Downtown Sacramento, seen from Sutter's Landing Park in Midtown.
Hi and happy Monday. As always I write today from Sacramento, and this week I bring you news from your state capital, all built around a thesis: Sacramento is its own kind of awesome.
First, staying with the Black History Month theme that The Newsletter has been championing for the past four weeks, I am pleased to celebrate two venerable Black cultural institutions, and introduce a brand new institution that is likely to draw national attention. Out of order:
1. Last night I caught a performance of the 1975 play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, staged by Celebration Arts, a Black theater company founded in 1986. This revolutionary Obie Prize-winning work consists of a series of monologues (or “spells”) in which the performers dance to accompany their stories, or another character’s stories, which are sometimes joyous and often devastatingly painful. Set on a spare stage with minimal props, these "choreopoems" relied entirely on the seven actors’ voices, bodies and hearts, and the show was thrilling.
Celebration Arts has dubbed this the season of Black Girl Magic. Its next production, Zora and Langston, is written and directed by Sacramento’s own Imani Mitchell, and is drawn from correspondence between the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet/playwright Langston Hughes during the Harlem Renaissance. It opens Friday, March 1.
2. Last week, the Sacramento Observer reported that Sacramento State University will be the first public university in the nation to host a Black Honors College on its campus. Sac State President J. Luke Wood, an alum, said the college will be modeled on the Historic Black Colleges and Universities of the South and Northeast, and that the effort represents “something that has never been done before outside of an HBCU, which is to have an honors college that is specifically designed to serve students who are from the Black community, who are interested in Black history, Black life and Black culture, and to use that as a way to protect the environment so that students are leaving having their brilliance, dignity and morality extolled.”
3. The Sacramento Observer itself has been covering the Black community here since 1962. Cofounded by longtime publisher Dr. William H. Lee, it is now guided by his son, Larry Lee, who in 2023 was named named Publisher of the Year by the National Newspaper Publishers Association. That organization has selected The Observer as the nation’s top Black newspaper seven times in its history, including last year.
