The Alabama Civil Rights Freedom Movement hosts a commemoration program honoring the memory and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Sunday, April 7, 2024, at 4:00 p.m. at the Renaissance Theatre Multiplex Center in Eutaw, AL   

Spiver W. Gordon, President of the local civil rights organization, arranged with George Stewart of Birmingham, the play’s author and one of its actors, to bring the play to Greene County to commemorate the 56th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

The play entitled, “King and the 13 Hundred” will have an admission fee of $10.00 payable in advance or at the door of the theater in downtown Eutaw. This will be a chance to see a dramatic play about the events at the end of Dr. King’s life, when he was working for economic justice with sanitation workers in Memphis.

George Stewart , the playwright, can remember the exact moment he learned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr had been killed. Stewart, who grew up in Tuscaloosa, was 13 years old at that time in 1968 and still can recall the pain, the heartache, the shock, and the anger. “I was young. Very young. But I felt like I was part of the movement,” he said. “And our leader of course had been assassinated.”

”I just asked God what you want me to do,” he recalled reflecting in his quiet time on what the day meant to him. “What part do you want me to play?” He ended up writing a play called “Trashing King.” It took him about a year to write it. “It’s a tribute to Dr. King as well as the 1,300 sanitation workers who were responsible for getting Dr. King to Memphis in 1968,” he said.

The name of the play, not lost on Stewart. He titled it that way on purpose. Because it tells the story that he believes some don’t know or truly understand. It was a sanitation worker’s strike that pulled Dr. King there. He had been invited.

Two Memphis garbage collectors, Echol Cole, and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck in February of 1968, according to the King Legacy website. Twelve days later, frustrated by the city’s response in a long pattern of neglect and abuse of its Black employees, 1,300 Black men from the Memphis Department of Public Works went on strike, the website reports.

Stewart’s play focuses on the days leading up to Dr. King’s death. It only has four characters, but its message is about what Dr. King epitomized, he said. “I believe everybody’s gift should be used for the betterment of everyone,” Stewart said.

Cassandra “Dedee” Frazier plays a sanitation worker’s wife in the play. For her, the play was personal, because it helps tell Dr. King’s story. “To actually have children come up and say I had never heard that,” she said, recalling civil rights organization feedback. The play has been performed several times all over the southeast in the past six months.

“I encourage them, why don’t you go back and read-up on it.”
”It’s a true testament of what Dr. King really means to people and what he wanted to see in people,” Stewart said. The lesson that he got from the play is one he hopes everyone gets.

”Let’s look into the heart of the matter of what he was about,” Stewart said. “It wasn’t just civil rights, but it was human rights.” Dr. King’s legacy, 56 years later, still guiding a light. Stewart felt he needed to commemorate it in a way that would honor Dr. King’s legacy.

George Stewart also hosts Alabama Gospel Roots, a one-hour television show that spotlight great gospel singing airs each Saturday at 8 p.m. CDT APT TV 

For more information and tickets ($10.00) to the April 7, 2024, viewing of the play, at the Renaissance Theater in Eutaw, Alabama, please contact Spiver W. Gordon at  205-372-3446.