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Students at John Jay College are lobbying to cancel a production of Emmett Till, A New American Opera, scheduled to premiere on the New York City campus Wednesday and Thursday, The Washington Post reported.
At issue is the race of the playwright/librettist, Clare Coss, who is white. She collaborated on the project for eight years with composer Mary Watkins, who is Black, according to the Post. But students argue that a white woman has no right to tell the story of Till, a Black teenager who in 1955 was murdered after being accused of flirting with a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store.
Coss has also come under fire for incorporating into the story a fictional white teacher who undergoes a moral shift.
“Clare Coss has creatively centered her white guilt by using this play to make the racially motivated brutal torture and murder of a 14-year-old child about her white self and her white feelings,” read the text of a Change.org petition urging the college to cancel the production, which was started by a John Jay student and had close to 13,000 signatures as of Tuesday evening. “Telling the story from the perspective of a fictional progressive white woman shows that Clare Coss is more concerned with showing the audience that ‘not all white people are bad’ than she is with the ongoing fight for racial justice.”
Watkins, who like Coss is in her 80s and vividly remembers Till’s lynching, defended her collaborator’s involvement in the project.
“She is an ally, a life-long activist who has worked hard for 8 long years to develop this piece and to raise the funds to produce the first two performances,” Watkins wrote in an email to the Post. “She has been very respectful to me and all the other artists of color on this project. It is my opinion that she has every right as an artist to tell the story of Emmett Till.”
