is very important and I have constantly been coming up with new information," German says.

As she keeps learning new information, German sometimes finds herself heading off into directions unexpected and surprising.

"Just in the past couple of months, I've learned new details," she offers. "I was looking at the whole element of when did local factory workers start gaining more rights on the job and the impact that may have had on Looby's life. As I gather more information, I gain new insights into the lives of Grafta and Z. Alexander Looby."

After a staged reading held during the summer of 2009, German was approached by people who knew Grafta Looby, about whom the playwright has found scant information. The resulting discovery has paid off nicely for the playwright/historian.

"I had imagined her as kind of mild-mannered, given the era in which she lived," German says. "As a writer, I had given her as much oompf as I felt I could, hoping the actor who plays her could give add more in her performance. Then someone told me that Grafta Looby was much more assertive than I had written her, she was much more business-oriented than I had initially thought and it was she who ran the family businesses while her husband tended to his law practice."

Grafta Looby, given the tenor of her times, exemplifed the notion that behind every strong, successful man, is a strong, successful woman.

It is discoveries like that, German contends, that results in a never-ending job for the playwright. "I never feel like the play is finished," she says. "We have a lot of ground to cover in the play - it covers the years from 1914 to the late 1960s - and I'm constantly finding out more and more."

When German first started plotting the course for her new play, she wanted to reach out to a broader community, hoping to create a bridge of sorts among Nashville's various racial, ethnic and social communities. That led to her partnership with Jeff Obafemi carr and his critically acclaimed theatre community, Amun Ra Theatre.

German explains: "jeff is great. He loved the idea and he immediately said, 'we're on...what do we need to do?"

Carr has been excited from the first moment, German says, and with his support and the efforts of the Amun Ra company, another staged reading earlier this year elicited a tremendous response and more enthusiasm from the theatre community as a whole.

"We got some great feedback from that reading and everyone among my theatre peers were very excited about what we're doing," she says. "The immediate effect has been that this is so obviously the right thing to do. Everyone has been so supportive, from the people who knew Looby in a business sense to people who knew him as friends or in church relationships."

With auditions completed and the show now cast, rehearsals are under way and the production of Signs of a New Day: The Z. Alexander Looby Story is taking shape, on target for its opening in early 2010. German will wear two hats in the production, directing and nurturing her hard-working cast while her playwright self continues to update the script and she makes her way, as she puts it, "through the jungle of rewrites."

"Maybe it's never finished," she suggests. "You continue to learn and to update. In general, I'm a writer who enjoys feedback and I enjoy hearing what people think, what moves them, what leaves them bored..."

With that, the interview come to an ends; perhaps a new idea has popped into her head. At any rate, Carolyn German has to get back to work. That's how it is with playwrights...anything could become fodder for a new play.